NCJ Number
188145
Date Published
2001
Length
234 pages
Annotation
This book focuses on how the Supreme Court has interpreted the rights of prisoners and the sociopolitical forces that have shaped those decisions. It uses prisoners' rights cases as a window to understand the dynamics of Supreme Court decision-making and to explain why the Court plays a more restrained role in this area of the Constitution.
Abstract
The Supreme Court grants review in only a handful of cases affecting prisoners each term, but as the Nation's highest court it sends important doctrinal signals to the lower Federal Courts. It is in the Federal District and Circuit Courts where prisoners' rights are given concrete meaning. The focus of this book is on the Supreme Court under Chief Justices Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist. The analysis includes death penalty cases, non-capital cases arising under the Eighth Amendment, habeas corpus petitions, conditions of confinements cases, and due process claims. In Chapter 1, the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) is used as a springboard in discussing issues surrounding prisoner litigation and the role of the Federal Courts. This chapter also describes the constitutional and statutory foundations for prisoners' rights and reviews remedies available to inmates to secure those rights. Chapter 2 describes three models of judicial decision-making, the legal, attitudinal, and strategic, offering different explanations for why the Supreme Court decides cases the way it does. The chapter also includes a discussion of three variables that form the external political environment of Supreme Court decision-making: public opinion, political institutions, and interest groups. The next four chapters are organized around the four periods in the doctrinal development of prisoners' rights which include: (1) tracing the development of prisons in America and early efforts at penal reform; (2) examining this reform period under the Warren Court (whose most important contribution was the expansion of access to the courts for rights violations); (3) focusing on the 1970's and 1980's, a period when Federal Courts began to actively intervene in the administration of prisons; and (4) reviewing decisions of the Rehnquist Court and described how the Supreme Court scaled back prisoners' rights in many areas. Chapter 7 reviews the amount of strategic interaction on the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts in prisoners' rights cases from 1953 to 1991, evaluates the role that the respective Courts played in the development of prisoners' rights, and discusses recent developments in Congress and in State legislatures that affect prison conditions and the rights of inmates such as, in 1994, Congress expanded the Federal death penalty statute to apply to over 50 crimes and enacted a Federal "three strikes" law and in 1996, Congress passed the Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and enacted the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). The book concludes with the vision that the rights of prisoners will continue to evolve and be shaped by the political divisions within the Supreme Court, the actions of Congress, interest group pressures, and the values of the American public. Bibliography, table of cases