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Necessary Suffering?: Weighing Government And Prisoner Interests In Determining What Is Cruel And Unusual, Brittany L. Glidden

Brittany L. Glidden

Necessary Suffering?: Weighing Government and Prisoner Interests in Determining What is Cruel and Unusual

Brittany Glidden

ABSTRACT

The Eighth Amendment espouses a normative principle—that the government will not inflict “cruel and unusual punishment”—but courts have struggled to give content to the prohibition where it concerns prison conditions. Society expects a prison term to be uncomfortable and potentially painful, but the Constitution protects prisoners from inhumane conditions that violate standards of decency. To find that a condition is cruel and unusual, courts have two requirements: 1) an objective component, that the condition is sufficiently serious, and 2) a subjective component, that …