The Temporality of Solitary Confinement

This paper takes the practice of solitary confinement, as a mechanism within the arsenal of punitive techniques used by the penal system, as its main focus. The paper builds on a foundation of scholarship that shows the psychological and phenomenological effects of solitary confinement. I situate this paper as a continuation of these arguments, which proposes that the practice of forced isolation weaponizes the internal structure of time consciousness against itself. Thus, after revisiting the established scholarship on solitary confinement, I will argue that the conditions of solitary confinement deny the intersubjective constitutive capabilities of our structure of time consciousness. The paper makes the argument that the practice of solitary confinement is operationally designed to weaponize time against the inmate. Therefore, in solitary confinement, time is not something that is taken away, rather, it is intentionally leveraged for the sake of undermining its inhabitants.