Making Visible Invisible Suffering: Non-deliberative Agency and the Bodily Rhetoric of Tamms Supermax Prisoners

Abstract

Brian Nelson speaks fast, and his Chicago ‘’dees’ and ‘dats’ promise to spare his audience some of the usual fluff; he evokes sympathy in his audience while handling his own outrage or recalling tough memories. In the spring of 2010, Brian was released from Tamms Closed Maximum Security prison (CMAX), the Illinois supermax, after spending 12 years in solitary confinement. Opened in 1998 and closed in 2013, Tamms was originally meant to function as temporary added punishment for prisoners already serving time in other state prisons. Yet many prisoners, including Brian, wound up being held in isolation at Tamms for many years—some for the duration of its operation. During Brian’s incarceration at Tamms, he suffered severe depression, became a central figure in litigation over the treatment of Tamms prisoners with mental illness, and organized a prisoner-written newsletter and hunger strike for improved conditions. Since his release, he has been a vocal activist, attempting to persuade members of the public that the conditions of extreme punishment in US supermax prisons inflict invisible but lasting psychological harm. Like the other former supermax prisoners who provide the impetus for this chapter Brian possesses considerable personal and political agency. Yet when he speaks about Tamms, he becomes visibly upset, often choking back tears and shrugging as though he has momentarily given up trying to explain his experience.