Sixty miles northeast of Nashville, in a tree-lined valley dotted with grazing cows and idyllic old barns, there’s a 108-acre, $140-million construction site that conjures up visions of an Eastern Bloc gulag.
Christened the Trousdale Correctional Facility in the spring of 2014, and set to open in early 2016, the emerging 485,741-square-foot medium-security structure already looks like a prefabricated, one-star hotel for the doomed. Its high, dead-gray walls are designed to house 2,552 prisoners, who will be managed by the Corrections Corporation of America, which, based in Nashville, is the largest publicly traded private prison company in the United States.
What makes the setting especially Kafkaesque is that the massive facility is dwarfed by a solitary nuclear cooling tower just a few hundred yards away. The first of several that were to be built by the Tennessee Valley Authority beginning in the mid-’70s, the tower was abandoned after locals protested. Weather-worn and startlingly incongruent, its shadow looms over the landscape.
If all of this weren’t ominous enough, a handful of CCA employees routinely cruise around the site in spotless white Ford 4x4 pickups, on the lookout for trespassers. Given the absence of inmates and the remoteness of the locale, that might seem unnecessarily paranoid. Except that on this unseasonably cool Saturday morning in early June, they may have good reason to be on the lookout.
There’s a philosopher on the loose.
Lisa Guenther is giving me and one of her doctoral students from Vanderbilt University a tour of what she dubs “the nuclear prison.” To get close enough to appreciate what she calls this “truly surreal” example of the profit-driven “prison industrial complex,” as well as snap a few pictures, she’s chosen to drive her aging Toyota Corolla past the “Keep Out” signs that litter CCA’s chain-link fences.
“What was the TVA all about?” Guenther asks us rhetorically. “Targeting rural white Appalachian folks — a make-work project for unemployed men. Ultimately, though, with the good came the welfare state’s recipe for managing surplus populations. So what does the neoliberal state do now to manage poor whites and African-American men? They build prisons.”
A lot of prisons, according to data gathered by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Prison Policy Initiative: 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,259 juvenile correction facilities, and 3,283 local jails. Many built to account for a 40-year growth in incarceration rates that, according to a 2014 report by the National Research Council, is “historically unprecedented and internationally unique.” During that time period, says the NRC — due largely to an increase in sentence lengths, required prison time for minor offenses, and intensified punishment for drug offenses — the U. S. inmate population has risen from around 200,000 to over 2.2 million, making it the world’s largest penal state.
“Now you’d think the media would be all over this place,” Guenther says as she and her passengers survey the Trousdale grounds. “If only because the visual culture of a nuclear power plant juxtaposed against a prison under construction reveals very densely layered surfaces of history, power, and special interests. But I have yet to see a meaningful story.”
Guenther, a Canadian who earned her doctorate at the University of Toronto, has long had a penchant for such analyses — informed by a life deciphering the likes of Plato and Socrates, Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl. Before she landed on the tenure track at Vanderbilt in 2007, though, you’d most likely be exposed to her theories by attending one of her lectures or reading one of her scholarly papers.
You most definitely would not be discussing the “corrupting influence of capitalism on the carceral state” while dodging security guards on an unmarked gravel road in the rural South.
“I was an anomalously quiet, bookish kid who grew into an adult with monklike tendencies,” Guenther says. “The reason I became a Ph.D. was to become an academic. I was interested in thinking and learning and writing, and if that lasted the rest of my life, that would be a good life.”
“Suddenly I realized that I really can’t do this work by simply reading 40-year-old books. I needed to engage.”
Guenther’s reserved demeanor started to unravel during the spring semester in 2008, when, as a new professor at Vanderbilt, she decided to sit in on a seminar called “Slavery,” led by the political activist and scholar Angela Davis. “The seminar was not about chattel and plantation slavery,” Guenther says. “It was about prison slavery going forth from the 13th Amendment.” That amendment abolishes the practice “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”
For Guenther, the experience was an intellectual awakening. “Davis talked about social movements and being a movement scholar,” she says. “And that stuck with me, even though I didn’t really know at the time what it could mean to me personally or professionally.”
In the seven years since, the 43-year-old scholar has metamorphosized from an office-bound theorist into a self-described social activist. She is an outspoken critic of mass incarceration and the death penalty, and an advocate for radical penal reform. Embedded in Nashville’s leftist community, she’s engaged in the Black Lives Matter movement, supports restorative-justice programs in the public schools, blogs regularly for Tennessee Students and Educators for Social Justice, and holds a weekly reading and advocacy group for men on death row.
The author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), she’s also become a go-to source for a growing cadre of journalists and policy makers on the lookout for plainspoken but provocative testimony about human-rights abuses in American prisons.
In other words, Guenther, like Davis, is now a movement scholar, who is sometimes compelled to bend a rule or two to make a point — Ford 4x4s and chain-link fences be damned.
Like most lasting personal and professional transformations, Guenther’s was incremental.
As a graduate student she was drawn to phenomenology, a philosophical movement founded in the early 20th century to grapple with the structures of experience and consciousness. While a lecturer at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, she continued to hone her focus on feminist phenomenology. Her 2006 book, The Gift of the Other (SUNY Press), examines the experience of both being born and giving birth, in part by focusing on the writings of the French philosopher, ethicist, and phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas, for whom Guenther continues to have a particular fascination.
When Guenther arrived at Vanderbilt she was getting interested in animals and says she was considering a book combining literature and philosophy “to examine whether or not the animal had a face, specifically in relation to Levinas.” By the time she took Davis’s “mind-blowing” seminar on slavery, however, her interests were already starting to shift. Fascinated by the politics of confinement and the ethics of torture at sites such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, she started doing research on the military-industrial complex and concluded that the pursuance of U.S. global hegemony was being fed, in part, by academe itself.
“There were embedded behavioral-science teams who were consultants on how to torture people most effectively,” Guenther says. “Anthropologists who were colluding with the CIA to create profiles of the human terrain. It was fascinating, in part. But it was also all so disgusting to me, and I looked up to find that I was alone in my room, wallowing in despair, just mouthing off about it all through the written word.”
Two years into her project, and on the brink of burnout, Guenther contemplated fleeing the academy. Still, she loved teaching and learning, so before planning an escape route she decided to reimmerse herself in the sorts of texts that most inspired her during Davis’s seminar. She read works by the Black Panther Party members Assata Shakur, George Jackson, and Huey Newton; the Pan-Africanist W.E.B. Du Bois; and other “radical political thinkers who,” Guenther points out, “may or may not have been engaged in academic work, but who were making sense of the world through praxis.”
“Suddenly I realized that I really can’t do this work by simply reading 40-year-old books. I needed to engage,” she says. “I needed to be in conversation with people who were directly affected by that system.”
Guenther consulted the Tennessee Department of Corrections’ website and began to realize that Nashville, known for its country-music scene and state-of-the-art medical facilities, was also home to the Corrections Corporation of America and a corridor of correctional facilities, tucked away on the north edge of town.
At the time, there was a 600-bed medium-security prison called Charles B. Bass Correctional Complex, a plantationlike workhouse known as “the Farm,” and the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, constructed in 1989 to replace its 150-year-old neighbor, the Tennessee State Penitentiary, which, because of its fortresslike exterior, has been featured in a number of Hollywood films, including The Green Mile. “Still one of the most beautiful buildings in the state,” Guenther observes, “that was a rat-infested dungeon inside.”
The available volunteer options at the Tennessee Department of Corrections struck Guenther as a bit too “churchy,” however, so she decided not to get involved. Then, as fate would have it, she heard a classics professor speak at a philosophy conference about teaching Levinas to Oregon inmates. The key turned. “I realized there was a way to do this work and be myself,” Guenther says. “I didn’t need to do Christian missionary work on the side. I didn’t have to check my intellectual commitments at the door.”
Guenther made contact with the southern regional director of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, an organization based at Temple University that brings civilian students together with incarcerated men and women to take college classes behind bars. According to Joshua Miller, a philosophy lecturer at George Washington University, Inside-Out programs — including a pilot he helped launch at Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland — usually focus on the humanities and are meant to provide inmate-students with a sense of purpose and hope. “When your surroundings are as bleak as prison, the life of the mind holds special consolation,” Miller says.
Having never been behind bars, Guenther decided to acclimate by taking an Inside-Out course on restorative justice at the Farm. Inspired by the experience, she soon proposed holding a philosophy reading group of her own, where she hoped to start off by introducing the minimum-security inmates to Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow (The New Press, 2010). Alexander argues that because more African-Americans are under the control of the justice system today than were enslaved in 1850, nothing short of a mass social movement can alter its trajectory.
Before Guenther could get started, though, the Farm was shuttered, in 2011.
“Then I got the challenge,” Guenther says. “I was asked if I wanted to host the reading group on death row at Riverbend. So I said yes, and I was doing that inside a month. It was like being plunged into the deep end.”
“Now achievement for achievement’s sake feels like a life sentence. It’s handcuffs. The university is a lily pad.”
Every week, 10 death-row inmates and a revolving group of three to six volunteers, usually graduate students from Vanderbilt, read and discussed philosophy. In short order, though, the gathering became less of a curated book club and more of a social-justice discussion group, complete with subcommittees focused on domestic violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, prison medical care, and death-penalty law. “Ultimately, we bring people from the outside and inside together, to teach and learn from one another,” Guenther says. The group started calling itself the REACH Coalition (Reciprocal Education and Community Healing on Tennessee’s Death Row), and it has become increasingly focused on coalition building, creative projects, and advocacy work that would resonate outside the prison’s walls.
Guenther insists she is not interested in turning all of the graduate students who volunteer with her at Riverbend into political activists, nor is she of the mind to abandon the philosophical lessons and discussions she pursues with inmates. Her goal is to create an atmosphere for unfettered critical engagement, which she believes is the centerpiece of both learning and living a full life. “There’s a broader ethical horizon of education as a radical project,” she explains. “Not radical in the sense that you have to hold specific, radical political ideals, but that some sort of transformation, and some sort of engagement of your whole personhood should happen in the classroom, wherever that classroom is.”
Working directly with what academics have come to call the carceral state fuels Guenther’s scholarly pursuits, which currently include research and writing about the ethics of lethal injection, the advent of hunger strikes in California prisons, reproductive rights behind bars, and the architecture of confinement (inspired by the nuclear prison northeast of Nashville). As a result, her colleagues at Vanderbilt are, for the most part, supportive of her work at Riverbend and beyond. Still, Guenther senses that her peers consider many of the activities she participates in with community activists and other movement scholars around the country to be extracurricular.
That mentality is typical in academe, says Marie Gottschalk, a political-science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a champion of prison reform. In her view, it’s also unfortunate. “The attitude is still: This won’t get you tenure, this won’t advance your degree, so don’t do it,” Gottschalk says. “We need to evaluate people differently. That’s not to say everyone should do public service, but if they are doing things in the wider public arena, that should be counted.”
Ultimately, Guenther has made peace with whatever biases people use when officially evaluating the scope of her pursuits. What disappoints her, she says, is that the phenomenon Gottschalk refers to often prevents talented midcareer colleagues from getting more involved with the community at large, which feeds the stereotype that higher education is isolated and out of touch.
“We aren’t just talking about criminals in prison, we’re talking about the wider effect the system has on the health of society.”
“The fact is that most of us, if not all of us, who ended up teaching in a university like Vanderbilt were good kids, who did well in school, and got good grades, and were just a little disappointed when they got an A-minus. And those sorts of reward structures become hugely disciplinary, and they shape the subjectivity of academics. So that people don’t want to take a risk,” she says.
“Working in the prison has put that into perspective for me. Now achievement for achievement’s sake feels like a life sentence. It’s handcuffs. The university is a lily pad. It’s not my home. And while a lot of my intellectual life happens here, it’s not where I find an engagement with my whole personhood.”
The book Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives grew out of Guenther’s initial work on the military-industrial complex and took shape at the same time that she was finding a family of like-minded activists and involved prisoners, all of whom inform and enliven it. The text revolves around the phenomenology of solitary confinement, which Guenther argues is a kind of social and civil death. When a prisoner is isolated for more than 15 days, he begins to distort reality so that the typical coping mechanisms people use under stress — feeling, observing, relating to others — not only cease to be relevant, but can become an unconscious source of crippling despair.
Solitary Confinement remains Guenther’s calling card, especially for journalists. She’s been interviewed on the subject by media organizations from Newsweek to The Believer and, more recently, Boston Review and Minnesota Public Radio have turned to her for related commentary.
Largely this is a function of timing: Over the past 18 months a seemingly endless string of troubling stories has surfaced about the country’s anarchic criminal-justice system. And the most resounding have involved revelations from New York, Texas, Louisiana, and California about the overreliance on solitary confinement as a method of control. In The New Yorker, for example, readers were introduced to Kalief Browder, who spent two years in the solitary-confinement unit at New York’s Riker’s Island without being charged with a crime. After being released he committed suicide.
In June, Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court made reference to Browder’s fate in an opinion he wrote regarding the case of a death-row inmate named Hector Ayala, which revolved around the jury selection process. While Kennedy and the conservatives on the court ruled against Ayala, the justice went out of his way to write separately about the endless days, months, and years the plaintiff had spent in solitary, a routine practice on death row that particularly troubles Kennedy. To some, the opinion suggests that the court might be on the lookout for a case that challenges the constitutionality of such isolation.
“Elites have finally begun to talk about these issues,” says Gottschalk. “Suddenly, we aren’t just talking about criminals in prison, we’re talking about the wider effect the system has on the health of society.”
That increased attention, according to George Washington University’s Miller, has opened a door for reforms — appealing both to Democrats, rhetorically committed to basic human rights, and fiscally conservative Republicans, who can appease their base by emphasizing the system’s astronomic costs and woeful returns. “It’s not necessarily a leftist or liberal issue anymore,” Miller says. “And, because there might be room for détente, I think it will remain an issue in the presidential election.”
Miller, Gottschalk, and other academics who have labored behind the scenes for reform see this largely unpredictable political thaw as a positive development. And given that in 2014 more states passed solitary-confinement reforms than in the previous 16 years combined, their measured optimism seems reasonable.
Guenther can’t help but be wary, however. “It’s an encouraging time because we’re starting to come to grips with the fact that the United States incarcerates the highest number of people in the world,” she says. “But it’s also a time when the potential for more radical change is at risk of being co-opted by more reformist policies that don’t break with the logic of carceral systems.”
The way Guenther ultimately expresses her vision for radical change can shift depending on what hat she’s wearing when asked for the details. On the phone with reporters in search of a quick sound bite or when working directly with prisoners — who have immediate wants, like library books and visitation rights — her ideas line up with the spirit and structure of her work at Riverbend: better health care, better education and vocational training, access to legal advice, and more sensitivity to mental-health issues.
“Abolition is a powerful issue. People hear that and think, ‘Man. What would that look like?’”
When out in the field touring Nashville’s prison row, visiting construction sites, or meeting with fellow activists, though, a less measured, more subversive idealism comes to the fore. At Sunday brunch with her fellow activist Jeannie Alexander, former chaplain at Riverbend and co-founder of Nashville’s No Exceptions Prison Collective, for instance, Guenther more freely uses the phrase “prison abolition,” a red-letter term for many like-minded idealists in academe, if only because of the connotations. “Abolition is a powerful issue,” says Miller. “People hear that and think, ‘Man. What would that look like?’”
“Prison abolition doesn’t mean that we’re going to head down to Riverbend today and open all the doors,” explains Alexander. “It means we have to abolish the system of mass incarceration — prison for profit. While it is necessary to socially segregate people sometimes, for the safety of themselves and the community, the goal should be to understand why that’s become necessary.”
Alexander and Guenther point to Norway’s restorative-justice system as an alternative to the prison-industrial complex. Lawyers, judges, and prison officials in that country work to keep people out of prison for victimless crimes, rely on shorter sentences, and focus on education and rehabilitation for those who do require detention. The results, advocates of the model say, speak for themselves: Norway, a country of some five million people, typically has about 4,000 people behind bars and, concurrently, one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world.
Adopting such a system, Guenther points out, would require more than the sorts of incremental reforms politicians are likely to bat around on the campaign trail or the average citizen is likely to indulge in polite conversation. Such a seismic change would demand that citizens challenge and ultimately upend America’s fundamental assumptions regarding race, class, and capitalism itself. Or, to put it in terms only a classically trained philosopher could love, a revolution would require a reconsideration of the Republic’s basic phenomenology.
“We need to think of community accountability, rather than individual accountability, not just for prisons, but for our community over all,” Guenther says. “That’s the link between prison reform and prison abolition. You can’t actually do the deep reforms in prison without doing deeper reforms on the outside. And that means the complete restructuring of the way we relate to the justice system, the state, and, most importantly, each other.”
David Schimke, former editor in chief of Utne Reader magazine, lives and writes in Minneapolis.
