Law Commons^™

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.

Plata V. Brown And Realignment: Jails, Prisons, Courts, And Politics, Margo Schlanger

Articles

The year 2011 marked an important milestone in American institutional reform litigation. That year, a bare majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion in Brown v. Plata by Justice Anthony Kennedy, affirmed a district court order requiring California to remedy its longstanding constitutional deficits in prison medical and mental health care by reducing prison crowding. Not since 1978 had the Court ratified a lower court's crowding-related order in a jail or prison case, and the order before the Court in 2011 was fairly aggressive; theoretically, it could have (although this was never a real prospect) induced the release …

On The Role Of Cost-Benefit Analysis In Criminal Justice Policy: A Response To The Imprisoner's Dilemma, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

With one in 100 adult Americans behind bars, and prison budgets consuming an increasing share of state budgets, few social policy issues compare in significance to the debate over which criminal offenders should be incarcerated and for how long. David Abrams' article, The Impriasoner's Dilemma: A Cost-Benefit Approach to Incarceration,' makes an important contribution to that debate, offering an economic approach to assessing the net benefits of holding or freeing prisoners on the incarceration margin. In this short Response, I first highlight several strengths of Abrams' piece and discuss the possible case that could be made for incorporating formal cost-benefit …

Cascading Constitutional Deprivation: The Right To Appointed Counsel For Mandatorily Detained Immigrants Pending Removal Proceedings, Mark Noferi

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Today, an immigrant green card holder mandatorily detained pending his removal proceedings, without bail and without counsel, due to a minor crime committed perhaps long ago, faces a dire fate. If he contests his case, he may remain incarcerated in substandard conditions for months or years. While incarcerated, he will likely be unable to acquire a lawyer, access family who might assist him, obtain key evidence, or contact witnesses. In these circumstances, he will nearly inevitably lose his deportation case and be banished abroad from work, family, and friends. The immigrant's one chance to escape these cascading events is the …

Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.

Michigan Law Review

Advocates for less punitive crime policies in the United States face long and dispiriting odds. The difficulty of the challenge becomes clear if we compare our criminal justice outcomes with those of other nations: We lock up more people, and for longer, than anyone else in the world. We continue to use the death penalty long after Europe abandoned it, we are the only country in the world to lock up juveniles for life, and we have prisoners serving fifty-year sentences for stealing videotapes from Kmart. Our courts offer little relief: the German Constitutional Court prohibits a sentence of life …

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 …

"One Of The Dirty Secrets Of American Corrections": Retaliation, Surplus Power, And Whistleblowing Inmates, James E. Robertson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Retaliation is deeply engrained in the correctional office subculture; it may well be in the normative response when an inmate files a grievance, a statutory precondition for filing a civil rights action. This Article, the first to address comprehensively the sociological and constitutional aspects of retaliation, argues for protecting grievants through safeguards much like those accorded whistleblowers. Part I of the Article provides a socio-legal primer on correctional officer retaliation by addressing the frequency of retaliation, its causes, and its constitutional taxonomy. Part II describes the elements of a prima facie case of unconstitutional retaliation under § 1983. Part III …

Of Sexual Bondage: The 'Legitimate Penological Interest' In Restricting Sexual Expression In Women's Prisons, Joanna E. Saul

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Despite its prevalence, sexual expression among inmates is currently prohibited in United States prisons. Recent scholarship, however, has advocated allowing certain types of sexual expression in women's prisons. The advocates of such a position differentiate between different types of sex within the correctional system: sexual expression that the system has no interest in prohibiting and should not bar, and sex acts that the system does have an interest in prohibiting and should continue to regulate. This position is based on the dual assumptions that, first, women in prison as a collective unit would benefit from some types of sexual expression, …

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 …

Unusual Suspects: Recognizing And Responding To Female Staff Perpetrators Of Sexual Misconduct In U.S. Prisons, Lauren A. Teichner

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Despite the general public's ignorance of this issue of sexual misconduct perpetrated by female prison staff against male inmates, such stories are remarkably familiar to those who study or work in the world of prisons. The Prison Rape Elimination Act ("PREA") of 2003 mandated that the Bureau of Justice Statistics ("the Bureau") undertake new studies of sexual violence in prisons. Accordingly, the Bureau released a report in July 2006 revealing some groundbreaking data. Of the 344 substantiated allegations of staff-on-inmate sexual violence made in federal, state, and private prisons in 2005, 67% of the overall victims were male inmates and …

Preserving The Rule Of Law In America's Jails And Prisons: The Case For Amending The Prison Litigation Reform Act, Margo Schlanger, Giovanna Shay

Articles

Prisons and jails pose a significant challenge to the rule of law within American boundaries. As a nation, we are committed to constitutional regulation of governmental treatment of even those who have broken society’s rules. And accordingly, most of our prisons and jails are run by committed professionals who care about prisoner welfare and constitutional compliance. At the same time, for prisons—closed institutions holding an ever-growing disempowered population—most of the methods by which we, as a polity, foster government accountability and equality among citizens are unavailable or at least not currently practiced. In the absence of other levers by which …

Jail Strip-Search Cases: Patterns And Participants, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Among Marc Galanter’s many important insights is that understanding litigation requires understanding its participants. In his most-cited work, Why the “Haves” Come Out Ahead, Galanter pioneered a somersault in the typical approach to legal institutions and legal change: Most analyses of the legal system start at the rules end and work down through institutional facilities to see what effect the rules have on the parties. I would like to reverse that procedure and look through the other end of the telescope. Let’s think about the different kinds of parties and the effect these differences might have on the way the …

Why The County Jail Is Often A Better Choice, Shawn Chapman Holley

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

I have been a criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles for almost twenty years. I began my career in the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office, representing defendants who were poor and often homeless. For the past twelve years, I have been in private practice, representing defendants who are wealthy and often famous. Having represented criminal defendants coming from such varied economic circumstances, I have witnessed firsthand the criminal justice system’s disparate treatment of those with money and those without. Pay-to-stay jails are yet another example of that disparity. Yet I believe that those without the money to pay for …

A Virtuous State Would Not Assign Correctional Housing Based On Ability To Pay, Bradley W. Moore

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Pay-to-stay jails expose the moral tension between the dominant theories of punishment: retributivism and deterrence. A turn to a third major moral theory—virtue ethics—resolves this tension. According to virtue ethics, the moral worth of an action follows from both the character of the action and the disposition of the actor. Virtuous acts promote human flourishing— the central goal of life—when they are the right actions performed for the right reasons. The virtue ethics theory of punishment suggests that pay-to-stay jails conflict with the promotion of human flourishing. A virtuous state’s criminal justice system would not include fee-based incarceration because it …

Government Entrepreneurship: How Cop, Direct Supervision, And A Business Plan Helped To Solve Santa Ana's Crime Problems, Paul M. Walters, Russell Davis

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Much has been written about Community Oriented Policing for police agencies and about the Direct Supervision concept for jail operations. Each strategy is at the cutting edge of its respective discipline. This Commentary describes how the progressive City of Santa Ana implemented both strategies— along with a visionary business plan to operate its jail at minimal cost—to combat crime successfully. The City’s business plan relies on entrepreneurship that is too often lacking in government programs. This approach has led to a number of innovations in law enforcement, corrections, and government service. Pay-to-Stay programs provide yet another example of how Santa …

The Dirty Little Secrets About Pay-To-Stay, Laurie L. Levenson, Mary Gordon

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The dirty little secret is out: people with more money get a better deal in our criminal justice system. Anyone who has spent more than a nanosecond in this system knows it to be true, yet that does not make it right. It is an abomination to divert our attention to pay-to-stay programs instead of finding the resources to improve our general jail facilities to make them tolerable for every inmate. Don’t get us wrong—if we suffered the misfortune of being arrested, we would dearly love the opportunity to pay for a private jail facility. However, the pay-to-stay initiative is …

Pay-To-Stay In California Jails And The Value Of Systemic Self-Embarassment, Robert Weisberg

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The website of the Santa Ana, California-version of Pay-to-Stay uses hotelier-type verbiage in describing features of its alternative jail program. It tells us that the jail “is pleased to host a full range of alternatives to traditional incarceration”; it reassures prospective “clients” seeking flexible work/jail schedules (“Work on Saturday or Sunday? No problem, your weekend days are our weekend days.”); it guarantees “24-hour on-site medical staff”; it accommodates inmates near and far (“We have helped clients with sentences from other counties as well as other states.”); and it generally brags that the jail “is the most modern and comfortable facility …

Pay-To-Stay Programs In California Jails, Michael S. Carona

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

When a person has committed a criminal offense, he or she must be punished to vindicate the law, to acknowledge the suffering of the victim, and to deter future crimes. Imprisonment—the method commonly used to carry out this punishment—becomes increasingly problematic when our jails and prisons, especially in California, are bursting at the seams. As the Sheriff of the eighth largest jail system in the nation, I am responsible for the confinement and care of thousands of inmates in the Orange County Jail system. With a growing inmate population and a shortage of beds, I continue to look for new …

Secondhand Smoke Signals From Prison, Scott C. Wilcox

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that courts should acknowledge current societal and medical perspectives on second hand smoke (SHS) and afford real protection to prisoners against SHS through injunctive relief. Part I examines evidence that conclusively demonstrates the serious risk of harm posed by SHS to the health of inmates. It reports that inmates' long-term exposure to SHS increases their risk of contracting lung cancer, heart disease, and other potentially life threatening conditions. Part II argues that, as required by the Helling standard, contemporary society does not tolerate involuntary, long-term exposure to SHS and that prison officials exhibit deliberate indifference by allowing …

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” …

Civil Rights Injunctions Over Time: A Case Study Of Jail And Prison Court Orders, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Lawyers obtained the first federal court orders governing prison and jail conditions in the 1960s. This and other types of civil rights injunctive practice flourished in the 1970s and early 1980s. But a conventional wisdom has developed that such institutional reform litigation peaked long ago and is now moribund. This Article's longitudinal account of jail and prison court-order litigation establishes that, to the contrary, correctional court-order litigation did not decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Rather, there was essential continuity from the early 1980s until1996, when enactment of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) reduced both the stock …

State Sentencing Policy And New Prison Admissions, Ben Trachtenberg

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

As the academy's focus has turned to sentencing in the wake of Blakely v. Washington and United States v. Booker, most commentators have continued their benign neglect of actual sentencing practices as they occur in state courts, not to mention whether and how such policies are effective in achieving the goals of criminal justice.

This Note examines trends in state sentencing policies and prison populations from the perspective of a would-be state reformer hoping to decrease her state's prison budget. Economic pressures, efficiency arguments, and social justice claims have combined to cause some states to desire lower prison populations, …

"Go And Sin No More": The Constitutionality Of Governmentally Funded Faith-Based Prison Units, Lynn S. Branham

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article discusses faith-based prison programs that immerse prisoners living in residential units within a prison in a religious atmosphere. Part One analyzes the constitutionality of these programs under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It notes that state action in the prison context receives more deference from courts than outside the prison context, and that prisoners' constitutional rights are more constricted than free persons" Part I proceeds to analyze the constitutionality of faith immersion programs in prisons, in light of the Supreme Court's precedents dealing with prisoners' rights and the Establishment Clause. States can defend immersion programs on …

Splitting Hairs: Why Courts Uphold Prison Grooming Policies And Why They Should Not, Mara R. Schneider

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Part I of this Note describes the substance of prison grooming policies and provides a sampling of cases that have challenged these policies under the Equal Protection and Free Exercise Clauses. Part II explores three theories of discrimination that describe certain types of discriminatory conduct that could be prohibited by the Equal Protection and Free Exercise Clauses. These theories inform the definition of "equal protection of the laws" and impact the analysis of equal protection challenges to prison grooming policies. Part III explores the "religious exemptions" doctrine and explains how courts have interpreted the protections offered to religious groups by …

Determinants Of Civil Rights Filings In Federal District Court By Jail And Prison Inmates, Anne Morrison Piehl, Margo Schlanger

Articles

This article uses panel data estimation techniques to examine the relation between the number of federal court civil filings by inmates and jail and state prison populations (and, hence, the relation between jail and prison inmate filing rates) both before and after the effective date, in 1996, of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). The research issue matters for several reasons. First, the amount of litigation by inmates is a crucial component of the regulatory regime governing jails and prisons and thus what factors drive filings, and by how much, deserves close attention and assessment. In addition, the PLRA was …

Waiving Goodbye: Incarcerating Waived Juveniles In Adult Correctional Facilities Will Not Reduce Crime, Ellie D. Shefi

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Incarcerating waived juveniles in adult correctional facilities does not reduce crime or result in increased public safety; incarcerating juveniles with adults is deleterious to both the individual offender and society. This Note argues for a renewed focus on rehabilitative rather than retributive justice, and in so doing, proposes the implementation of a comprehensive continuum of graduated sanctions that includes networks of small, secure, highly structured maximum-security juvenile facilities, wilderness camps, residential and non-residential community-based programs, restitution, and fines. This Note further advocates for the incorporation of extensive education, vocational training and placement, counseling, treatment, supervision, mentoring, transitional, aftercare, and support …

Inmate Litigation, Margo Schlanger

Articles

In 1995, prison and jail inmates brought about 40,000 new lawsuits in federal court nearly a fifth of the federal civil docket. Court records evidence a success rate for inmate plaintiffs under fifteen percent. These statistics highlight two qualities long associated with the inmate docket: its volume and the low rate of plaintiffs' success. Then, in 1996, Congress enacted the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), which dramatically altered the litigation landscape, restricting inmates' access to federal court in a variety of ways. This Article examines inmate litigation before and after the PLRA. Looking first at the litigation process itself, it …

The Reliability Of The Administrative Office Of The U.S. Courts Database: An Initial Empirical Analysis, Theodore Eisenberg, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Researchers have long used federal court data assembled by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO) and the Federal Judicial Center (FJC). The data include information about every case filed in federal district court and every appeal filed in the twelve nonspecialized federal appellate courts. Much research using the AO data spans subject matter areas, and includes articles on appeals, caseloads and case-processing times, case outcomes, the relation between demographics and case outcomes, class actions, diversity jurisdiction, and litigation generally. Other research using the AO data covers particular subject matter areas, such as inmate cases, contract cases, corporate litigation, …