Law and Race Commons^™

Is Solitary Confinement A Punishment?, John F. Stinneford

Northwestern University Law Review

The United States Constitution imposes a variety of constraints on the imposition of punishment, including the requirements that the punishment be authorized by a preexisting penal statute and ordered by a lawful judicial sentence. Today, prison administrators impose solitary confinement on thousands of prisoners despite the fact that neither of these requirements has been met. Is this imposition a “punishment without law,” or is it a mere exercise of administrative discretion? In an 1890 case called In re Medley, the Supreme Court held that solitary confinement is a separate punishment subject to constitutional restraints, but it has ignored this …

Punishment In Prison: Constituting The "Normal" And The "Atypical" In Solitary And Other Forms Of Confinement, Judith Resnik, Hirsa Amin, Sophie Angelis, Megan Hauptman, Laura Kokotailo, Aseem Mehta, Madeline Silva, Tor Tarantola, Meredith Wheeler

Northwestern University Law Review

What aspects of human liberty does incarceration impinge? A remarkable group of Black and white prisoners, most of whom had little formal education and no resources, raised that question in the 1960s and 1970s. Incarcerated individuals asked judges for relief from corporal punishment; radical food deprivations; strip cells; solitary confinement in dark cells; prohibitions on bringing these claims to courts, on religious observance, and on receiving reading materials; and from transfers to long- term isolation and to higher security levels.

Judges concluded that some facets of prison that were once ordinary features of incarceration, such as racial segregation, rampant violence, …