Lisa Guenther - "Why solitary confinement degrades us all"

    The prisoners might enter the SHU with good hearing, 20/20 eyesight, and stable mental health, but the longer they remain in isolation, the greater the chance that their sensory awareness, cognitive clarity, and emotional stability will erode. This is because, as relational beings in an individualist society, a good deal of what we take to be our own, intrinsic properties and capacities are in fact social practices that rely for their coherence and vibrancy upon interactive feedback loops with other social beings in a shared situation.

    But as a phenomenologist, my task is not to describe the teapot as if it were a totally separate entity from me, but rather to reflect on the way that the teapot appears to me.

    The other people with whom I share space give me an objective location in the world - they anchor me somewhere.

    In the words of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, my body "gears into" the things that draw my attention, my toes feel for the edge of the last step, my hands dig into a backpack searching for my keys. And likewise, the world gears into my body, warming my face with sunshine or moving me to tuck my nose into my scarf. But the main thing that my body gears into is not a thing at all; it is the body of another person, another "here", another starting-point for the experience of a world. My own sense of objective reality, and even my sense of myself as an objectively existing person rather than an abstract capacity for awareness, depends on the co-ordination of my here with your there, and vice versa.

    The prisoner who bashes his own body against the walls of a rec yard is both refusing and confirming the abyss of solitary confinement.