Rough draft for analysis project

***Please note: I'm hoping to present this project in video/audio format, so that may affect or inspire your insights and comments. Also, my apologies for not having specific examples for the rhetorical analysis (I spent too much time on the background), but I've included notes to show where I'm planning to go with a few particular ideas...

The WashingtonPost  reports, “President Obama on [January 25, 2016] announced a ban on solitary confinement for juvenile offenders in the federal prison system, saying the practice is overused and has the potential for devastating psychological consequences.”

Interestingly, Amy Fettig, senior staff counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union and director of the group’s Stop Solitary Campaign, stated, “We rarely have presidents take notice of prison conditions.” (Washington Post)

Okay, so why has Obama taken notice?

Well, my guess is that a discourse about solitary confinement in prisons has given rise to a public sphere—and one big enough to attract the President’s attention.

According to a PBS documentary, solitary confinement “began in America in the 1800s as a progressive experiment to see if isolation would reform criminals. It was soon largely abandoned because prisoners didn’t reform. They lost their minds. But in the 1980s, solitary reemerged as a way to stamp out prison violence” (17:15 min). Well, that and because of rehabilitation cuts and because the prisons were overcrowded (Wired).

Researchers have documented apparent symptoms of solitary confinement in prisoners, which include extreme anxiety, anger, hallucinations, mood swings and flatness, and loss of impulse control. In the absence of stimuli, prisoners may also become hypersensitive to any stimuli at all. Often they obsess uncontrollably, as if their minds didn’t belong to them, over tiny details or personal grievances. Panic attacks are routine, as is depression and loss of memory and cognitive function. (Wired)

The Post states, “An increasing number of studies show a connection between isolating prisoners and higher rates of recidivism.” Don’t gloss over the word connection. To put into scientific terms, this means correlation, and correlations, no matter how strong, can never prove a cause and effect relationship, even in the case of solitary confinement, where the evidence seems convincing. Some prison officers warn of inmates trying manipulation—faking mental illness—to get themselves out of solitary. Still other people argue that inmates who are already predisposed to mental illness wind up in solitary.

Despite the controversy, the overall public opinion towards inmates in solitary confinement seems to have shifted dramatically. The public awareness may have been caught by research findings, but its continued attention appears to be motivated through a changed representation of the inmates in public discourse, which evolved simultaneously with the publication of research.

Examples:

Prison Break television series (beginning in 2005)

The Shawshank Redemption movie, 1994

Prison Writers website, founded 2014, gives inmates a voice/opportunity to contribute to public discourse

***Explain Asen and role of representation/imagination. Also note how different language/terministic screening contributes to a particular representation

***Symbolic action displayed by inmates, as recorded in PBS documentary; along with Prison Writers, points toward a counterpublic. Or would they be actually in the dominant public, since that public seems to be in their favor?

“[T]o convince another person of an idea, purely rational and objective argument is not enough because communication occurs though language that has judgments embedded within it” (Palczewski et al. 54). Basically, language is pathetic by nature—not pitiful like wet-cat-in-the-rain pathetic, but pathetic in the rhetorical sense, relating to emotions. What’s underneath emotion is an expression of values, and we make judgments based on values.

***Explain ideographs referenced in the changing representations