In 1999, well before solitary confinement had become a cause célèbre, Human Rights Watch published a report on the Red Onion State Prison in Virginia. The group’s finding suggested a scenario worthy of Colonel Kurtz:
Their world is austere, cramped and claustrophobic. Security procedures imposed on all inmates in segregation exceed those reasonably necessary for safety; their real purpose may be simply to intimidate and degrade. Prisoners’ minimal physical requirements—food, shelter, clothing, warmth—are met, but little more. The facility offers nothing but bleak isolation to encourage or enable an inmate to return to general population or to enhance his ability to live peaceably once he has.
“I don’t think that even prison officials think of it as a corrective practice,” Guenther told me over the phone. Later, in an email, she explained how she first became interested in solitary confinement “as a way of dealing with the ethical trauma of living in the United States. I’m not-so-secretly Canadian, and I moved to Nashville in 2007 after teaching in New Zealand for five years.
“How could I move to a country that abandoned people during Hurricane Katrina, tortured people at Abu Ghraib, and continues to detain and force-feed people at Guantánamo Bay? Just for a job—teaching philosophy, of all things? What good is philosophy if it leads you to make decisions like that?”
While she is cognizant of policy concerns, Guenther is more curious about how the human ego responds to the absence of all other egos (a guard checking bodily cavities for contraband does not count). Using the work of early 20th century philosopher Edmund Husserl, she concludes that “the personal ego is essentially constituted in relation to a world and to other egos,” which makes individuality a flimsy thing when confined to itself. We tend to think of objectivity as a bedrock of fact, but it is actually something we create communally: the crowdsourcing of reality, if you will. We may disagree about politics, but we do not disagree that it is March. No such certainty is possible when your only companions are four featureless walls.
While solitude can be reflective, solitary is confining, an endless date with your own mind. The murderer Jack Henry Abbott, infamously championed by Norman Mailer, described how solitary had him “awash in pure nothingness.”