Rushforth (excerpt)

 Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives

 “To be socially dead is to be deprived of the network of social relations, particularly kinship relations, that would otherwise support, protect, and give meaning to one’s precarious life as an individual. It is to be violently and permanently separated from one’s kin, blocked from forming any meaningful relationship, not only to others in the present but also to the heritage of the past and the legacy of the future beyond one’s own finite, individuated being.” 

     - Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives, 2013, xxi

 Lisa Guenther’s Solitary Confinement, aptly subtitled “Social Death and its Afterlives,” does an exceptional job of exploring the detrimental physical and mental health aspects of solitary confinement. While she mainly set out to catalog the historical, philosophical, and existential underpinnings of the solitary confinement system within the carceral state, the thread of psychological distress and nefarious, government-run behavioral modification programs runs deep, stretching back to the beginnings of the organization of the penitentiary in the United States. Guenther (2013) notes in her introduction that “deprived of meaningful human interaction, otherwise healthy prisoners become unhinged. They see things that do not exist. They do not see things that do” (p. xi). This brief statement indicates simply that even the objectively sanest of individuals can go insane in solitary confinement. As early as research done in the 1830s at Eastern State Penitentiary, one of the oldest penitentiaries in the country, hallucinations and dementia were described in prisoners subjected to solitary confinement. Since then, consistent symptoms have arisen in studies of prisoners in prolonged isolation: anxiety, confusion, depression, fatigue, hallucinations, headaches, paranoia, and uncontrollable trembling. As solitary confinement had its start at the beginnings of the penitentiary system in the United States, the religious ideals of penance and reform, as well as the biosocial medical ideas of criminality during the late 18th and early 19th century shaped the design and implementation of solitary confinement. In fact, at one point, solitary confinement was hailed as an alternative to capital punishment—on the grounds that the anxiety caused by prolonged solitude was worse than certain death. Benjamin Rush, who, as well as being a physician and psychiatrist, was a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, lauded solitary confinement as a way of increasing the suffering of criminals, and used the same types of treatments on his own patients. Would that we leave this purposeful induction of anxiety and distress to our predecessors, but Guenther traces a similar malicious intent over the course of the next two centuries.

 Jen Rushforth