Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives

Description

Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons--even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today's supermax prisons.

Lisa Guenther is associate professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University and the author of The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. She facilitates a weekly discussion group at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee.

In an unusually vigorous interrogation of philosophy and the social sciences, Lisa Guenther addresses one of humanity's greatest inhumanities and its perversely long, extensive history in America. Guenther offers a compelling critique of solitary confinement, in the course of which she pushes phenomenology beyond its classical limits, revealing our inherent inter-subjectivity, our need for both interaction and anonymity, and the moral imperative that America end this cruel and barbaric form of punishment. An urgently needed, powerfully argued study of one of the nation's gravest moral and socio-political failings.-Orlando Patterson, Harvard University