ABSTRACT
Since the 1960s there has been a revival of the practice of solitary confinement in the U.S.A., not just as a mere component of the prison system but as an increasingly institutionalized long-term practice. Prevailing interpretations of this practice disconnect the post-1980s proliferation of penal isolation from its experimental use in the 1960s and 1970s as a tactic of behavior modification, and even more so from its nineteenth-century origins as a penal site of idealized redemption. This chapter offers a new framework for making sense of solitary confinement’s mass institutionalization in the contemporary prison system, offering a political genealogy of the “prison within a prison” through an ontological consideration of the solitary cell’s social rather than individual object of subjugation.
