In Chapters three and four, the structure and legal construction of the practice of solitary confinement was explored for the purpose of establishing the role that it plays within this phenomenology. What will follow will be a phenomenological exploration of the lived experience of solitary confinement from the narrative accounts in The Guardian online newspaper of a group of individuals who have decided to share this experience, from Solitary Watch and its segment on solitary confinement titled Voices from Solitary, and other print sources. These first-person narratives not only explore the experience of living in solitary confinement, but also describe how this experience evolves over time.

What these interviews reveal is the lived experience of individuals confronted with the state of exception exemplified by the apparatus of solitary confinement as employed by the criminal justice machine as a strategy for the re-fabrication of the self (Polizzi, Draper & Andersen, 2014). Within this context, Agamben's conceptualization of the apparatus clearly is witnessed. For Agamben (2007/2009), human existence is the struggle between living beings and “… apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured” (p. 13). As such, Agamben's conceptualization of the apparatus goes beyond Foucault's initial formulation of this process. “Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (Agamben, 2007/2009, p. 14).

Agamben continues by adding a third class to the initial two categories he provides – living beings and apparatus which he identifies as the subject. “I shall call the subject that which results from the relation and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses” (Agamben, 2007/2009, p. 14). The position of the subject, therefore, emerges from the in-between of this struggle between living being and the apparatus. The process which Agamben describes, however, is threatened by what he calls desubjectification, which is the process that unfolds within our relationship to the apparatus. Our ability to avoid desubjectification begins by first recognizing our relationship to the apparatus, which in turn can evoke a different manifestation of the in-between of living beings and apparatuses (Agamben, 2007/2009).