Available via license: CC BY 3.0
Content may be subject to copyright.
Geogr. Helv., 69, 355–364, 2014
www.geogr-helv.net/69/355/2014/
doi:10.5194/gh-69-355-2014
© Author(s) 2014. CC Attribution 3.0 License.
Special Edition SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY
Alone inside: solitary confinement and the ontology of
the individual in modern life
B. Story
Department of Geography and Program in Planning University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Correspondence to: B. Story (brett.story@utoronto.ca)
Received: 4 March 2014 – Revised: 20 May 2014 – Accepted: 28 May 2014 – Published: 22 December 2014
Abstract. The long-term solitary confinement of prisoners causes fundamentally debilitative psychological
damage. This violence, inherent to the socio-spatial organization of solitary confinement, diminishes prisoners’
capacity to function as human beings. Yet while violence might characterize the ends of solitary confinement, in-
dividuation defines the means. This paper argues that solitary confinement, while an extreme case, shares crucial
characteristics with other spaces, structures, and modes of organization familiar to Western society. The actual
experiences of prisoners subjected to conditions of total isolation, moreover, contradict the prevailing ontology of
the individuated subject. The irreconcilability of this paradox invites inquiry into the political and material prob-
lematic of individualism itself. The violence of solitary confinement’s spatial practice therefore holds important
implications for a critical reassessment of any or all socially isolating institutions and individuating ideologies
within the structural fabric of modern life.
1 Introduction
In July 2013, some 30000 prisoners of California’s peniten-
tiary system participated in the largest hunger strike in state
history. They were protesting the practice of long-term soli-
tary confinement and its limitless dominion over the lives of
thousands of Californian prisoners. The strike was a renewal,
as well as an elaboration, of two similar hunger strikes in
2011. That year, about 12000 prisoners across more than a
dozen institutions had used one of the last powers available
to them in their austere conditions – the power to stop eating
– to draw public attention to the problem of prison isolation.
At the California Assembly Public Safety Committee
Hearing (2013) on proposed reforms to the Security Hous-
ing Unit (SHU) of the California Department of Correction
and Rehabilitation (CDCR) in February of 2013, a handful
of community members were given the opportunity to give
testimonies on the effects of isolation on their family mem-
bers and loved ones. First to speak was Irene Huerta, a wife
of a prisoner at Pelican Bay’s SHU. Huerta read a statement
describing isolation written by her husband, who has been
in solitary confinement since 1986 because of an alleged –
though unseen – memorandum connecting him to a prison
gang:
It is like being locked in the trunk of a car with
just enough weatherstripping removed so you can
breathe, and with enough food and water stuffed in
everyday inside so that you can physically survive.
You’re soon going to realize what it actually means
when it’s said that we’re social beings. You’re go-
ing to crave social interaction and human contact.
Soon you’re just hollering out there, you can talk
even for a brief time ... And yet every time you
talk, every time you act like a human being and in-
teract with other human beings, you’re told that it’s
a gang activity and you have to stay another 6 years
now before your next review.
“You’re soon going to realize what it actually means when
it’s said that we’re social beings.” Indeed, this realization is
remarkable for being a deeply existential, as well as devas-
tating one. Prisoners living in solitary confinement often de-
scribe encountering a state of “breaking down”, or fighting to
resist an impending “brokenness” that they can feel the isola-
tion induce. Testimonies culled from the tens of thousands of
US prisoners subjected to long-term isolation describe “the
brain slowing to standstill,” and “losing the ability to initi-
ate any kind of action or behavior” (interviews with author,
Published by Copernicus Publications for the Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft Zürich & Association Suisse de Géographie.
356 B. Story: Alone inside
2011, 2012), and they find disturbing corroboration in the
clinical findings on isolation’s psychological consequences.
The bulk of research on solitary confinement over the long
term paints a harrowing picture of its debilitating and psy-
chologically damaging effects (see Grassian, 2006; Haney,
2003; Smith, 2006). The “breaking” is more literal than figu-
rative: in the absence of meaningful human interaction, oth-
erwise healthy prisoners begin to lose touch with reality.
They have hallucinations and become paranoid. They be-
come unable to distinguish sounds and images in their heads
from those in actuality. Agitation, delirium, impulsive and
self-destructive behavior, and acute psychosis have all been
recorded as the consistent and predictable consequences of
subjection to long-term sensory deprivation and social isola-
tion (Grassian, 2006: 338; Smith, 2006: 457).
This paper suggests that the experiences of prisoners in-
side long-term isolation in fact have tremendous implication
for how we consider and organize social life on the outside
of prison structures. Specifically, it uses the material experi-
ences of spatially isolated prisoners to pose a speculative, but
politically significant, challenge to the very ontology of the
individual subject in modern life. For if it is indeed the spa-
tial practice of socially isolating, or, to use Michel Foucault’s
description, “individualizing” (Foucault, 1977: 236) prison-
ers that is the cause of such damage, we are presented with
an interesting pair of questions: What is this self that can be
broken? And how does it compare to the atomized individ-
ual subject that organizes and structures everyday life in the
liberal, capitalist West?
It is the ontology of the atomized individual as such, the
historical conditions of its possibility, and its contemporary
economic and political salience against which this paper
seeks to situate the practice and consequences of solitary
confinement. In other words, this paper explores what the
carceral practice of solitary confinement discloses and dis-
turbs about the very idea of the individual subject as a cat-
egory of being. I will begin by demonstrating that in both
its historical antecedents and its contemporary resurgence
within the US prison system, the penal practice of solitary
confinement is characterized fundamentally by conditions of
extreme social individuation. That this carceral practice of
individuation constitutes a form of violence is the premise
upon which I make a case for investigating the very ontology
of the individual, and the ideological practices it animates in
non-carceral modern life, as itself a form of violence.
The 18th century origins of solitary confinement will be
considered in the context of the Enlightenment period and the
political conditions the Enlightenment helped lay for the in-
dividuated subject as a theory of being – an ontology that far
outlasted the earliest iterations of penal isolation as an exper-
iment in rehabilitation. There is an important contradiction,
I’ll argue, between the actual experiences of prisoners sub-
jected to conditions of total isolation, and the orthodoxy of
individuated subjectivity that animates the dominating struc-
tures and modalities of modern life. The irreconcilability of
this paradox, I suggest, offers us important insight into the
political and material problematic of individualism itself.
2 Solitary confinement in the 19th century: ideals
and realities
The US prison population exploded from around 300000
people in 1973 to nearly 2.4 million in 2010. This unprece-
dented phenomenon of prison expansion over less than 40
years has become widely known as mass incarceration, and
a significant body of literature has attended, from a variety
of disciplinary perspectives, to the challenge of explaining
and interpreting it (see for example Garland, 2001; Gilmore,
2007; Gottschalk, 2007; Mauer, 2006; Perkinson, 2010; Wac-
quant, 2009). The US now not only has the highest rate of
incarceration in the world, but the lock-up boom has pro-
foundly racialized contours. As Michelle Alexander points
out, “the US imprisons a larger percentage of its black pop-
ulation than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. One
in three young African-American men is currently under the
control of the criminal justice system: in prison, in jail, on
probation or on parole” (2009: 6–8).
Trending alongside this dramatic explosion is another, less
explored phenomenon: the growing isolation of prisoners
within these institutions themselves. In the US today not only
are more people sentenced to more time in more prisons,
but they are also in greater isolation than at any other time
in its history. According to the 2005 census by the US Bu-
reau of Justice, approximately 82000 people are reportedly
confined in segregation units in the nation’s prisons on any
given day (Gibbons and Katzenbach, 2006). This number
does not include the some 25000 prisoners held in isolation
in super-maximum (supermax) facilities. Other estimates of
the number of prisoners in solitary confinement are as high
as 100000 or 120000 (Casella and Ridgeway, 2010).
Many of these prisoners spend years, or even decades, in
the “management control units”, “departmental disciplinary
units” and “closed custody units” that constitute and euphem-
ize the contemporary practice of solitary confinement. That
confinement is typically characterized by holding prisoners
alone at least 23h per day, in cells averaging 6 ft by 9ft with
no opportunity for human contact or communication (Kamel
and Kerness, 2003: 5). The cells are arranged so that prison-
ers have no view of one another. The spaces themselves are
often stark, with a sterile and monotonous arrangement in
keeping with the extreme restriction of sensory stimulation.
Cells rarely have windows or other sources of natural light,
air flow, or indicators of the passage of time. It is common to
find artificial lights kept turned on 24h a day (Shalev, 2011:
153).
The evidence of solitary confinement’s intractable harm to
the psyche of its human subjects is so great that it has been
deemed by all major international human rights bodies to
constitute a form of torture. This is the position, for example,
Geogr. Helv., 69, 355–364, 2014 www.geogr-helv.net/69/355/2014/
B. Story: Alone inside 357
of the Istanbul Statement on the Use and Effects of Solitary
Confinement (2007); the UN Basic Principles for the Treat-
ment of Prisoners (1990); and the UN Convention Against
Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment
or Punishment (1985). As recently as August of 2013 the
United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture issued a state-
ment equating prison isolation with torture, stating, “Even
if solitary confinement is applied for short periods of time,
it often causes mental and physical suffering or humiliation,
amounting to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or pun-
ishment” (Miles, 2013).
The origins of solitary confinement, however, belie such
violence, at least in their initial intentions. Developed at the
turn of the 19th century as the central architecture of the
emergent penitentiary system, the cellular isolation of pris-
oners was first championed as an enlightened, humanist cor-
rective to pre-existing punishment practices, such as public
beatings, hangings and other corporeal brutalities. The first
institution in the US to experiment with isolation was the
Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, built at the end of the 18th
century by members of the Quaker Church with the objec-
tive not just of punishing criminals but also of rehabilitating
them. The model was quickly adopted by the original Amer-
ican penitentiaries, first in Philadelphia at Eastern State and
then in Auburn, New York at the beginning of the 19th cen-
tury (Smith, 2009).
The solitary confinement cell was central to these early ex-
periments with the penitentiary form because isolation was
coterminous in the minds of reformers with the idea of im-
prisonment as a socially productive system of punishment.
In the one-man cells and total silence in which felons spent
their days and nights, it was believed, they would discover in-
side of themselves the requisite remorse and self-realization
to become not just better people, but true citizen-subjects.
“Through the reflection that it gives rise to and the remorse
that cannot fail to follow,” describes Foucault in his founda-
tional genealogy of Western penal systems, “solitude must
be a positive instrument of reform” (1977: 237). Our jails are
called penitentiaries because of this penitence that solitude
was meant to occasion.
The idea, at the time, was a revolutionary one. That crimi-
nals could be rehabilitated and reformed was an untested idea
in the history of penology, and spoke to a particular kind of
humanism popularized during the early Enlightenment pe-
riod. This is an era that witnessed a radical shift in the dom-
inant conception of the individual subject. With the rise of
the bourgeoisie and early industrial capitalism in the 18th
and 19th centuries, the individual, now the bearer of formal
rights and liberties, came to be regarded as responsible for his
own place in the social system (Davis, 2003; Smith, 2009;
Wood, 1995). The role of this emergent individual subject
to the restructuring of the modern social, political and eco-
nomic order is significant, and will be elaborated upon later
in this article. Certainly, the idea of the self-governing sub-
ject bore itself out in the early experiments with the prison,
whose champions held that discipline should not just harm
the offender but also improve him (Smith, 2009). The prison
really was to be a “house of corrections,” one within which
a remade citizen-subject, newly capable of the rigors of self-
discipline, would emerge from the seclusion of the solitary
cell (Smith, 2009: 10).
Contrary to the humanist ideals that at least partly ani-
mated the prison’s early champions, however, total isolation,
rather than offering criminals the requisite conditions of self-
reflection to rehabilitate them into ideal subject-citizens, in-
stead drove prisoners mad. Evidence to this effect abounded
throughout the 19th century. As early as the 1830s, reports
had started to materialize about the various mental disorders
isolated prisoners were exhibiting. These included halluci-
nations, “dementia, and “monomania” (Smith, 2006: 457).
Charles Dickens, indulging Europe’s interest in this radical
experiment in criminal justice by visiting the isolation cells
at Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842, wrote of his shock at
meeting sense-deprived and wild-eyed prisoners. They were
“dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible de-
spair,” he wrote, concluding, “I hold this slow and daily tam-
pering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably
worse than any torture of the body” (Dickens, 1957: 99).
German doctors documented a spike in psychosis among
prisoners in their isolationist replicas of the Pennsylvania
model, and clinical research reports across Europe were un-
equivocal about the dire psychological effects of total soli-
tude. By the late 1800s the concept of total isolation had
been thoroughly discredited, even evoking condemnation by
the US Supreme Court. In an 1890 opinion concerning the
effects of solitary confinement on prisoners in Philadelphia,
US, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Freeman found that “a
considerable number of prisoners fell ... into a semi-fatuous
condition ... and others became violently insane” (quoted in
Biggs, 2009). As a system of penal practice solitary con-
finement was officially abandoned in 1913, and retreated, for
more than half a century, from common use.
3 Solitary confinement redux: the rise of the
supermax and the general demolition of the
person
Beginning in the 1960s and proliferating most systematically
over the last 30 years, we have seen a revival of the practice of
solitary confinement in the United States as an increasingly
long-term and wide-reaching practice. Since the early 1980s,
the use of isolation has come to be one of the fastest-growing
conditions of detention, even exceeding the expansion of the
US prison system in general over the same period. For exam-
ple, while the overall prison population increased by 28%
from 1995 to 2000, the number of US prisoners in solitary
grew by 40% during that time (Johnson, 2010). This expan-
sion has occurred most systemically under the aegis of the
supermax prison, and in the design and construction of prison
www.geogr-helv.net/69/355/2014/ Geogr. Helv., 69, 355–364, 2014
358 B. Story: Alone inside
control units more generally. Massive, highly technologized,
and largely impenetrable to members of the public, super-
max prisons are specifically designed for the prolonged and
often indefinite isolation of prisoners classified as high risk
and/or difficult to control (Rhodes, 2009; Shalev, 2011). Con-
trol units, likewise, are the designate part of a prison that op-
erates under a “super-maximum security” regime, and share
with supermaxes the indefinite lockdown of prisoners in iso-
lation for 22–23h a day. The institutional designation of a
prisoner into solitary confinement, meanwhile, is an adminis-
trative rather than judicial decision, and one made by correc-
tions management and officers in a whole host of scenarios.
Supermax prisoners are often described by prison officials as
the “worst of the worst,” a discourse perpetuated within of-
ficial justifications for the increased need for supermax units
despite being an amorphous and discretionary category with
no clear accompanying criteria (Rhodes, 2009: 196).
The literature investigating the precise purpose of soli-
tary confinement, meanwhile, despite its massive costs and
deleterious effects on prisoners’ mental health, is still sparse
(King, 1999; Mears and Reisig, 2006: 34). Within the schol-
arship that does exist, Lorna Rhodes (2004) has provided
one of the few ethnographic accounts of life inside a su-
permax unit. Other accounts have sought to trace the judi-
cial negotiation buffeting the supermaxes’ rise, and the de-
gree to which courts have deemed isolation units compati-
ble with the constitutional rights of prisoners and detainees
(Shalev, 2011; Reiter, 2012). There has also been some im-
portant work documenting how isolation and sensory depri-
vation were initially used in the 1960s as a technique of “be-
havior modification” and protest management against politi-
cized and politically active prisoners in particular, includ-
ing Black Muslims, jailhouse lawyers, and those identified
with various radical freedom struggles of the period (see
Gomez, 2006). In general, however, most accounts (Shalev,
2009; King, 1999; Kurki and Morris, 2001; Ward and Wer-
lich, 2003) tend to offer descriptive accounts of the physical
structure, day-to-day operations, or narrative history of the
supermax phenomenon, alongside only brief speculation into
the functional origins and purpose of the control prison in the
contemporary period.
What is not fully understood about why solitary confine-
ment has proliferated so systematically over the past thirty
years is counterbalanced by an abundance of literature at-
testing to its effects on prisoners themselves. In other words,
what is known for certain is that under the conditions of
deprivation of human contact and extremely restricted sen-
sory stimulation that characterizes standard practices of soli-
tary confinement in Western liberal democracies (Shalev,
2011:153), the human self is unlikely to psychologically sur-
vive.
In a series of interviews I conducted with two dozen ex-
prisoners who had spent more than 6 months in solitary con-
finement, the words that came up over and again were “bro-
ken,” “insanity,” “lost,” “closing of mind,” and “living death.”
One ex-prisoner described the mental place he found himself
in after many months in isolation as a state of losing oneself:
“That wall that I built there, in reality, is destructive, because
I can’t move out of that ... for those who can’t get that back,
they’re lost forever. And you get a lot of suicides as a result
of this stuff, because they just lose themselves.” He charac-
terized that fight as a battle between normality and insanity,
and compared the condition of total isolation to a kind of
death. “It’s a dead space. That’s probably the best way I can
describe it, because it only is relevant to you, experiencing
what you’re experiencing at the time, but it makes no sense
to nobody else. It’s like a void.”
Another prisoner describes feeling acutely damaged by the
11 years she spent in and out of isolation, even 12 years after
her release from prison. “Solitary confinement does drive you
insane. In solitary it’s not just a loneliness, it’s a craziness.
Because it’s what you have in your mind to begin with that
can help you, or hurt you. There’s no external stimulation.
Everything is the same. So, it’s a devastating experience.”
Indeed, the effects of long-term solitary confinement on a
prisoner’s mental health have proven to be uniquely dam-
aging. Among the most extensive and groundbreaking of
the research on the psychological consequences of solitary
confinement is a 1982 study of isolated prisoners conducted
by Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist at Harvard University
Medical School and an expert on the psychological impact of
control units. He found that “solitary confinement itself can
cause a very specific kind of psychiatric syndrome, which in
its worst stages can lead to an agitated, hallucinatory, confu-
sional psychotic state often involving random violence and
self-mutilation, suicidal behavior, [and other] agitated, fear-
ful and confusional kind of symptoms” (quoted in Kamel
and Kerness, 2003: 3). He termed this condition “SHU syn-
drome” after the “secure housing unit,” the prison system’s
favored terminology for the modern solitary cell. In his ex-
tensive and groundbreaking 1982 study of isolated prison-
ers he delineates a particular cluster of symptoms produced
by long-term segregation, grouped into the six basic compo-
nents that make up the SHU syndrome: (1) hypersensitivity
to external stimuli; (2) perceptual distortions, illusions, and
hallucinations; (3) panic attacks; (4) difficulties with think-
ing, concentration, and memory; (5) intrusive obsessional
thoughts; and (6) overt paranoia (Grassian, 2006: 337).
Grassian’s research offers the most extensive and detailed
reports of prisoners’ first-person testimony, but his findings
are consistent with most other studies that document the
detrimental psychological impacts of long-term solitary con-
finement (also see Kupers, 1999; Haney and Lynch, 1997;
Haney, 2003). Under these conditions, it is evident, prisoners
lose not only their sense of the distinction between reality
and hallucination, but they seem to descend into a general-
ized confusion and cognitive impairment that violently dis-
solves one’s very sense of personhood.
Common within the testimonies and observations of soli-
tary confinement’s effects across both the 19th and 20th cen-
Geogr. Helv., 69, 355–364, 2014 www.geogr-helv.net/69/355/2014/
B. Story: Alone inside 359
turies is an overwhelming sense of isolation’s damage, even
violence, on its subjects. Of particular note is the way its con-
sequences are felt not on the tissue of the body per se, but as
operating at a more general and fundamental level of a per-
son’s being. In Dickens’ vivid notes, the damage he observed
seemed to occur as if at the register of personhood itself. As
the phenomenologist Lisa Guenther, reading Dickens, puts
it, the withdrawal from concrete relations with others consti-
tuted a violence that “leaves no bruises, and yet it effects a
general demolition of the person” (Guenther, 2013: 19). It is
to what this “general demolition of the person” tells us about
the individual subject itself that we now turn.
4 “A recoding of existence”: isolation and the
individual
While the experiment with solitary confinement as a mech-
anism for humanistic rehabilitation in the 19th century had
clearly been a disaster, the relationship between the space
of the solitary prison cell and an emergent ontology of the
individual subject proved to be a mutually productive and
enduring one (Foucault, 1977; Smith, 2009). Indeed, Fou-
cault characterizes the institutionalization of subject produc-
tion pioneered through the prison edifice as “a recoding of
existence,” the first principle of which was isolation: “The
isolation of the convict from the external world, from every-
thing that motivated the offence, from the complicities that
facilitated it. The isolation of the prisoners from one another.
Not only must the penalty be individual, but it must also be
individualizing” (italics added, Foucault, 1977: 236).
The production of the atomized individual was central to
a whole host of political and economic transformations tak-
ing place during this period. In his history of the solitary cell
the literary scholar Caleb Smith (2009) underscores the cen-
trality of cellular isolation to the 18th century projects of
nation-building, capitalist industrialization, and liberal sub-
ject production. The isolation cell, he argues, was tactically
effective in that it allowed authorities to disperse and manage
the prison population, but it also deeply aligned with, and
reinforced, the dominant culture’s evolving common sense
about the autonomous character of the human subject and
the individualized responsibilities of the rights-bearing cit-
izen (Smith, 2009). The prisoner in solitary was not just a
transgressive self, in other words, he was an ideal self.
Foucault similarly interprets the prison not simply as a
space to contain problematic bodies, but as a tactic, one used
to reproduce state power and produce particular kinds of po-
litical subjects – both inside and outside of the prison. “Penal
imprisonment,” Foucault reminds us, “from the beginning of
the nineteenth century, covered both the deprivation of lib-
erty and the technical transformation of individuals” (1977:
233). Solitary confinement enacts, or attempts to enact, a to-
tal realization of this disciplinary power.
Yet if Foucault saw the prison as a disciplinary edifice for
the production of certain kinds of subjects, others have sug-
gested that the prison’s spatial power resides just as much in
its destructive capacity and divestment of subjecthood.
Colin Dayan’s work (2007) investigates the historical cen-
trality of the concept of “civil death” – a legal fiction indi-
cating the status of a person who has been deprived of all
civil rights – to the laws governing the status of the prisoner.
In the US, civil death statutes have dictated that the felon
may not vote or make contracts, loses his property, and in
some states “widows” his wife. Thus the convict retains his
or her “natural life” but has lost the higher, more abstract,
civil life that made him/her fully human in the eyes of the
law (Dayan, 2007). Caleb Smith elaborates on Dayan’s work
to argue that civil death is the legal language that finds its
“materialization” in the modern prison. Evidence amassed
from the earliest penitentiaries reveal a reality not of rebirth
or rehabilitation, but (using the idiom often invoked) a kind
of death-in-life; a living death. Contrary to the ambitions of
the 18th century humanists and industrialists alike, the condi-
tions of solitary confinement did not generate improved and
productive ideal subjects for the emergent capitalist nation-
state. Rather, as Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Toc-
queville in their 1833 report on the American penitentiary put
it: “Absolute solitude ... destroys the criminal without inter-
mission and without pity; it does not reform, it kills” (quoted
in Smith, 2009: 67).
This violently destructive capacity derives from the unique
power of social and spatial isolation to damage a prisoner’s
very capacity to function as a willful human being. Guenther
makes just such a point, drawing specifically from the field of
phenomenology as well as the psychological literature doc-
umenting the deleterious effects of isolated confinement on
the psyche, to suggest that when studied together, they make
a strong case against the ontology of a self-contained sub-
ject. She asks, “What must a person be like, in order for
this destruction to be possible?” (2013: 22). She concludes,
convincingly: “These transformations are only possible if the
person in solitary confinement is not simply an atomistic in-
dividual, separable from others and from the world, and con-
structed of different interlocking but separate parts” (2013:
20).
Indeed, the consistency with which prisoners become un-
hinged in various ways from reality when deprived of every-
day encounters with sentient beings and sensorial stimulus
demonstrates that “full, concrete personhood is structurally
undermined in prolonged solitary confinement” (Guenther,
2011: 262). For solitary confinement to break people apart
in the way that Dr. Grassian’s study of isolated prisoners –
and most other comprehensive psychological research – sug-
gests it does, Guenther argues, subjectivity itself must be con-
stituted relationally. In other words, its violence is enacted
against the social structures that make a particular way of
being possible in the first place – the very relationality that
constitutes subjecthood itself.
www.geogr-helv.net/69/355/2014/ Geogr. Helv., 69, 355–364, 2014
360 B. Story: Alone inside
Solitary confinement enacts a fundamental and existential
violence on those subject to its practice. That this violence
is enacted against the experiential structures that make pos-
sible a functional being, itself stands as a powerful reason
for a political or ethical critique of solitary confinement as a
penal practice. It is important to also point out, however, that
while violence might characterize the ends, individuation de-
fines the means. Appreciation of the violence inherent to this
particular practice, therefore, necessarily holds transferable
implications for a critical reassessment of any or all socially
isolating institutions and individuating ideologies within the
structural fabric of modern life. If solitary confinement con-
firms anything to us, it is that the individuated subject is a
broken, even impossible self. Such a self, moreover, stands
in remarkable contrast to the ideal of the self-contained and
self-determining subject we are, in modern life, expected to
become.
5 Individuation and its discontents
Escaping into individual solitude has had a long association
with intellectual and spiritual well-being, at least within the
modern period. Jean-Jacques Rousseau would, influentially,
develop a whole political philosophy out of the idea of a na-
ture inside, even making a point to practice solitude as part
of his regime of self-regard: “[During] my solitary walks and
the reveries that occupy them,” he wrote, “I give free rein to
my thoughts and let my ideas follow their natural course, un-
restricted and unconfined. These hours of solitude and med-
itation are the only ones in the day when I am completely
myself and my own master, with nothing to distract or hinder
me, the only ones when I can truly say that I am what nature
meant me to be” (Rousseau, 1979: 35).
At the same time that the earliest experiments with penal
isolation were being discredited as a rehabilitating method,
the idea of the atomistic individual underlying this early 19th
century project remained a salient organizing force, one that
retains potency and influence in most other aspects of con-
temporary Western life. The notion that isolation could offer
prisoners relief from a corrupt external world and a salvation
in a retreat inwards is expressive of a philosophy of subjec-
tivity that presupposes the individual as such; the concept
of the individuated subject. This contemporaneous ontology,
itself a radical departure from previous conceptions of self-
hood, has proven far more enduring than the penal idealism
that justified the first experiments with prison isolation. Inso-
far as solitary confinement has in its more recent revival been
relieved of its rehabilitative narrative, moreover, it might now
be seen as existing as counterpoint rather than corroborative
to the idea of the self-contained individual being; the vio-
lence of isolation giving lie to the very ontology of the in-
dividual subject. The idea of that individual being, however,
holds stronger than ever.
Outside the cellular and segregated walls of the 19th cen-
tury prison’s solitary architecture, modern life reverberates
with analogous themes: the psychology of private conscious-
ness; the celebration of individual responsibility and self-
determination in economic and political behavior; the innate
rights of humans mobilized as the basis for justice struggles.
Indeed, the value Western society places on individual expe-
rience shares an intimate relationship with the political and
economic systems that organize political democracy in the
contemporary West, specifically liberal capitalism. Liberal-
ism as a system and an ideology takes atomistic individu-
als as the basic units of political and legal theory (Cairns
and Sears, 2012: chap. 3; Wood, 1995). The liberal vision
of human beings as self-made and self-determining is foun-
dational to the theories of liberty championed by liberalism’s
earliest philosophers, from John Locke to John Stuart Mill,
and more recent heirs, such as Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls
(Nedelsky, 1989: 8). The premise is the same: the individual
as a self-contained, autonomous, and atomized being. The
history of this ontology, however, is a relatively modern one.
The individual as we conceive of it in the West today began
to take shape in the 17th and 18th centuries, and one finds
some of its earliest theoretical justification in the writing
of French philosopher René Descartes. The thinker, math-
ematician and writer would become famous for developing
the philosophical basis for distinguishing between the non-
material mind and the material body, known as Cartesian du-
alism. The Cartesian model, in turn, can be considered essen-
tial for understanding the ideology of the modern world.
In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes employs
a method called metaphysical doubt in order to reject all that
in the world of experience whose existence is predicated on
the senses. “I resolved to pretend that all things that had ever
entered my mind were no more true than the illusions of my
dreams” (quoted in Negri, 2007: 171). All that is left after the
dismantling of the world through radical doubt is the “I” – a
realm of reality that is interior, solitary, and superior to the
doubtable, and therefore fallible, world of experience “out-
side” the self. Descartes’ famous formula “I think, therefore
I am” served as foundation for a metaphysics in which the
ego, or the “I” was central. This logic of separation and iso-
lation is foundational to subsequent political theories pred-
icated on individual authority and the supremacy of human
reason.
What Descartes offered was not just a novel notion of be-
ing, but an understanding of the being of politics in a radi-
cally new sense. Antonio Negri suggests that its endurance is
“linked to the power of the implicit political dispositif within
its author’s ontology” (2007: 318). The self-limitation and
autonomy of the subject became foundational to a new or-
der and to that effect Descartes’ thought has proven to be
spectacularly influential on subsequent centuries of Western
philosophy and political organization.
In the late 18th century, during the flurry of intellectual,
scientific and cultural creativity known as the Enlighten-
Geogr. Helv., 69, 355–364, 2014 www.geogr-helv.net/69/355/2014/
B. Story: Alone inside 361
ment, the model of selfhood offered by Cartesian dualism
would be taken up and invested with idealistic promises
of human betterment and liberty. In the service of the En-
lightenment’s twin ideals of human emancipation and self-
realization, David Harvey notes, “the ‘voice of nature within
us’ becomes a key component of action and understanding”
(1996: 122). As described earlier, these ideals were also an
important part of the complex rationale animating the pris-
ons’ earliest American champions (Smith, 2009). The En-
lightenment era therefore not only marked a massive subjec-
tive turn, such that we have come to think of ourselves as be-
ings with inner depths, but the conception of liberation that
identifies the human individual as the primary locus and the
central unit of analysis which persists today.
We do not need to look far to see how the ontology of
individuated subjectivity informs the most basic organizing
structures of contemporary life. One of the best examples is
the regime of private property, rooted in a legal and political
ideology that identifies autonomy with a private sphere de-
fined and bounded by property ownership (Nedelsky, 1989:
17; Blomley, 2004). Liberal democracy itself takes as its cen-
tral premise the primacy of individual rights, the exercise
of those rights through representative political systems and
their protection from government power. Such is the basis of
the social contract as proposed by Thomas Hobbes and John
Locke. Individualized self-realization has also been mobi-
lized under capitalism through market choice, which, in turn,
derives legitimacy from its presumption of the self-interested
individual, homo economicus, exercising free will through
practices of consumption and capital accumulation (Harvey,
1996).
We might add to this brief survey the salience in West-
ern society of psychology and psychoanalysis over the past
2 centuries, and their related practices and institutions. As
Richard Sennett notes, “The advent of modern psychology,
of psychoanalysis in particular, was founded on the faith that
in understanding the inner workings of the self sui generis,
without transcendental ideas of evil or of sin, people might
free themselves from these horrors and be liberated to partic-
ipate more fully and rationally in a life outside the boundaries
of their own desires” (1976: 5). Reflecting on the impoverish-
ment of public and social life consequent to this turn inwards,
he writes: “The psyche is treated as though it has an inner life
of its own ... each person’s self has become his principal bur-
den; to know oneself has become an end, instead of a means
through which one knows the world” (Ibid: 4).
It is important to remember that the idea of an inner, in-
dividuated self that so permeates modern life has never been
ceded as uncontested terrain. As early as the 17th century,
writing against Hobbes and other thinkers of the liberal tra-
dition who would have us suppose ourselves “a kingdom
within a kingdom ... and is determined by no other source
than itself” (quoted in Montag, 1995: 68), Baruch Spinoza
argued passionately for a conception of the soul, or the mind
(the mens), as contiguous with the activity of the organic
body. For Foucault as well, as Warren Montag reminds us,
“The individual does not pre-exist his or her interpellation as
a subject but emerges as a result of strategies and practices
of individualization” (1995: 75). As such a strategy, then, we
might do well to think of solitary confinement through this
concept of interpellation, and reflect on the possible ontolo-
gies of subjectivity its practice reveals, as well as repudiates.
An oft-cited New Yorker article on solitary confinement
by the physician Atul Gawande begins with a bold claim:
“Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just
in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in
the obvious sense that we depend on others. We are social
in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal hu-
man being requires interaction with people” (2009). But how
widespread is this particular conception of subjectivity? One
might counter that, actually, the prevailing Western ortho-
doxy of human sociality supposes humans to be, in fact, so-
cial only in the sense that we like company and that we de-
pend on others. I posit that this orthodoxy, moreover, oper-
ates as structuring corollary to the more salient ontological
presumption: that humans are self-contained, separate and
individualized beings.
There is a difference between considering humans social
in a relational sense – that individuals will and should en-
counter one another – and considering the social as a consti-
tutive force on being itself, namely that there are no human
beings in the absence of relations with others. That we take
our being in part from those relations runs counter to a liberal
theory concerned primarily with the proper rules governing
the interaction among people. The existence and interaction
of others is a given, but only insofar as liberal politics is con-
cerned with “drawing boundaries around the sphere of indi-
vidual rights to protect those individuals from the intrusions
of others (individuals or the state)” (Nedelsky, 1989: 9). Not
only are rights and responsibilities individual, under liberal-
ism, but they must also be individualizing.
An ontology that instead presupposes that a person’s very
being is in large part constituted by her interactions with oth-
ers, that there is no “subject” to protect within a sphere segre-
gated from all others because there is no pre-existing, unitary
self in isolation from relationships, has little resemblance to
the received notion of individuated selfhood, expressed and
reified by the structures, rituals, institutions, discourses and
markets that actually organize and govern our lives. An ex-
ception, as this paper argues, can be found in the practice of
solitary confinement, which in its attempt to realize individ-
uation spatially and materially reveals both its violence, and
its impossibility.
It is remarkable how much like Descartes’ theoretical
exercise in metaphysical doubt the material practice of soli-
tary confinement is. His was essentially a thought experiment
in which he identified all that which was known to him solely
through sensory experience, and then rejected the reality of
those things on the basis of the unreliability of perception.
What he believed himself to have been left with was himself,
www.geogr-helv.net/69/355/2014/ Geogr. Helv., 69, 355–364, 2014
362 B. Story: Alone inside
alone inside: the I who thinks. The conclusion, as Negri puts
it, was that “The individual discovers his own true reality
only through isolation” (2007: 180).
Descartes’ thought experiment has become our social ex-
periment. From the beginning, control units have relied on
actual sensory deprivation. Prisoners are confined in cells
rarely larger than a parking space. Few have windows and
there is no way of telling whether it is daytime or night-
time. The cells are soundproof. The experience of isolation
is meant to be total, such that as little as possible is perceived
or received as experiences of the senses. The prisoner in soli-
tary confinement too, finds himself alone, inside. But in stark
contrast to Descartes’ ostensible revelation of selfhood, the
confined prisoner experiences his self, instead, actually dis-
integrate.
The implications of this contrast – one, indeed, revealing
the lie of the other – are significant. For if we are to con-
sider the self isolated and individuated under conditions of
solitary confinement to be subject to a kind of violence, then
we might consider how other practices of individuation struc-
tured by modern life might also constitute violence. The vio-
lence extends necessarily into the social and political realms
as well as the psychological, and in non-carceral life as well
as within the space of the prison. The measurement of life in
individualized terms, whether we call this individuality “psy-
chology” or “humanity” has so come to define social rela-
tions, that social meanings are themselves generated by the
feelings of individual human beings. In that way they serve
to effectively mask social relations and inequities of power
inherent therein (Sennett, 1976: 337).
Solitary confinement, while extreme, shares defining char-
acteristics with other spaces, structures, and modes of orga-
nization familiar to Western society. This is by no means to
suggest an equivalency between the deeply racialized and
classed experiences of state violence enacted by the soli-
tary confinement cell – experiences that too often culminate
in premature death – and the forms of individuation experi-
enced outside the prison. It is rather to suggest that the shared
logics and homologies that circulate between such sites also
reveal the interplay between power and violence at work in
all spaces and practices of individualization organized in ev-
eryday life, and therefore also warrant radical critique. That
such critique might upset our very ideas about what it means
to be human is part of its implicit threat, as well as its poten-
tial promise.
6 Conclusions
The largest and most sustained contestations of the US prison
regime in recent years have come from within the isolation
cell. California’s third hunger strike in 2 years, originating
from the bowels of the Pelican Bay SHUs, came to an end
in September of 2013. At its height there were more than
30000 prisoners participating. Since then there have been at
least two other hunger strikes waged by prisoners across the
country protesting, most immediately, their isolated confine-
ment. One of the latest began on 15 January 2014, when pris-
oners in the High Security Unit at Menard Correctional Cen-
ter in Illinois began a hunger strike to protest their indefinite
placement in solitary confinement without notice, reasons, or
hearings (Lynd and Lynd, 2014).
The core suggestion of this paper is that our reflection on
the meaningfulness of their austere spatial conditions on the
inside has important implications for thinking about what
Dostoevsky might call “civilization” on the outside. We are
inheritors of the Enlightenment tradition and we continue in
many ways to reinscribe, as a society, Descartes’ formulation
of dualism, perhaps more intensely than ever under the ne-
oliberal form of social organization. Two key insights follow:
first, the concept of the atomistic individual with which we
are all familiar is by no means historically given, politically
neutral, or ontologically uncontested. Second, it is difficult in
modern life to organize ourselves politically or economically
or socially in forms other than those premised on individu-
ated subjectivity.
It is tragically ironic, therefore, that people are imprisoned
when they fail to live up to the expectations of a modern soci-
ety and capitalist economy premised on notions of individual
will and responsibility, and are then punished with the actual-
ity of that individuation on the other side. The violence might
thus be said to begin before one’s arrival at the prison gates.
If we consider solitary confinement as both a realization of
individualism and also as a form of violence enacted against
those it subjects, then we must consider the damage done to
us by those other dispositifs of modern life that also serve to
contain and confine us, alone, inside.
What the lives of prisoners in solitary confinement teach
us is that individuated humans are first and foremost inade-
quate; they do not contain within themselves sufficient con-
tent or sufficient being with which to provision their lives.
Foreclosure of the social environment from which we draw
necessary sustenance thus constitutes a violence on subject-
hood itself. The purpose of this paper is also to suggest that
solidarity with these isolated prisoners requires identifying
ourselves – those of us on the “outside” – with their strug-
gle, and recognizing the shared (albeit unequally so) social
conditions and relations that organize the prison regime and
life under the neoliberal carceral state more broadly. Indeed,
if the solitary confinement cell has always told us something
about the condition of modern life and the production of the
subject, its contemporary practice should serve as a powerful
forewarning about the political work of isolation and indi-
viduation as practiced and spatialized outside of prisons as
well.
Acknowledgements. I am indebted to James Cairns, Debo-
rah Cowen, Matt Farish, Philip Goodman, and Susan Ruddick
for their incisive feedback and support during various stages in
Geogr. Helv., 69, 355–364, 2014 www.geogr-helv.net/69/355/2014/
B. Story: Alone inside 363
the writing of this article. I would also like to thank the anony-
mous reviewers for their generous and extremely helpful comments.
Edited by: J. Turner
Reviewed by: three anonymous referees
References
Blomley, N.: Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of
Property, Routledge, New York, 2004.
Biggs B. S.: Solitary Confinement: A Brief History, Mother
Jones, available at: http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/
solitary-confinement-brief-natural-history (last access: May
2014), 2 March 2009.
Briggs, C. S., Castellano, T. C., and Sundt, J. L.: The Effect of Su-
permaximum Security Prisons on Aggregate Levels of Institu-
tional Violence, Criminology, 41, 1341–1376, 2003.
Brook, D.: A History of Hard Time, Legal Affairs, available
at: http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2003/
review_brook_janfeb2003.msp (last access: 10 May 2014),
January/February 2003.
Cairns, J. and Sears, A.: The democratic imagination: Envisioning
popular power in the twenty-first century, University of Toronto
Press, Toronto, 2012.
California Assembly Public Safety Committee Hearing, Testi-
mony on the California Department of Corrections and Reha-
bilitations Proposed Reforms to the Security Housing Units,
available at: http://solitarywatch.com/wpcontent/uploads/2012/
06/PSHEARINGTRANSCRIPTfeb252013FINAL.pdf, 2013.
Casella, J. and Ridgeway, J.: No Evidence of Na-
tional Reduction in Solitary Confinement, Solitary
Watch, available at: http://solitarywatch.com/2010/06/15/
no-evidence-of-national-reduction-in-solitary-confinement/
(last access: 10 May 2014), 15 June 2010.
Casella, J. and Ridgeway, J.: Unlock the Box: The Fight against
Solitary Confinement in New York, The Nation, 2 October 2012.
Davis, A.: Are Prisons Obsolete?, Open Media, New York, 2003.
Dayan, C.: The Story of Cruel and Unusual, MIT Press, Boston,
2007.
Emerson, R. W.: The Conduct of Life, Penguin, New York, NY,
1860.
Foucault, M.: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans-
lated by: Sheridon, A., Vintage, New York, NY, 1977.
Garland, D.: The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in
Contemporary Society, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
2001.
Gawande, A.: Hellhole, The New Yorker, available at: http://www.
newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande
(last access: 10 May 2014), 30 March 2009.
Gibbons, J. J. and de B Katzenbach, N.: Confronting Confinement:
A Report of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in Amer-
ica’s Prisons, Vera Institute of Justice, New York, NY, available
at: www.prisoncommission.org/pdfs/Confronting_Confinement.
pdf (last access: 6 September 2013), 2006.
Gilmore, R. W.: Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Oppo-
sition in Globalizing California, University of California Press,
Berkley, CA, 2007.
Gómez, A. E.: Resisting Living Death at Marion Penitentiary, 1972,
Radical Hist. Rev., 96, 58–86, 2006.
Gottschalk, M.: The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass
Incarceration in America, Cambridge University Press, Cam-
bridge, 2006.
Grassian, S.: Psychiatric effects of solitary confinement, Journal of
Law and Policy, 22, 325–383, 2006.
Guenther, L.: Subjects Without a World? An Husserlian Analysis of
Solitary Confinement, Hum. Stud., 34, 257–276, 2011.
Guenther, L.: Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2013.
Haney, C.: Mental health issues in long-term solitary and ‘super-
max’ confinement, Crime Delinquency, 49, 124–156, 2003.
Haney, C. and Lynch, M.: Regulating prisons of the future: Psycho-
logical analysis of supermax and solitary confinement, New York
University Review of Law & Social Change, XXIII, 4, 477–570,
1997.
Harvey, D.: Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Black-
well, Oxford, 1996.
Horton, S.: Bush and the Art of Breaking Human Beings,
Harpers, available at: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/
hbc-90000901 (last access: 10 May 2014), 15 August 2007.
Human Rights Watch: Long-Term Solitary Confinement of Political
Prisoners, Human Rights Watch, available at: http://www.hrw.
org/en/node/12007/section/9 (last access: 10 May 2014, 2004.
Johnson, K.: States Start Reducing Solitary Confinement to Help
Budgets, USA Today, available at: http://www.usatoday.com/
news/nation/2010-06-13-solitary-confinement-being-cut_N.
htm (last access: 10 May 2014), 14 June 2010.
Kamel, R. and Kerness, B.: The Prison Inside the Prison: Con-
trol Units, Supermax Prisons, and Devices of Torture: A Justice
Visions Briefing Paper, American Friends Service Committee,
Philadelphia, PA, 2003.
Kupers, T.: Prison Madness, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1999.
Kuriki, L. and Morris, N.: The Purposes, Practices and Problems of
Supermax Prisons, Crime and Justice: A Review of Research,
edited by: Tonry, M., University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
2001.
Lynd, A. and Lynd, S.: Illinois prisoners in Menard High Security
Unit plan to begin hunger strike Jan. 15, San Francisco BayView,
available at: http://sfbayview.com/2014/illinois-prisoners-in-
menard-high-security-unit-plan-to-begin- hunger-strike-jan-15/
(last access: 10 May 2014), 14 January 2014.
Mauer, M.: Race to Incarcerate, revised edition, The New Press,
New York, 2006.
Mears, D. P. and Reisig, M. D.: The theory and practice of supermax
prisons, Punishment & Society, 8, 33–57, 2006.
Miles, T.: U.N. expert says solitary confinement
in U.S. prisons can be torture, Reuters, avail-
able at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/23/
us-usa-california-torture-idUSBRE97M0QU20130823 (last
access: 10 May 2014), 23 August 2013.
Montag, W.: The Soul is the Prison of the Body, Yale French Stud-
ies, 88, 53–77, 1995.
Nedelsky, J.: Reconceiving Autonomy: Sources, Thoughts and Pos-
sibilities, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 1, 7–36, 1989.
Negri, A.: Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois
Project, translated by Mandarini, M. and Toscano, A., Verso,
New York, 2007, 1970.
Perkinson, R.: Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,
Metropolitan Books, New York, 2010.
www.geogr-helv.net/69/355/2014/ Geogr. Helv., 69, 355–364, 2014
364 B. Story: Alone inside
Rhodes, L. A.: Total Confinement: Madness and Reason it the Max-
imum Security Prison, University of California Press, Berkeley,
CA, 2004.
Rhodes, L. A.: Supermax as a Technology of Punishment, Soc. Res.,
74, 547–566, 2007.
Rhodes, L. A.: Supermax prisons and the trajectory of exception,
Studies in Law, Politics and Society, 47, 193–218, 2009.
Rousseau, J. J.: Reveries of the Solitary Walker, translated by
France, P., Penguin, New York, NY, 1979.
Schaeffer-Duffy, C.: Solitary Confinement: An American Invention,
National Catholic Reporter, available at: http://natcath.org/NCR_
Online/archives2/2000d/112400/112400d.htm (last access: 10
May 2014), 23 November 2000.
Shalev, S.: Solitary Confinement and Supermax Prisons: A Hu-
man Rights and Ethical Analysis, Journal of Forensic Psychol-
ogy Practice, 11, 151–183, 2011.
Sennett, R.: The Fall of Public Man, W.W. Norton, New York, 1976.
Sennett, R.: The Conscience of the Eye, W.W. Norton, New York,
1990.
Smith, C.: The Prison and the American Imagination, Yale Univer-
sity Press, New Haven, 2009.
Smith, P. S.: The Effects of Solitary Confinement on Prison Inmates:
A Brief History and Review of the Literature, Crime and Justice,
34, 441–528, 2006.
Sullivan, L.: Timeline: Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons, Na-
tional Public Radio, available at: http://www.npr.org/templates/
story/story.php?storyId=5579901 (last access: 10 May 2014), 26
July 2006.
Thoreau, H. D.: Walden and other Writings, edited by: Krutch, J.
W., Bantam, New York, 2004, 1854.
Wacquant, L.: Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet
and Mesh, Punishment and Society, 3, 95–134, 2001.
Wacquant, L.: Ordering Insecurity: Social Polarization and the
Punitive Upsurge, Radical Philosophy Review, 11, 9–27, 2008.
Wacquant, L.: Prisons of Poverty, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 2009.
Ward, D. A. and Werlich, T. G.: Alcatraz and Marion: Evaluating
Super-Maximum Custody, Punishment and Society, 5, 53–75,
2003.
Wood, E. M.: Democracy against capitalism: Renewing historical
materialism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995.
Geogr. Helv., 69, 355–364, 2014 www.geogr-helv.net/69/355/2014/
