Fiona’s Reviews > In Defense of Flogging > Status Update

Prolonged isolation in solitary confinement became rare at the dawn of the 20th century up until 1983 when inmates in Marion prison, Illinois killed guards on two separate occasions on the same day. This gave birth to what would be a "supermax" prison which reincarnated total isolation: inmates eat alone in their cells, have solitary showers & are allowed an hour of "rec time" alone in an unroofed but caged area.

"Politically, then as now, prisons started to gather support both from conservatives hard-liners who demanded ever more severe sanctions and liberals who desired an alternative to punishment and desperately wanted to believe reformers' curative promises."

Solitary confinement & prisons designed to hold hundreds emerged in America as a "humane" alternative to flogging which was deemed an unsavoury relic of barbaric British imperialism, unsuited for the new country.
Bentham's Panopticon (a fixation in Foucault's Discipline & Punish) was the architectural parallel to the ideas of Calvinists & Quakers on solitary redemption, self-monitoring & "obtaining power over mind."

Great so far. I like writers who add a bit of humour and a personal voice to their otherwise serious scholarship. Hoping to finish this before New Year's.