Criminal Law Commons^™

Lost Souls: Constitutional Implications For The Deficiencies In Treatment For Persons With Mental Illness In Custody, Katherine L. Smith

Golden Gate University Law Review

This Comment explores systemic deficiencies of access to mental health care in prison systems and the Eighth Amendment implications of those deficiencies. Because the Eighth Amendment prohibits, among other things, infliction of cruel and unusual punishments, when denial of adequate mental health care results in undue suffering, the conditions of confinement may violate the Constitution. Therefore, there must be mechanisms in place to ensure necessary treatment is provided while protecting individual rights.

Part I of this Comment addresses the duty a state owes to those it incarcerates (e.g., to provide food, clothing, recreation, education, medical care) and what standards exist …

Requiring The State To Justify Supermax Confinement For Mentally Ill Prisoners: A Disability Discrimination Approach, Brittany Glidden, Laura Rovner

Publications

The Eighth Amendment has long served as the traditional legal vehicle for challenging prison conditions, including long-term isolation or "supermax" confinement. As described by Hafemeister and George in their article, The Ninth Circle of Hell: An Eighth Amendment Analysis of Imposing Prolonged Supermax Solitary Confinement on Inmates with a Mental Illness, some prisoners with mental illness have prevailed in Eighth Amendment challenges to prolonged isolation. Yet an equal or greater number of these claims have been unsuccessful. This Essay considers why some of these cases fail, and suggests that one reason is that Eighth Amendment jurisprudence does not contain a …