The discussion offered in the previous chapters has attempted to explore the phenomenology of solitary confinement from the various perspectives from which these experiences are constructed. The intent of this strategy has been focused on the history and structure of solitary confinement and the ethical implications that these reveal relative to the individual experience. Though the individual experience of solitary confinement unfolds in a variety of ways, the structural context of those experiences is for the most part similar. Any attempt to explore the phenomenology of a given experience requires that both individual perspective and social context are included and the experience of solitary confinement is certainly no different.

What these experiences reveal is the way in which the apparatus of solitary confinement fundamentally disrupts and transforms some of our most basic abilities to take up the world. As a space of confinement, this experience drastically limits bodily potentiality for living movement by the absence it establishes. The emptiness of this diminished space is so pathologically vacant that the normal ways of being a person, of being a body, are effectively disrupted or at times negated. How one re-establishes some semblance of “normalcy” becomes exclusively dependent on individuals’ ability to “re-inhabit” this emptiness in ways that are specifically meaningful to them. However, these experiences also evoke another aspect of this experience that is often overlooked: What does this type of confinement say about us as a society that allows its continuation?

Though it is often rationalized that solitary confinement in its most recent iteration is a necessary tool or apparatus of the criminal justice machine, we tend to continue to overlook its obvious consequences and it's more troubling ethical implications. The conditions by which solitary confinement is “strategically” employed must be viewed as an intentional act of rationalized retribution. As such, it implies an intentional desire to construct a system of punishment that elicits an intense degree of psychological harm. However, this harm rarely emerges from a place of actual hatred. Rather, and perhaps more problematically, it becomes articulated as a form of bureaucratic indifference or as the banality of evil.