Us Versus Them: How California State Prisons Justify Solitary Confinement

This dissertation examines how actors across the California state prison system use inconvenience as a strategy to harm incarcerated people through solitary confinement. Prison administration imbue prison staff with a frightening level of discretionary power over the lives of incarcerated people. Prison staff use safety, security, and punishment to justify the practice. Using their discretionary power, individual actors can and do take away days, weeks, years, and decades from the lives of those deemed inconvenient based on their identity (e.g., perceived ethno-racial identity), actions (e.g., political organizing), or even more arbitrary reasons (e.g., perceived disrespect). I argue that California state prisons knowingly rely on staff discretionary power to reify institutional racism on an individual level through routine decision-making. To substantiate this argument, I use a range of archival documents, unpublished quantitative administrative data, qualitative interviews from both sides of prison walls, and secondary academic sources. In so doing, I reveal the social costs of California state prisons’ continued justification of solitary confinement.