Prison Reform
James Webb and Arlen Specter are introducing a bill in Congress to address prison reform--an issue that's been neglected as this article points out because it has come to be identified in the U.S. with being "soft on crime." The difference between our political rhetoric and reality is made apparent by a statistic that Webb sites in a separate article: the U.S. has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prison population. Another illustrative statistic: there are four times as many mentally ill people in prison as in mental hospitals.
Here's the article describing the bill: Webb steps on third rail, survives
And Webb's own writing on the subject: Why we must fix our prisons
"Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire"
Interview in the paper today with Robert Perkinson, the author of"Texas Tough" in which he makes a compelling argument tracing the roots of today's prison system in slavery.
"After Emancipation, courts turned former slaves into felons who were sold to mining and railroad companies, to sugar and cotton planters and that system dominated the Southern criminal justice system into the 20th century. In the wake of the civil rights era, the same politicians that fought integration immediately began increasing sentences and that became the template nationwide."
"one of the things that made Texas unique and preserved the lifeways of slavery into the 20th century was that prisons were primarily plantations, many of them operating since the 1830s with unfree labor. The white guards would live on the prison plantation; they would have houseboys, even babysitters who were prisoners. This lasted into the 1980s and persists to some extent."
A Nation's Journey from Slavery to Prisons
Amazon link to "Texas Tough"
The US Program Director for
The US Program Director for Human Rights Watch wrote an editorial published in the paper today on a little-known federal law, the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which puts an increased burden on those in prisons (not only those serving time, but also pretrial detainess and young people in juvenile facilities) which restricts their ability to bring lawsuits.
The editorial cites the following particular case to illustrate problems with the law:
"In 2004, a teenage girl incarcerated at the Illinois Youth Center in Warrenville was sexually abused by a male employee at the facility. The abuse consisted of repeated acts of oral sex and sexual intercourse. There was no doubt that the abuse occurred, and the employee ultimately pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal sexual assault.
The girl, identified in court documents as “B,’’ eventually filed suit in federal court, seeking compensation. "
The case was dismissed because she had failed to meet all the requirements under the PLRA:
"Among its many other requirements, the PLRA requires that before a detained person may sue over the conditions of her confinement, she must first take her complaints through all levels of the facility’s grievance system, complying with all deadlines and other procedural rules. If the detained person fails to comply with all technical requirements, or misses any deadlines, her right to sue may be lost forever."
"Human Rights Watch is unaware of any other country in which national legislation singles out prisoners for a unique set of obstacles to vindicating their legal rights in court."
Meaning of the 8th Amendment
Linda Greenhouse posted a disturbing piece in the New York Times on Clarence Thomas's view that the 8th amendment on cruel and unusual punishment does not address how prisoners are treated while incarcerated but only the sentence they receive. In a 1992 case, Thomas and Scalia dissented from the majority view. The case involved a prisoner who had been kicked and punched while handcuffed and shackled. The original suit had been dismissed because his injuries were deemed to be not great enough to be covered under the 8th amendment. Sandra Day O'Connor writing for the majority in reinstating the suit stated that “When prison officials maliciously and sadistically use force to cause harm, contemporary standards of decency always are violated.” In dissent, Thomas wrote that the founding fathers “simply did not conceive of the Eighth Amendment as protecting inmates from harsh treatment.”
In a similar case this year, both Scalia and Thomas joined the majority based on precedent, but as Greenhouse notes, Thomas's writings point to an invitation to bring a case that will overturn the earlier ruling:
“I continue to believe that Hudson was wrongly decided,” he said. But noting that “no party to this case asks us to overrule Hudson,” he said that he was going along with the majority because as long as the precedent was on the books, it clearly required the result the Supreme Court had reached.
Justices do not casually note that “no party has asked us to overrule” a particular precedent. It is an invitation to send the court just such an invitation, and it is a technique that Justice Thomas has used before to good effect. Concurring in a 1997 decision, Printz v. United States, which struck down a federal background check for gun purchasers on states’-rights grounds, Justice Thomas observed that no one has asked the court to look at the case through the lens of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. “Perhaps at some future date” the court would have the opportunity to consider the scope of the Second Amendment, he added, helping to initiate a project that came to fruition in the Heller decision in 2008."
Clarence Thomas, silent, but sure