We are too humane for anything like the above, or at least too clever. Today, we keep the felon’s privations well out of view and shroud them in so much anodyne rhetoric of the bureau-democracy that the ordinary American thinks nothing of the 80,000 individuals wasting away in solitary confinement across the land. These are, the thinking goes, society’s dregs: killers, rapists, terrorists. May they rot in hell and, prior to that, rot for a slightly shorter forever in the blank confines of a prison cell. At least a few of them would prefer the guillotine to this endless tundra of time. Some have said so.
The arguments against solitary confinement are legion, but none are quite as intriguing as that found in Lisa Guenther’s recent book, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. A young philosopher at Vanderbilt who also volunteers at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Guenther argues that while solitary confinement may be a failing of criminal justice and a psychological abomination, it is, above all, a flagrant offense against the idea of personhood.
Guenther’s book is probably the most original study of solitary confinement since the surgeon Atul Gawande published “Hellhole” in The New Yorker in 2009, wherein he detailed the psychological duress of spending some 23 hours a day without any human contact. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois told me that Gawande’s article served as an “epiphany” for him. Durbin, a Democrat, held the first congressional hearings on the use of solitary confinement in 2012, which he said were among “the more graphic and memorable” of his career.
Last month, Durbin held a second round of hearings, amid signs that the nation is finally rethinking solitary confinement. New York state has agreed to curb its use for some populations, including juveniles, the developmentally disabled and pregnant women. (I suspect I was not the only American to discover that pregnant women could be placed in solitary confinement.) Around the same time, the head of Colorado’s Department of Corrections, Rick Raemisch, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times after spending a night in solitary confinement. Raemisch, who was called by Durbin to testify, concluded that today’s virtually indiscriminate use of the practice was “both counterproductive and inhumane.”
States like Maine and Mississippi have already curbed solitary confinement, Durbin told Newsweek. “When the United States of America is led by a reform movement in the state of Mississippi….” He didn’t need to finish the thought.