Lisa Guenther situates the development of solitary confinement within two larger frameworks: as an ongoing political project aimed at punishing undesirables, and as a phenomenological practice that, whatever its intentions, functions as social death for those experiencing it. Though aimed primarily at a philosophy audience, nonphilosophers (such as this reviewer) will likely find Solitary Confinement to be engaging and informative, if challenging in some of the denser chapters.

Guenther’s main argument is that critical phenomenology provides a unique and crucial insight into the historic and contemporary problem of solitary confinement (or intensive isolation). While a major aim of the book is to critique the vast system of isolation and control in prisons that has developed in the past half century or so, Guenther’s main target seems to be the behavioralist framework for assessing human actions, understandings, and meaning making, which the author sees as inadequate for fully understanding the impact of isolation on living beings. Pushing beyond current critiques of solitary confinement that rely on human rights frameworks, Guenther provides an ontological foundation upon which to analyze the worst excesses of the contemporary carceral state, one that is rooted in an intercorporeal, interrelational understanding of human subjectivity.

The author argues that intensive isolation is world annihilating because both human and nonhuman animals understand themselves and their world through interaction with other living beings and through their orientation in time and in spatial location. The complete isolation of a prisoner from other people, and the sensory deprivation commonly associated with solitary confinement “does not simply dehumanize prisoners.… [It] is a violence so radical that it could even alter the ontology of a stone (p. 143, referencing comments by Jack Henry Abbott in his prison memoir). Solitary, Guenther argues, is a form of violence against life itself. Moreover, the subjection of black and brown people to this violence is an extension of colonial and slave powers that sees such bodies as objects to be used for the benefit of others and/or demolished (literally and figuratively) when no longer needed.

The book is divided into three sections, each of which develops two themes simultaneously, one related to the development of intensive isolation as a form of punishment/corrections between the nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, and the other to the development of an ontology that can explain why intensive isolation is a world-annihilating experience.

In the first section, “The Early U.S. Penitentiary System,” Guenther describes the emergence of the penitentiary, focusing on the assumptions about personhood implicit in arguments both in favor and against its use. Drawing on the work of Benjamin Rush, among others, she argues that the nineteenth-century notion of personhood as an autonomous individual who thrives most when independent and not reliant on others runs counter to the lived experience of persons who were sent to penitentiaries, particularly when the penitentiary experience became essentially synonymous with isolation. Guenther uses critiques of colonialism and plantation slavery to illustrate how the view of black and brown bodies as insufficiently human to be worthy of the redemptive promise of solitary contemplation reinforced racist hierarchies, which treated such bodies as incapable of meaningful social life and simultaneously solidified the possibility of behavioral modification for worthy whites.

In the next section, “The Modern Penitentiary,” Guenther notes that the behavioralist view of individual atomization and isolation continued to influence ideas about behavioral modification and thought reform in the twentieth century, including CIA coercive interrogation experiments during the Cold War, as well as coercive “therapy” for domestic prisoners (p. 101). Such tactics were rooted in assumptions similar to Rush’s; strip people of their previous thoughts and behaviors and supplant them with new and more “acceptable” ones.

Here, Guenther lays out her provocative thesis. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of animal ontology (with which this reader was not familiar), she argues that in order to truly see the impact of isolation on the human condition, and to understand the failures of legal rules to reduce, let alone stop, the relentless increases in the use of intensive isolation and control in the prison system, we need a “political and ethical phenomenology of constituitive relationality to address the needs and desires of prisoners as human animals, and not as human rather than animals” (p. 128). The author’s claim is that an ontology of personhood that relies on autonomy as the essence of humanness, in opposition to animals, cannot sustain genuine resistance to the violence of isolation because it overlooks the co-relational reality of all living beings. Only when the needs of prisoners are considered as those of human animals, “and not as human rather than animals,” can we fully appreciate the impact of isolation on the human condition (p. 128; emphasis in original).

This is why, Guenther argues, a purely humanist discourse of prisoner treatment has promised much but actually delivered quite little. A commitment to more “humane” forms of punishment in the early penitentiary movement, in fact, “did not prevent it from inventing insidious forms of violence such as solitary confinement and perpetual surveillance” (pp. 126–27). More contemporary versions of such claims have largely led to legal standards for the minimally necessary humane conditions, which then become the norm to be targeted, rather than the baseline from which to build.

The final section, “Supermax Prisons” further develops Guenther’s ontology by drawing on an array of scholars, including Martin Heideggar, Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This section also contains descriptions of isolation in prisoners’ own words, a powerful juxtaposition to the dense philosophy that frames the ontological discussion. Supermax prisons, Guenther concludes, “are set up to fail.” The inmates

These demands claim to serve as accountability but, rather, simply take “account” of prisoners’ compliance or noncompliance that can be judged without treating the inmate as a subject.

The fact that some bodies under colonialism and slavery were always treated as less than human smoothed the path for the outcome: The prison system now treats any body within the system as merely “raw material,” as a physical object to be fed, worked, and controlled. Through the loss of intercorporeal touch and experience, the lack of spatial depth, the persistence of darkness, and self-loss, intensive isolation is “violence against the ontological structure of life itself” (p. 143).

The brief concluding chapter suggests that the solidarity of experience and resistance to intensive isolation across race, ethnicity, class, gender, and religion offers an opportunity to reconsider a prison system that renders ethical transformation impossible by denying the nature of being itself.

Guenther’s claim that the dehumanization of prisoners is better understood as “de-animalization” may strike some readers as an overreach. But her position that humanist claims have done little to help the “living death” experience for many in prison is supported by others who have noted that federal court decisions in favor of prisoners’ claims were often, in the long run, pyrrhic victories, resulting in improved methods of confinement that further sanitized any meaningful co-relational interaction (e.g., Schoenfeld 2010; Reiter 2012). While prisoners’ rights litigation set minimum thresholds for cells, nutrition, and sanitation, once those very basic conditions were met, any other actions—however corrosive to the self—were de facto sanctioned (see Guenther’s discussion of Madrid v. Gomez in Chapter 6). The mere shifts in terminology, from “segregation to control units,” and from “punitive detention to preventive detention,” did nothing to alter the fact that, in the words of one long-term inmate of an intensive control unit, there is “no recognition of your being” (p. 185).

While the book begins with a clear focus on solitary confinement, it seems to lose some conceptual clarity as the argument proceeds. For example, the link between “de-animalizing prisoners” and “de-animalizing animals” becomes murky as Guenther elides the distinction between solitary confinement and intensive confinement. Being alone, separated from any possibility of intercorporeal experience, seems to be central to Guenther’s argument, yet her discussion of animal confinement includes the experience of massive overcrowding of animals together in factory farms. Nonhuman animals may experience world annihilation under different conditions than do humans—the inability to turn and move around, for example—but then it is not entirely clear why solitariness is so central to the book’s theme and title.

Still, political scientists interested not only in mass imprisonment but also in state repression, citizenship, violence and racial/ethnic subjugation will find Solitary Confinement an engaging and provocative read.