Castaway - Into Solitary

The time-obsessed character played by Tom Hanks in Castaway became disconsolate when stranded alone on a lush Pacific island, dappled in sea breezes and swaying fronds.

So why, then, do we expect American inmates to make it in solitary confinement for extended periods of time, without becoming mentally inhinged?

Revisiting Atul Gawande's "Hellhole" Essay

It's been almost a year and a half since The New Yorker published Atal Gawande's provacative essay Hellhole, an eye-opening account of the overue of solitary confinement in American prisons. More than 25,000 American inmates are in solitary at any given time, according to Gawande's figures. Another 50,000 to 80,000 are in administrative segregation, which often involves isolation. Despite evidence showing that a stay of more than 10 days in solitary has no real benefits in imposing compliance with prison discipline, many offenders are subjected to solitary for years at at time. And because the human self is social, the deprivation of social contact is a recipe for driving people into psychosis. Gawande contrasts British and American approaches to offenders classified as "the worst of the worst." Beginning in the 1980s, British correctional officials gradually moved toward providing more, not less, opportunity for social interaction to the highest risk inmates. Meanwhile, the United States began to build supermax prisons, where inmates have virtually no human contact on a daily basis. Two paths diverged in a dark wood - and one has led straight to hell for tens of thousands of people.

Foucault, the AFSC, and the Prison Paradigm

Michael Foucault and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) are admittedly an unlikely duo.

Foucault was a radical French intellectual whose work was animated by a drive to expose what he saw as the underlying connection between knowledge and power. He died of AIDS in 1984, around the time his work was coming into vogue in American academic circles.

The AFSC is an earnest, faith-based organization committed to progressive social action and deep-seated principles of justice. Rooted in the Quaker tradition but also committed to interfaith cooperation, it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 for its role in aiding displaced people in war-torn Europe.

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (French, 1975; English, 1978) and a recent AFDC-supported book, Beyond Prisons (2006, by authors Laura Magnani and Harmon L. Wray), are separated by a generation in time and come from very different perspectives. Foucault, using a method he called “the archeology of knowledge,” examines the emergence of the modern prison two hundred years ago, as it grew to replace a penal system focused on torture. The AFSC, motivated by religious faith, seeks to point the way to a new paradigm beyond prisons, emphasizing the healing of relationships and community building.

As different as these perspectives are, the two books pose similar questions about the power dynamics present in a society that relies heavily on incarceration. “Regard punishment as a political tactic,” Foucault cautioned. The AFSC is more blunt: “Prisons serve the power structure.”

As the New Year begins, I will be reading Discipline and Punish and Beyond Prisons side by side. One irony I’ve noted already: The modern prison, with its excessive reliance on solitary confinement, has reverted back to the torture model of punishment it was supposed to replace.

Atul Gawande, Truth-teller

Clay Shirkey’s book Here Comes Everybody is about the current rage for online social networking, not prison conditions. But in asserting that humans are social by nature, he illustrates the point by asking us to consider the consequences of completely depriving someone of social contact during incarceration.

“One of the most severe punishments that can be meted out to a prisoner is solitary confinement; even in a social environment as harsh and attenuated as prison, complete removal from human contact is harsher still.”

Sharkey published these words in 2008. Early in 2009, Atul Gawande probed the soul-destroying experience of long-term solitary confinement in prison and concluded that it amounts to torture. The March 30 issue of The New Yorker contains his disturbing essay “Hellhole,” which should be required reading for all Americans. The depth of the degradation it depicts will not leave you unchanged.