Theoretical and empirical limits of Scandinavian Exceptionalism: Isolation and normalization in Danish prisons

Drawing on interviews with 76 prisoners, 47 prison staff, and 14 experts, we document lived experiences of punishment in the Danish prison context. We argue that, regardless of “humanizing” elements of normalization and humanity, prisoners and staff may experience the power of the carceral state in Denmark in ways similar to those under more obviously harsh confinement regimes, as exist in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in the United Kingdom. Ultimately, macro-level theories like Scandinavian Exceptionalism serve as a rhetorical tool, implying that harsher prison systems are fixable, but fail to reflect the micro-level realities of incarceration

The International Persistence and Resilience of Solitary Confinement

Drawing on a combination of legal analysis and fieldwork conducted with prisoners and administrators in both Denmark and the United States, this article interrogates how solitary confinement has been defined and constrained – or not – in the context of U.S., European, and international law over time. Solitary confinement has existed consistently in prisons across the world, since the first prisons opened. Solitary has been surprisingly predictable over its long history: resilient to criticism, subject to ongoing debates about just how detrimental it is, and repeatedly producing instances of extreme and de-humanizing brutality. This consistency and predictability suggests substantial limitations inherent in the newest barrage of critiques leveled by courts, scholars, international human rights bodies, and professional associations against the practice of solitary confinement. Indeed, this reveals that many critiques of solitary confinement have failed because they have promoted reformist rather than non-reformist (or abolition) agendas – a distinction articulated by Mathiesen (1974/2014)

The Origins of and Need to Control Supermax Prisons

Supermaxes are prisons designed to impose long-term solitary confinement. Supermax prisoners spend 23 h or more per day in windowless cells. Technology, like centrally controlled automated cell doors and fluorescent lights that are never turned off, allows prisoners to be under constant surveillance, while minimizing all human contact. California built two of the first and largest supermaxes in 1988 and 1989. Corcoran State Prison and Pelican Bay State Prison, which together house more than 3000 prisoners in supermax conditions, were two of 23 new prisons built in California during the late twentieth century era of rapidly increasing incarceration rates and prison capacities. This article will address three stages of supermax operation in California: (1) the early, tumultuous years of total administrative discretion and egregious abuses; (2) the middle years of controlled expansion and entrenchment of supermax use; and (3) the recent events and reforms initiated following a hunger strike in California’s segregation units in the summer of 2011. The history of California’s use of supermax prisons reveals both the role of administrative discretion in shaping the initial design and day-to-day operation of the institutions, as well as the perverse  ncentives that made these institutions increasingly invisible and decreasingly governable.Supermaxes, then, serve as an important piece of the story of mass incarceration in California, a microcosm of the larger trends in administration, law, and politics, which have created the social and economic behemoth of a state prison system facing Californians today

Crossing Borders and Criminalizing Identity: The Disintegrated Subjects of Administrative Sanctions

This paper draws on in-depth, qualitative interviews that examine individual experiences in two different legal contexts: deportation regimes and supermax prisons. Through putting these contexts and experiences into dialogue, we identify common legal processes of punishment experiences across both contexts. Specifically, the U.S. legal system re-labels immigrants (as deportable noncitizens) and supermax prisoners (as dangerous gang offenders). This re-labeling begins a process of othering, which ends in categorical exclusions for both immigrants and supermax prisoners. As individuals experience this categorical exclusion, they cross multiple borders and boundaries—often against their will—moving from prison to detention center to other countries beyond the U.S. border, and from isolation to prison to “free” society. In both cases, the state action that subjects experience as punishment is civil and, therefore, nominally not punitive. Ultimately, excluded individuals find themselves in a space of legal nonexistence. By examining these common processes and experiences, we argue that a new kind of subject is revealed: a disintegrating subject (as opposed to a juridical or disciplinary subject) whose exclusion reinforces the power of the state