“I Am Opposed to this Procedure”: How Kafka’s In the Penal Colony Illuminates the Current Debate about Solitary Confinement and Oversight of American Prisons
| dc.contributor.author | Mushlin, Michael B. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2015-04-17T16:56:24Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2015-04-17T16:56:24Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2015-04-16 | |
| dc.description | 60 pages | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | This is the 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. The story brilliantly imagines a gruesome killing machine at the epicenter of a mythical prison’s operations. The torture caused by this apparatus comes to an end only after the “Traveler,” an outsider invited to the penal colony by the new leader of the prison, condemns it. In the unfolding of the tale, Kafka vividly portrays how, even with the best of intentions, the mental and physical well-being of inmates will be jeopardized when total control is given to people who run the prisons with no independent oversight. At the core of America’s vast prison system is the pervasive practice of solitary confinement, a practice that in many ways is analogous to the penal colony machine. Like the machine, it inflicts great psychological and often physical pain on people subjected to it. It, like the machine, is used to punish people for trivial offenses without due process. Like the machine, it is seen as essential to the operation of this closed prison system. Many of the new leaders of American prisons want to reform solitary confinement practices, but like the new Commandant in Kafka’s tale, without oversight, these leaders operate in the dark, unable to effectuate meaningful change by themselves. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.citation | 93 OR. L. REV. 571 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.issn | 1096-2043 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/18854 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | en_US |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon School of Law | en_US |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Prison | en_US |
| dc.subject | Solitary confinement | en_US |
| dc.title | “I Am Opposed to this Procedure”: How Kafka’s In the Penal Colony Illuminates the Current Debate about Solitary Confinement and Oversight of American Prisons | en_US |
| dc.type | Article | en_US |