In this second interview in a series of three on issues of criminal justice, incarceration, and solitary confinement in the United States, I speak with philosopher Lisa Guenther about what solitary confinement does to bodies and minds. Her forthcoming book, Social Death and Its Afterlives: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement, shows simultaneously why solitary confinement should be considered cruel and unusual punishment (even though, as we learned from Colin Dayan in the first interview in this series, the Supreme Court keeps refusing to make that ruling) and how what happens to prisoners subjected to isolation reveals to us something about what it means to be a person. In other words, what is wrong about solitary confinement matters in an institution of justice, of course, but it also speaks, on a more existential level, to our understanding of ourselves as creatures who must live together with others. Isolation is not punishment; it is destruction of personhood. As such, it does not belong in a correctional system.

Guenther is associate professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She also facilitates a reading group in a prison in Nashville, and recently authored a New York Times op-ed on solitary confinement, as well as submitting testimony in June 2012 to the first-ever Senate hearing on the subject. Her first book, The Gift of the Other, explored the ethical significance of birth. This interview began when I visited Vanderbilt during the March 2012 tornado season (more exciting than planned!), and then continued over email.

—Jill Stauffer

THE BELIEVER: What, specifically, is wrong with solitary confinement as a form of punishment, and why would a philosopher write a book about it?

LISA GUENTHER: The practice of solitary confinement raises all sorts of philosophical questions for me. First of all: why do we tend to think that isolation is a more “humane” punishment than physical torture? What view of personhood and of justice would you have to hold in order to think that someone could be rehabilitated or even redeemed by prolonged solitary confinement? In the early penitentiary system, solitary confinement was seen as a civilized alternative to physical punishment. The idea was that if you separated the prisoner from “criminal influences” and locked them away with nothing to do but reflect on their crime, you could force them to undergo a spiritual, moral, and political conversion. But already in the first years of the penitentiary system, critics like Charles Dickens observed that solitary confinement was far more likely to drive people insane, or to make them withdraw into themselves to the point of being unable to reconnect with others, than to turn them into upstanding citizens. So why...