When Derek Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder, it felt like accountability had been realized for the first time in a long time. I watched the coverage of celebrations in Minneapolis and the messages of vigilance. Accountability was delivered, but police brutality was far from being eradicated.
The dialogue began shifting towards addressing systemic racism and Chauvin, quite symbolically, disappeared from it. After all, shortly after the jury announced its verdict, news broke that Chauvin would spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement.
At the time, I did not give much thought to it — my focus was on the larger conversation that had moved away from the case. When I read it, I felt no sympathy. For the last year, Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer who had betrayed his duty to protect, had occupied a subhuman standing in my mind; it was the only way I thought about it following his subhuman murder of George Floyd.
A couple of days passed, and I stumbled upon a conversation between two of my White peers. Ardent prison abolitionists, they could not come to terms with the fact that Chauvin was in solitary confinement. When they asked me what I thought, my first reaction was a long pause.
To be clear, solitary confinement is inhumane torture. Painted in flowery words as “restricted housing population,” solitary confinement entails staying in one area to eat, sleep and use the toilet. Stimuli are usually completely removed — there are limited educational materials, no windows or communication with anyone else. Its effects are devastating. Approximately 35% of those in jail who spent 30 days or longer in solitary confinement were left with symptoms of serious psychological distress. These range from anxiety and stress all the way to hallucinations, paranoia and suicide. On the physical side, solitary confinement can lead to chronic headaches and eyesight deterioration or heart disease and diabetes. Overall, social isolation increases the likelihood of early death by 26%. That is the low end of the estimation.
Hopefully by now you agree that solitary confinement is legalized torture. As an unwavering believer in abolishing solitary confinement alongside heavy prison defunding and reform, why did I pause when Chauvin was on the line? The pause, for a little, made me feel guilty. Nobody should be subject to solitary. Nobody, though, includes murderers like Chauvin. Did my lack of sympathy mean I was not upholding the ideology of abolishing solitary?
My feeling of guilt changed when I read Bonnie Kristian’s piece, “The Derek Chauvin solitary confinement predicament.” A longtime opinion columnist for The Week, she used the news of Chauvin’s solitary sentence to suggest prison reform. I then looked through her work. Before Chauvin, she had never written about the inhumane conditions of solitary confinement. The dialogue stemmed from his sentencing. Why was she suddenly concerned with prison reform?
Only considering prison reform and solitary confinement when a notable White person falls victim to it is problematic. The carceral state and all its inhumane forms of treatment were designed to ensnare Black people. This holds true for solitary confinement. Studies have shown that, in dozens of prisons, Black men are disproportionately subject to solitary confinement compared to the portion of the prison population they constitute. In more than half of those jurisdictions, Juleyka Lantigua Williams, who distilled the study for The Atlantic, writes that “Latinos were overrepresented in relation to their general-population numbers” as well. I hope you’re not too shocked when I say that the study revealed that White people are underrepresented in the same prisons.
Chauvin, despite low odds, has fallen victim to the worst facets of the prison-industrial complex. But they were not designed for him. That is why I paused. When so many individuals, predominantly People of Color, are in the same situation as Chauvin for far less significant crimes — not to mention falsely convicted ones as well — it is hard to have a conversation about prison reform with a morally repugnant character like Chauvin at its center.
I don’t feel guilt anymore. When conversations about prison reform only happen when a White man is the victim, we should reconsider the impetus of the dialogue. These conversations should take place, and Chauvin will benefit from the discussion of solitary confinement abolition. But to center him is to misunderstand the true victims of the carceral state.
Pausing in the conversation with my friends about Chauvin is emblematic of a big moral grey area. What does one do when those who are inhumane to others are subject to a larger system of inhumane treatment? I am not sure. To pause, though, is to recognize the flaw of dialogue when Chauvin is the catalyst for prison reform conversations. The conversation can and should happen without focusing on him.