Frederik Rom Taxhjelm is a Ph.D. Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, and currently a Visiting Researcher at UC Berkeley. His work examines self-isolation in Danish prisons and the limits and paradoxes of rights-based discourses of punishment. He has published in Punishment & Society and Incarceration, most recently as guest editor of a themed issue on “pockets of punitiveness” in the welfare state.
Drawing on interviews with self-isolated prisoners, Taxhjelm's talk explores how they make sense of their painful form of confinement. It identifies five types of narrative work on the self through which they attempt to adapt to isolation: the respectable self, the reparable self, the controlled self, the caring self, and the future self. To the isolated men, such narratives are pivotal to understanding the choice to self-isolate but also to making space in isolation for hope and reinvention, to the extent that that is possible. Rather than offering a defense of isolation, the talk provides an empirical account of how prisoners derive meaning from the harms of its emptiness. It concludes by discussing the precarious nature of self-understandings produced in solitude.
Draft paper available upon request. E-mail reiterk@uci.edu
