In solitude, as with any human experience, choice is an important driver. We know that humans, in general, like having some decision-making capability, or at least the perception of it. Positive time spent in solitude stems from the desire to be with ourselves, and we talk about how to exercise choice to be more comfortable and stronger in solitude. Simply wanting to avoid other people does not unlock its benefits and opportunities. The fact that you choose to devote your morning walk, drive to work, or shower time to solitude is what matters in building an enduring practice of everyday solitude. In this chapter, we also consider involuntary solitude, like prisoners in solitary confinement and pandemic lockdowns. This chapter also looks at what it means to have a "preference for solitude," the importance of understanding motivation in why we’re choosing time alone, and what it means to have the right framing and expectations for solitude.

This chapter discusses the theoretical controversies surrouding the death penalty, the status of the death penalty under international human rights law, the death penalty in the United States and China. It also explores other cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishments including mass incarceration, life imprisonment, shackling, and solitary confinement.

The chapter seeks to correct an apparently widespread misimpression that animals are afforded greater protections against solitary confinement than human prisoners in the United States, and to encourage greater collaboration among animal and prison reform advocates. The United States’ dubious distinction of being a world leader in solitary confinement of both human prisoners and nonhuman animals offers an opportunity for discourse and collaboration for those fighting such conditions in different settings. With the goal of laying groundwork to facilitate such discourse and collaboration, this chapter details and analyzes the current scope of legal protections for social animals against solitary confinement in the United States.

Chapter 6 outlines the growing momentum of prison reform, enacted by a broad range of prison reformers and within the prison administration itself, towards producing reforms of punitive penal regimes, including separate confinement. Critiques of late nineteenth-century prison regimes noted the continuing high incidence of mental breakdown in prisons and the detrimental effect of severe prison regimes. The chapter highlights how individual campaigners and campaign groups lobbied for the end of the separate system and for rehabilitative penal policies. However, while the Gladstone Committee inquiry of 1895 was hailed as a turning point, and the severity of prison discipline was eased earlier in Irish prisons, in practice change was ‘glacial’. The residue of the nineteenth-century prison system arguably remains with us today, in the physical structures of prison estates, in prison disciplines that still emphasise order and uniformity, in the retention of large numbers of mentally ill people and the imposition of solitary confinement, no longer a philosophy and method of reform, but a means of dealing with disruptive behaviour among prisoners and shortages of prison staff and resources.

This chapter shows how the derangement of the senses and isolation of the individual that are idealised modes of Romantic and post-Romantic verse are hideously intensified in the contemporary supermax. Its focus is on solitary confinement in US prisons as a way of preventing the formation of solidarities. As such, it explores the conditions for producing poetry in prison: different models of the workshop, reform and revolution, and imprisoned writers’ relationships to the carceral and poetic institution. It discusses the trope of incommunicability in prison writing. It discusses the psychic and physical effects of life ‘in the hole’, drawing on writings by numerous well-known and lesser-known imprisoned poets. It ends with the claim that it is the contemporary abolitionist movement that is the true inheritor and defender of the Romantic imagination.

This chapter offers a history of solitary confinement as a disciplinary technique, which emerged in the late eighteenth century as a replacement for the chaotic and degrading spectacle of corporal punishment. Key to that history are the ‘separate’ and the ‘silent’ regimes, whose most influential exponents were in the US, at prisons in Philadelphia (Eastern State) and New York (Auburn). The chapter uses the figure of the chaplain, and the inventive ways prisoners circumvented controls on their speech and inspection of their souls, to contextualise the solitude and introspection of the Romantic lyric. These contexts are rendered much more specific in readings of Wordsworth’s poetry of solitude and of penal discipline, and his evolution from the compassionate friend of ‘The Convict’ in Lyrical Ballads to the patron of capital punishment in his ‘Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death’.