10: Solitary Confinement Pt. 1

Question 1

why do we still use solitary confinement so pervasively?

Answer 1

Guenther gives us a historically specific answer

genealogy of ideas and practices inspiring early ideas about incarceration to present day practices of solitary confinement

Question 2

first wave of solitary confinement (19th century)

Answer 2

dealing with society’s deviance so one big assumption of penal reformers is that crime is environmental
- putting them into isolation creates conditions where moral reform/rehabilitation can occur

religious Christian rubric

model abandoned by 1913 with Eastern States as the last big prison using solitary confinement as a primary mechanism
- overcrowding, administrative issues, cost issues

Question 3

second wave of solitary confinement (1950s-1970s)

Answer 3

revived as a response to increasing levels of prison violence (1950s-1960s)

highly pathologised/individualised/medicalised
- criminality no longer socially spread/learned but conceptualised as individual pathology

aim is no longer moral reform and spiritual enlightenment but behavioural rehabilitation

experimental discipline by prison guards/wardens targeting politically problematic groups that were often racialised

Question 4

roots of solitary confinement in the Korean War and the CCP

Answer 4

concept of brainwashing/thought reform invented in this context to describe what Chinese Communists were doing to POWs

subjecting prisoners to intensive solitary confinement and then following that with intensive group confinement
- makes them especially open and receptive to new ideas that they take up as their own

Question 5

sensory deprivation in the 1950s-1960s

Answer 5

broader questions of the psyche, ego and self when people are put into extreme situations

Question 6

results of sensory deprivation

Answer 6

radical reduction/deintensification of sensory stimuli

intensification of the effects of accelerated unfreezing of the personality
- unfreezing, indoctrination, refreezing
- facilitates the breakup/death of the personality, making it theoretically available to be remade

produces a dramatic feeling of instability to the point of dissolving the coherence of the subject’s experience of objects and space

mimics the death of the personality
- how do you know you exist if you don’t have sensory information to confirm your own existence?

Question 7

sensory deprivation and the fantasy of freedom

Answer 7

realise fulfilment of casting off social boundaries/personalities, opening up an individual to radical change of personality but is premised no the fantasy of freedom

dependence of the subject on the presence of the safety man
- person they cannot sense, see or feel but know is there ensuring corporeal safety allowing them to experience this sense of open freedom

Question 8

• thought reform

Answer 8

techniques to use the social, emotional and physical capacity of prisoners against themselves, to break them down in order to make them in another form

Question 9

• behaviour modification

Answer 9

humans can be conditioned to behave in certain ways without needing to account for the ways they think, their emotions and subjectivity

corollary is that psychological disorders/pathologies best treated by altering behaviour patterns rather than thinking
- training people to behave differently and in desirable ways through repeated reinforcement with punishment and reward

Question 10

interrogation techniques with behaviour modification

Answer 10

creation of an exclusive parental-style relationship

mapping onto sensory deprivation, interrogator becomes the “safety man” for the prisoner who is put through sensorially extreme conditions
- only source of comfort, food and anything that might bring joy/pleasure

Question 11

1961 “power to change behaviour” symposium

Answer 11

blending insights from psychology and the military to apply them in an institution focusing on domestic combatants (inmates)

broader premise that the effective treatment of individuals confined in correctional institutions depends on the degree to which their unsocial/antisocial behaviour can be modified

not a lot of psychological research so symposium encouraged prison wardens to experiment/do research on inmates
- completely unethical by modern standards

Question 12

paradigmatic group of antisocial inmates

Answer 12

people identified as most available and to be experimented on first were racialised politically problematic groups like black Muslims, Black Panther, Puerto Rican independent activists, etc.

Question 13

connection between politics, science and punishment

Answer 13

scientific knowledge applied loosely and without rigour in techniques of punishment in prisons against inmates designated as political threats to the government (politics directing punishment)

Question 14

• social death

Answer 14

effect of a social practice where a person or group of people are excluded, dominated or humiliated to the point of becoming dead to the rest of society

forcing individuals who suffer social death to be isolated in their own individuality

most important integral social relationships that for most people sustain themselves, give them identity/purpose/meaning and connect them socially are deprived