By: Eleni Christofides The statistics of prison population growth are not new to anyone familiar with the criminal justice system; rates continue to soar above what they have been in previous decades, and mass incarceration is an increasingly common term outside of academia and within public conversation. Yet frequently, this image of the carceral state remains black and white, lacking attention to the human element. Simply, mass incarceration means that institutions often house twice the number of people they were originally designed to house, which unsurprisingly creates deplorable living conditions and indifference—or even outward hostility—toward an incarcerated person’s needs. What does such a situation imply for prisoners’ rights? In the book Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America, Jonathan Simon examines the unparalleled magnitude of the United States’ incarcerated population through the lens of Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. Specifically, he argues that this criminal justice model of total incapacitation denies a basic sense of humanity and dignity to prisoners through violence and indifference. After the fear-fueled coverage of prison uprisings such as Attica, and serial killers such as Charles Manson during the 1970-80s, the image of the prisoner changed and sentencing policy goals soon shifted from rehabilitation to incapacitation to deal with this new, violent predator. People felt that any decrease in imprisonment was a direct threat to public safety and viewed offenders as unchanging, permanently dangerous criminals.
Simon focuses on a series of court cases out of California that were necessary to begin dismantling the mass incarceration system and to restore a sense of dignity to prisoner treatment. First was Madrid v. Gomez, which specifically examined supermax-level security prisons and found that the violent cell extractions used by guards violated the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment; the decision did note that the treatment was particularly egregious for the mentally ill, but did not rule that those violations were inherent to the supermax structure. Instead it levels the blame at insufficient training for the prison guards. Simon calls Madrid a missed opportunity to stop mass incarceration and the associated inhumanity in its tracks. In Coleman v. Wilson, the plaintiffs went beyond the supermax issue of Madrid and filed a class action suit for the mentally unwell in California prisons at all security levels, saying that failure to provide appropriate mental health care was a violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court’s order in Coleman for California to create a better mental health system indirectly prioritized the individualized approach to mental health needs; recognizing that an individualized approach is difficult if not impossible to achieve in such overcrowded conditions, the Court began to blame the very structure of mass incarceration for creating these constitutional violations. The inhumanity of mass incarceration was best showcased through the lack of physical health care for an aging prison population, affecting those with and without mental health problems, particularly captured by plaintiffs in Plata v. Davis. This decision is remarkable in its use of human stories that must generate empathy in its readers, detailing the health emergencies that many prisoners suffered or even died from while incarcerated—emergencies that were regularly ignored by staff. Plata showed the ways in which California’s attempts at totalitarian control over prisoners failed: they could not keep track of such a large number of prisoners as individuals, particularly in matters of health, and it revealed the conflict between the dehumanizing mission of incapacitation and the “do no harm” mission of health care providers. Here the federal court officially blamed mass incarceration for this health crisis and thus the constitutional violations. Coleman-Plata v. Schwarzenegger highlighted the overcrowding effect of mass incarceration that ultimately led to California declaring a state of emergency. The federal court issued an order for population reduction, finding clear and convincing evidence that the overcrowding problem was the cause of the unconstitutional state of operation and thus decided that reducing the population was the only practical solution. The Coleman-Plata series of decisions was appealed to the Supreme Court as Brown v. Plata, which put California’s issues of mass incarceration on the national stage. The Court upheld the reduction order and the opinion, making clear that it understood how the very laws and policies themselves needed to change to end this mass suffering. The greatest impact of Brown v. Plata could be in forming a new “common sense” when it comes to prisoners and their treatment in the criminal justice system. The old common sense holds that prisoners are inherently dangerous, but Brown managed to show that many prisoners do not fit this “super predator” description and their risk level does not warrant such treatment. Going forward, Simon argues, the goal of prison and criminal justice sanctions should be to prevent further deterioration in mental and physical health, not to worsen the decline. This set of case law illustrates that appellate courts in this country have not only the power but also the responsibility to create positive change in the way our criminal justice system operates; this will be done both through the legal precedence they set and the effect on public opinion that their decisions may have. As further cases find their way before the Supreme Court that address a denial of dignity, this shift in the common sense will ideally lead to the further dismantling of a system that offers no substantive additional protections and only serves to harm those under its control. References:
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