Prisoners' Rights (Update 1)

AuthorRalph A. Rossum
Pages2012-2013

Page 2012

Upon conviction and imprisonment, a profound change occurs in a person's legal status. Duly convicted prisoners lose entirely many freedoms enjoyed by free persons; however, they do not relinquish all rights. As the Supreme Court noted in Wolff v. McDonnell (1974), "though his rights may be diminished by the needs and exigencies of the institutional environment, a prisoner is not wholly stripped of constitutional protections when he is imprisoned for crime. There is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country."

Prisoners always retain the right to the minimal conditions necessary for human survival (i.e., the right to food, clothing, shelter, and medical care). The right of the prisoners to a non-life-threatening environment goes beyond the provision of life's necessities; it includes their right to be protected from each other and from themselves. On this last point, lower courts have been more responsive to prisoners' claim than Supreme Court and have found that prison crowding is unconstitutional. As a federal district court in Florida asserted in Costello v. Wainwright (1975), prison crowding "endangers the very lives of the inmates" and therefore violates the Eighth Amendment's guarantee against CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT. The Supreme Court's reluctance to follow the lower courts is understandable, for emperical studies flatly contradict the assertion that crowding is life-threatening. Not only are the overall death rates, accidental death rates, and homicide and suicide rates of inmates two or three times lower than for comparable groups of parolees (controlling for age, race, and sex), but no statistically significant correlations exist between measures of crowding (density and occupancy) and inmate death rates.

Beyond agreement that inmates have the minimal right to a non-life-threatening environment, legal debate rages. Some courts and legal scholars have taken their cues from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Coffin v. Reichard (1944) and have declared that prisoners retain all the rights of ordinary citizens except those expressly or by necessary implication taken by law. The Supreme Court's decision in PROCUNIER V. MARTINEZ (1974) followed this line of reasoning when it held that it would employ a STRICT SCRUTINY standard of review to evaluate claims that the rights of prisoners were being denied. It declared that it would sustain limitations of prisoners'...

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