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Continuity in the Face of Penal Innovation: Revisiting the History of American Solitary Confinement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Ashley T. Rubin  and
Keramet Reiter
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Abstract

Solitary confinement has been a perennial tool of control in US prisons, despite its status as a repeatedly delegitimized practice. Although there have been significant changes in punishment over time, solitary confinement has remained, mostly at the margins and always as a response to past failures, part of an unending search for greater control over prisoners. This history raises the question of how a discredited penal technology can nevertheless persist. We locate the source of this persistence in prison administrators' unflagging belief in solitary confinement as a last-resort tool of control. To maintain this highly criticized practice, prison administrators strategically revise, but never abandon, discredited practices in response to antecedent legitimacy struggles. Using solitary confinement as a case study, we demonstrate how penal technologies that violate current sensibilities can survive, despite changing macro-level social factors that otherwise explain penal change and practice, provided those technologies serve prison officials' internal goals.

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Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , Fall 2018 , pp. 1604 - 1632
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2018 

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References

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