Solitary confinement has been used in correctional practice since the very inception of the penitentiary system in the United States. However, by the late 1840’s, it usefulness as a rehabilitative strategy was placed into question. By the late 1880’s, it’s utility as a mode of rationalized retribution quickly became the sole function of this type of correctional strategy. By the 1980’s, a number of states in the U.S began to build supermax penitentiaries. Within the current context, isolated confinement has become a regular correctional strategy of every state correctional system in the U.S., ... More

Solitary confinement has been used in correctional practice since the very inception of the penitentiary system in the United States. However, by the late 1840’s, it usefulness as a rehabilitative strategy was placed into question. By the late 1880’s, it’s utility as a mode of rationalized retribution quickly became the sole function of this type of correctional strategy. By the 1980’s, a number of states in the U.S began to build supermax penitentiaries. Within the current context, isolated confinement has become a regular correctional strategy of every state correctional system in the U.S., including the federal supermax facility located in Colorado. As the use of solitary and supermax confinement became more mainstream, the U.S. Supreme Court was often called upon to determine if this type of correctional strategy violated constitutional protection. Though the Supreme Court has moved rather slowly on this issue, it has begun to prohibit certain individuals to be placed in this type of confinement due to the psychological damage it can impose on certain individuals. What has been consistently observed both historically and within the context of personal accounts of this experience is the profound effects of isolated confinement. The phenomenology of this event is evoked within the relationality between the structural limitations of the physical space of solitary and individual experience. Within this context, the most basic aspects of embodied existence—the possibility of human touch, the possibility of bodily movement by which to take up the world and the absence of direct intersubjective experience—are denied.