If Guenther’s book does not prove quite as epiphanic as Gawande’s article, the uncompromising sophistication of her ideas may be the cause. It’s hard to think of another criminology tract that bears a section titled “A Levinasian Critique of Supermax Rhetoric.” An obviously hard-core student of phenomenology (the study of how human consciousness perceives the world), Guenther drops the names of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger like they were late-’90s rap stars you revisit occasionally on the treadmill. She does it while dipping into murky pools of social policy, race relations and politics. This ain’t bathroom reading, OK?
Though daunting, Solitary Confinement is lucid as hell. Lucid about hell, too. Its fundamental premise is that no man is an island, and that throwing inmates into concrete rooms, especially for minor offenses like possessing Black Panther writings or disobeying guards, is an exile no human psyche should (or can) bear. “The absence of even the possibility of touching or being touched by another,” Guenther writes, “threatens to unhinge us.” Jean-Paul Sartre said hell is other people. Guenther reminds that this hell of Others is far better than the hell of no Others at all. You don’t have to care about prisons or prisoners to care about the philosophical valence of the human touch. That, I’m pretty sure, is what this book is really about.
Some researchers have tried to quantify the suffering of solitary confinement. In 2003, Craig W. Haney of the University of California at Santa Cruz published a study of inmates in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, Calif. He found that 88 percent of those in prolonged isolation suffered from irrational anger; chronic depression plagued 77 percent, while violent fantasies visited 61 percent of these prisoners. Nearly a third (27 percent) wanted to kill themselves.
But quantifying the psychosomatic toll of solitary confinement is tricky; it is entirely possible that many prisoners “in the box” found to be suffering from psychological maladies had them before being sequestered. Those pre-existing ailments could have contributed to their removal from the general population. To tease out solitary confinement’s effects on mental health, a researcher would have to conduct a controlled assessment of inmates before and after, across several institutions. Given the insularity of prisons, that’s not likely. But it may not be necessary, either, since just about no one thinks that solitary confinement is good for the human mind, especially one already troubled.
Guenther’s approach is ultimately more intrepid. It relies not on numbers but on ideas. Ideas not of criminal justice but of human experience.