Richard Levitt's 2nd Cir. Criminal Law
Don Samuel's Compilation of Noteworthy Cases
Lawyer's Guide to the Internet
The Cutting Edge Guide to Federal Criminal Law
ARTICLES, MEMOS AND SPECIAL FEATURES
[Editor's Note: From time to time we come across various Articles, Memos and Special Features dealing with aspects of the Criminal Justice System that just don't fit in the other categories of our site. Because we feel that many of these documents are significant and may be of help to our subscribers, they will be added periodically to this new section of our Web site.]
Index
Prisons in America - a special compilation of materials about prison conditions in America
Justice Brennan once described the plight of prisoners with these compelling words:
"Prisoners are persons whom most of us would rather not think about. Banished from everyday sight, they exist in a shadow world that only dimly enters our awareness. They are members of a 'total institution' that controls their daily existence in a way that few of us can imagine. '[P]rison is a complex of physical arrangements and of measures, all wholly governmental, all wholly performed by agents of government, which determine the total existence of certain human beings (except perhaps in the realm of the spirit, and inevitably there as well) from sundown to sundown, sleeping, walking, speaking, silent, working, playing, viewing, eating, voiding, reading, alone, with others. . . .' It is thus easy to think of prisoners as members of a separate netherworld, driven by its own demands, ordered by its own customs, ruled by those whose claim to power rests on raw necessity." Justice William Brennan, dissenting in O'Lone v. Estate of Shabazz, 482 U.S. 342, 354-55 (1987)
Editor's Note: For a comprehensive listing of articles and research materials dealing with Prisons and Prisoners' Rights which are available on the Internet, click here. You should also visit the ACLU's page that deals with Prisons and Prisoners' Rights, which you can access by clicking here.
Prison Conditions - Generally
A recent, chilling example of the "netherworld" of prisons that we so frequently ignore was seen in Judge Henderson's lengthy expose of the conditions that exist at Pelican Bay Prison in California, which he described in his decision reported at Madrid v. Gomez, 889 F.Supp. 1146 (N.D.Cal. 1995).
In 1982, California had a total of 12 prisons, housing 31,000 prisoners. By 1998, California had a total of 33 prisons, housing 160,000 prisoners, at an annual budget of $4 billion. (See, "California Examines Brutal, Deadly Prisons", The New York Times, Nov. 7, 1998, p. A-7). Pelican Bay was built to house the State's most incorrigible prisoners; and although it only opened in 1989, Judge Henderson found, in Madrid, that conditions at Pelican Bay caused "senseless suffering and sometimes wretched misery."
Conditions like those found at Pelican Bay were so severe, and so unnoticed by the general public, that Sally Mann Romano wrote an extraordinarily revealing law review article, entitled , "If the SHU Fits: Cruel and Unusual Punishment at California's Pelican Bay State Prison," in the Emory Law Journal, Vol. 45, No. 3, Summer 1996, which can be accessed by clicking here. (The footnotes to that article can be accessed by clicking here.)
If you are interested in reading about the conditions that exist in America's prisons in the last decade of this enlightened 21st Century, we suggest that you read Ms. Romano's expose.
