Solitary Symposium: The Scandal of Solitary in the US Today

Lisa Guenther, Juan Mendez, and Scarlet S. Kim in The Scandal of Solitary in the U.S. Today, Session III of the all-day symposium, Should You Ever Happen to Find Yourself in Solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities, organized by the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU (Nov. 17, 2012 at Cantor Film Center; details at nyihumanities.org).
- Lisa Guenther, a philosopher from Vanderbilt Univ., draws on ideas developed in her forthcoming book, Social Death and its Afterlives: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement
- Juan E. Méndez, the celebrated human rights lawyer who himself suffered a harrowing stint in solitary during the Dirty Wars in his Argentine homeland, puts the U.S. situation in a wider international context from his perch as the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment
- Scarlet S. Kim, one of the co-authors of the recent New York Civil Liberties Union report "Boxed In: The True Cost of Extreme Isolation in New York's Prisons"