Spirituality in Dark Places

The Ethics of Solitary Confinement

D. Jeffreys

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137311788
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Jeffreys explores the spiritual consequences and ethics of modern solitary confinement and emphasizes how solitary confinement damages our spiritual lives. He focuses particularly on how it destroys one's relationship to time and undermines our creativity, and proposes institutional changes in order to mitigate profound damage to prisoners.

CHAPTER 1

IS TIME OUR ENEMY? SPIRITUALITY AND CREATIVITY

Dear Christ! the very prison walls

Suddenly seemed to reel,

And the sky above my head became

Like a casque of scorching steel;

And, though I was a soul in pain,

My pain I could not feel.

Oscar Wilde¹

Time dominates prison life. Inmates use phrases like “hard time” to describe life in penal institutions. They obsess about the past, longing to change it or alter its meaning. They plan for the future, hoping to escape their dismal circumstances. Prison administrators also concern themselves with time. They carefully plan out days and activities, recognizing that by controlling time they control people. Nineteenth-century wardens of British and American prisons meticulously organized time. They were convinced that idle time creates sinful behavior, and therefore regimented every hour of the day. Young people in particular were subjected to careful time management lest they fall into idleness. Early prison wardens also frequently linked time with architecture, emphasizing how organized space developed positive character. Inmates would move only at designated times and for regimented distances. Buildings would instill fear and respect for the law. Routines would replace disorderly behavior, and orderly space would undermine criminal habits and behavior.

Nineteenth-century British and American architects held dangerous aspirations to reform the human personality through architectural works. They aimed their efforts particularly at the poor and working classes, hoping to transform them into “respectable” people. When built, many penal institutions not only failed at spiritual reformation, but also produced terrible mental disorders. These failures lead many historians to worry about linking architecture and spirituality.

Despite this valuable historical lesson, we cannot hastily dismiss the connection between architecture and spirituality. Those visiting, working, or living in prisons recognize almost immediately how they shape feelings and thoughts. Older prisons feature imposing facades that greet visitors. Stone walls surrounding the building produce a sense of heaviness and foreboding. In contrast, newly built prisons appear aseptic, monotonous, and artificial. When people enter them, they feel a pervasive sense of control and helplessness. Time seems to stop, and individuals lose themselves in an endless and stifling boredom. Those sensitive to prison architecture cannot refrain from thinking that it somehow shapes our psyches.

To provide analytic precision to these vague reactions to architecture, in this chapter I link spirituality and creative works. First, I briefly discuss our experience of time, noting in particular its inner dimensions. Second, I describe two important temporal experiences. People grasp themselves as enduring entities in time or seem to lose their identity in its flow. I also note how our relationship to the past and future can create a sense of temporal dislocation. Third, I consider two ways we can overcome our sense of temporal dislocation, spiritual self-possession, and spiritual transcendence. We transcend our environments by seeking intellectual wholes, and become aware of ourselves as centers of activity. Fourth, I consider the unusual nature of objects like architectural works. I argue that they are neither purely physical nor purely mental, but instead arise when human beings link the two. Finally, I show how architectural works express and limit self-possession and spiritual transcendence. They reveal our capacity to link mental and physical realities, but constrain us once we create them.

TIME, MOTION, AND MEASUREMENT

With time, we experience a linked succession of thoughts, feelings, or objects along with some kind of change.² Without change, we would grasp only motionless presence. Temporal experience requires change from one object to another. Our experience of time also includes linked elements. Past, present, and future and before and after seem connected. For example, the present points to or gives some intimation of the future. I anticipate that what is now happening will lead to something in the future. Similarly, my present experiences quickly become past ones, but leave traces in the present. Finally, a present experience can evoke memories of the past. For example, the current experience of my child graduating from high school has poignant echoes of the past and intimations of the future. Time thus involves a distinctive order absent from other kinds of succession. A mathematical succession, for example, lacks the look backward and pointing forward that we find in time.³

In experiencing time, we also measure succession using internal and external tools. We take a succession and compare it “with some standard of reference.”⁴ We are not compelled to choose one standard. In fact, the diversity of human standards testifies to the conventional character of much of time measurement. We measure succession through bodily functions or rhythms. Or we relate it to natural occurrences like the earth’s movement. We also develop internal standards that depend on personal history and psychology. Finally, we invent clocks, timepieces, calendars, and other devices to measure succession. Most communities adopt public standards of time, but particular groups embrace additional ones. Scientists, for example, measure time using technical instruments. Whatever standard human beings adopt, they understand time by measuring succession and change with a standard.⁵

TWO EXPERIENCES OF TIME

Two experiences of time play a particularly important role in our lives. In the first, we experience ourselves as what exists and time as derivative. In the second, we relate to time as fundamental and feel like we are disintegrating in its passage. In the first experience, I feel time is moving, but think I remain the same person throughout it. I am a constant in the course of my life. I apprehend deep changes in my body and ideas, but “feel myself to be a person constituted by this specific nature.”⁶ Suppose I graduate from high school and begin a new life at a university. I change, but retain an identity I had in my pre-university days.

In this experience, I feel relatively immune from time. People and things change, but maintain enough continuity to withstand time’s changes. The present rushes into the past, but I remember it and prevent it from disappearing entirely. I also plan for the future, and assume I will be the same person in a few years. In the midst of temporal change, I remain a center of past and future events, steadfast while they appear and disappear. I transcend both past and present, and am never entirely constrained by time.

In the second experience, we apprehend time’s destructive character. Through a dramatic event, we become aware of our fragile existence. Suppose a loved one dies, a person whom we believed would always be around. Her death stuns and overwhelms us. We realize that human existence is contingent on many factors. We cannot exist without food and other necessities, and built institutions to provide them. We need time to develop these institutions, and they can easily crumble through natural or human disasters. We may also reflect on cultural achievements, and realize that “the repository itself, namely human civilization, is itself perishable.”⁷ Monuments, cathedrals, and works of literature disappear over time. Visiting an ancient ruin, we realize that “it is not we who are masters of time, but that time rules over us.”⁸ This sense of time’s threat appears powerfully in ancient Greek thought. For example, the historian Herodotus captures how time appears like a dangerous force. Surveying his massive army invading Greece, the Persian king Xerxes begins to weep, stating, “I was suddenly overcome by pity as I considered the brevity of human life, since not one of all these people here will be alive one hundred years from now.”⁹ One of the most powerful people on the planet felt time’s threat to his existence. On this view, we no longer transcend time but are instead its pathetic victims.

TEMPORAL DISLOCATION AND THE SELF

Often, this experience of time’s danger includes a sense of temporal dislocation. We have difficulty connecting the periods of our lives. Sometimes, we cannot link past and present because the past intrudes on the present.¹⁰ Suppose I discover that my spouse secretly cheated on me for years. This revelation forces me to completely rethink my life. Or perhaps I change religious or philosophical views and see my past as morally or religiously corrupt. I might also be haunted by horrible memories that undermine my current sense of temporal coherence. Or I might imagine past events that never occurred, and they gradually erode my sense of temporal coherence.¹¹ In all these cases, I wonder about my earlier self, seeing it as an apparition lost in disconnected processes.¹²

My relationship to the future can also produce temporal confusion. Perhaps I see my life as going nowhere.¹³ Or I anticipate future suffering, throwing my current sense of time into disarray. Unable to stop thinking about what might happen, I imagine alternative futures. They weigh heavily on my consciousness, radically changing my present. For example, I have spoken with young inmates serving life sentences. They cannot enjoy the present because they know they will never leave the penitentiary. They sense that they are moving toward a future against their will, and they cannot coherently link present and future.

I can also lose myself in temporal processes when facing important life decisions. In a crisis, I fail to realize what’s important or am too weak to act. Paralyzed by fear, weakness, or distraction, I act inappropriately. Perhaps I have lived my life with a moral commitment to human rights. Confronted with a government committing genocide, I accede to its policies out of fear or opportunism. I betray my ideals, and disappear as an agent defined by a commitment to human rights.¹⁴ I “become dispersed” in a large historical or political process, and lose my moral center.¹⁵ Without it, I can no longer exert significant power to influence the present and future.

To summarize, we often struggle to maintained temporal coherence. Processes outside of our control and internal distortions can create pathological relations to time.¹⁶ We experience temporal units as only vaguely connected, and lose our sense that we endure in time. Recalling the past and anticipating the future, we find ourselves “as if on the edge between two abysses of non-being,”¹⁷ Time becomes a hostile force destroying our identities.

TEMPORAL DISLOCATION AND SELF-POSSESSION

People can resist temporal dislocation by developing spiritual self-possession, an “awareness of oneself both as present and as a source of action.”¹⁸ Philosophers and theologians often see it as a sign of our spiritual nature. It involves no “dispersal of parts characteristic of material bodies with their spatial extension.”¹⁹ When material objects unite, they displace each other, one giving way to another. A stone placed in a jar of water dislodges the water. Philosopher Kenneth L. Schmitz calls this dimension of material entities determinacy; material objects resist and exclude other objects. The awareness of self involves no such determinacy, but instead enhances a knowing being.²⁰ When I am aware of myself, I do not exclude or lose anything.

Gradually, human beings can understand themselves as unified centers of thought and action. Many living beings maintain biological systems that enable them to interact with their environment. Through internal unity, an organism “distinguishes itself from the world and constructs its own opposition to it.”²¹ Self-possession includes a deeper interiority because human beings grasp both their mental activity and its meaning.²² How do new experiences fit into older ones? How do they reflect a personality? By considering such questions, a person relates meaning to a center of mental and other activities.

I develop self-possession through conscious action, and I gradually “construct an abiding portrait, proclaiming implicitly” that “this is the kind of person I am.”²³ Every consciously chosen action shapes my character. It affects me and the world, and cannot “be simply wiped out at will without leaving a trace.”²⁴ Gradually, I understand the consequences of action for others. I never completely understand myself because my personality contains hidden dimensions.²⁵ Other people may in fact understand parts of me better than I do. Nevertheless, by acting I grasp something of my presence in the world.

Self-possession often appears when we confront difficult choices. Our acts sometimes “spring forth from the deepest interior of the ego, as it has become in the past and sustains itself to this day, to the moment of the deed.”²⁶ In moments of crisis I respond in ways requiring continuity in change. I may be unaware of it until I act, but retrospectively realize its presence. For example, some people give little thought to how they would respond to torture. A government tortures, and people must decide whether to support it. They refuse to torture perhaps at grave personal costs. They then reflect on what made this choice possible. A profoundly disordered person might be incapable of resisting institutional pressures to torture. Through reflection, I apprehend the kind of person who could resist making immoral choices.

I often discern constancy with difficulty, but recognize that time cannot fully destroy my enduring self.²⁷ When making an important choice, my act “simultaneously enhances my powers” and “shapes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Is Time Our Enemy? Spirituality and Creativity
• 2. Solitary Confinement and the Economy of Violence
• 3. Solitary and the Assault on the Human Spirit
• 4. Sending a Message: The Expressive View of Punishment
• 5. Should We Banish the Wicked? The Ethics of Solitary Confinement
• From Fear to Hope: Concluding Thoughts
• Useful Web Resources for Studying Solitary Confinement
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index