Human Rights Law Commons^™

Slamming The Courthouse Door: 25 Years Of Evidence For Repealing The Prison Litigation Reform Act, Andrea Fenster, Margo Schlanger

Other Publications

Twenty-five years ago today, in 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Prison Litigation Reform Act. The “PLRA,” as it is often called, makes it much harder for incarcerated people to file and win federal civil rights lawsuits. For two-and-a-half decades, the legislation has created a double standard that limits incarcerated people’s access to the courts at all stages: it requires courts to dismiss civil rights cases from incarcerated people for minor technical reasons before even reaching the case merits, requires incarcerated people to pay filing fees that low-income people on the outside are exempt from, makes it hard to find …

From Pelican Bay To Palestine: The Legal Normalization Of Force-Feeding Hunger-Strikers, Azadeh Shahshahani, Priya Arvind Patel

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Hunger-strikes present a challenge to state authority and abuse from powerless individuals with limited access to various forms of protest and speech—those in detention. For as long as hunger-strikes have occurred throughout history, governments have force-fed strikers out of a stated obligation to preserve life. Some of the earliest known hunger-strikers, British suffragettes, were force-fed and even died as a result of these invasive procedures during the second half of the 19th century.

This Article examines the rationale and necessity behind hunger strikes for imprisoned individuals, the prevailing issues behind force-feeding, the international public response to force-feeding, and the legal …

How Does The Law Put A Historical Analogy To Work?: Defining The Imposition Of "A Condition Analogous To That Of A Slave" In Modern Brazil, Rebecca J. Scott, Leonardo Augusto De Andrade Barbosa, Carlos Henrique Borlido Haddad

Articles

Over the last decades, the Brazilian state has engaged in concerted legal efforts to identify and prosecute cases of what officials refer to as “slave labor” (trabalho escravo). At a conceptual level, the campaign has paired the constitutional protection of human dignity and the “social value of labor” with an expansive interpretation of the offense described in Article 149 of the Criminal Code as “the reduction of a person to a condition analogous to that of a slave.” At the operational level, mobile teams of inspectors and prosecutors have intervened in thousands of work sites, and labor prosecutors …

Isolated Confinement In Michigan: Mapping The Circles Of Hell, Elizabeth Alexander, Patricia Streeter

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

For the past twelve months, there has been a burgeoning campaign to abolish, or greatly reduce, the use of segregated confinement in prisons. Advocates for the campaign call such classifications "solitary confinement" despite the fact that in some states, like New York, prisoners in these cells are often double-celled. The Michigan Department of Corrections, as well as other prison systems, uses labels such as "segregation," "special management," "special housing," and "observation" for these classifications. Prisoners ordinarily use traditional terms, such as "the hole." In this Essay we will refer to such restrictive classifications as "segregation" or "segregated confinement." Our perspective …

The Federal Bureau Of Prisons: Willfully Ignorant Or Maliciously Unlawful?, Deborah Golden

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The Federal Bureau of Prisons ("BOP") and the larger U.S. government either purposely ignore the plight of men with serious mental illness in the federal prison system or maliciously act in violation of the law. I have no way of knowing which it is. In a complex system comprising many individual actors, motivations are most likely complex and contradictory. Either way, uncontrovertibly, the BOP and the U.S. government, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, continuously assert that there are no men with serious mental illnesses housed in the federal supermax prison, the Administrative Maximum facility in Florence, Colorado, also known …

Prison Segregation: Symposium Introduction And Preliminary Data On Racial Disparities, Margo Schlanger

Articles

For this Introduction, I undertake to look a bit more broadly at recent data. The best sources of demographic information about prisoners are the various surveys and censuses conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). While no BJS publication directly addresses the issue, and no BJS dataset allows its full analysis, it is possible to glean something from the most recent BJS prison census, the 2005 Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities.

Regulating Segregation: The Contribution Of The Aba Criminal Justice Standards On The Treatment Of Prisoners, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Over recent decades, solitary confinement for prisoners has increased in prevalence and in salience. Whether given the label "disciplinary segregation," "administrative segregation," "special housing," "seg," "the hole," "supermax," or any of a dozen or more names, the conditions of solitary confinement share basic features: twenty-three hours per day or more spent alone in a cell, with little to do and no one to talk to, and one hour per day or less in a different, but no less isolated, setting-an exercise cage or a space with a shower. Long-term segregation units operated along these lines are extraordinarily expensive to build …

Lessons From Hurricane Katrina: Prison Emergency Preparedness As A Constitutional Imperative, Ira P. Robbins

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters ever to strike the United States, in terms of casualties, suffering, and financial cost. Often overlooked among Katrina s victims are the 8,000 inmates who were incarcerated at Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) when Katrina struck. Despite a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, these men and women, some of whom had been held on charges as insignificant as public intoxication, remained in the jail as the hurricane hit, and endured days of rising, toxic waters, a lack of food and drinking water, and a complete breakdown of order within OPP Wien the …

It Could Happen To "You": Pay-To-Stay Jail Upgrades, Kim Shayo Buchanan

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

In the jails of Los Angeles County, about 21,000 detainees are held in filthy cells so overcrowded—four men in a cell built for two, six to a four-man cell—that, as federal judge Dean D. Pregerson observed in 2006, inmates must stay in their bunks at all times because there is not enough room for them to stand. These men—ninety percent of whom are pretrial detainees— are held in these conditions twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, and are typically allowed only a single three-hour exercise period weekly. Other inmates are held for days in a county “reception center” …