Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives. By Lisa Guenther. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 321 pp. $25.00 paperback, $13.99 Amazon Kindle.

Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives. By Lisa Guenther. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 321 pp. $25.00 paperback, $13.99 Amazon Kindle.A developing literature in the social sciences has given attention to the rise of super-maximum confinement in contemporary U.S. penal practice, but few scholars have explored with depth its philosophical, experiential, and ethical implications. Lisa Guenther's volume, Solitary Confinement, does this by presenting us with a "critical phenomenological" account of the history and con- temporary practices of isolation. Much like torture, solitary con- finement works, according to Guenther, through a forced self-betrayal where the prisoner's capacity for the relational-the ability to feel, perceive and engage with others-is turned against one's self through a gaping absence of other beings in time and space. Solitary confinement seeks to foreclose the possibility of meaningful existence, distorting the perceptual to the point of "anti-relationality" and violating authentic forms of solitude and sociality, both of which are constitutive to being. Guenther argues that the destruction of personhood is, consequently, central to the practice of "intensive confinement," which she defines as a "range of practices including solitary confinement, small-group confine- ment, sensory deprivation, and sensory overload: any form of iso- lation that is structured in a way that diminishes or undermines an open-ended relation to the world and other living beings" (loc 2752). This expansive use of the term directs our attention to worlds that, in their extreme isolation, exceed what we under- stand as solitary confinement. It also highlights the more mundane environs of mass incarceration where daily life is defined by a perpetual exposure to others-the overcrowded common rooms, dormitory tiers, and holding cells where there is no break from human exposure, a "forced relationality of con- stant surveillance and control" (loc 3137).Guenther lays out her argument in three parts. Part 1 exam- ines the foundational role of solitary confinement in the early U.S. penitentiary system, including the transposition of slavery into an ongoing form of racialized hyperincarceration. Building upon the concept of civil death, she highlights the law's role in structuring and sustaining racialized practices of social death, like solitary confinement, pointing to the "loophole" in the Thirteenth Amendment that allows for slippage between slavery and carceral practices, and leaves incomplete the work of abolition. Part 2 pro- vides a fascinating, brutal, and often omitted account of the role of Cold War psychological research, funded by the Central Intel- ligence Agency and Department of Defense, in making solitary confinement, with its emphasis on sensory deprivation and stress positions, an accepted form of behavior modification. Here, Guenther describes the violence done to living, relational beings by mechanist, "hard-wired" constructions of the self and how such assumptions produced in solitary confinement a "technology" for the production of mental illness. Part 3 takes on the more familiar story-the contemporary emergence of control prisons-where the "immobilization of inmates has become an end in itself " (loc 158). While social death is central to her account, the most origi- nal and innovative aspects of her analysis display how civil and social life are produced in the impossible and deathly spaces of intensive confinement. …