Prisoner Rights

After a person has been found guilty and sentenced to prison, many people assume that the person has (or should have) no rights. Until the 1960s this was, to some extent, true. Federal and state courts refused to hear “prisoner rights” cases or decided such cases in a way that made it clear that prisoners had few, if any, of the rights of free people. In Ruffin v. Commonwealth (1871), for example, the Virginia Supreme Court stated that inmates were a “slave of the state” [Page 1247]with only those rights that the state chose to give them. In contrast, the opinion that prisoners have not lost all of their constitutional rights is voiced, for instance, by the Supreme Court in Wolff v. McDonnell (1974): “There is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country.”

During the so-called Warren Court era between 1953 and 1969, named after Chief Justice Earl Warren (1891–1974), the Supreme Court published a number of opinions that expanded the civil rights of several groups of people, including students, the mentally ill, racial minorities, criminal defendants, and prisoners. This era became known as the “activist era.” The Court utilized the Fourteenth Amendment to expand the protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Most of the cases establishing certain rights of prisoners were decided during this era. For the first time it was recognized that prisoners in state prisons deserve some due process before punishments can be inflicted upon them. Their rights to engage in certain religious practices were recognized. Corporal punishment was declared unconstitutional, and a complete lack of medical care was also declared to violate the Eighth Amendment. Partly because of the civil rights litigation, many changes occurred in this nation's prisons. Some states were forced to improve the building structures to meet health standards. Other states, such as Texas, were forced to abandon the use of building tenders: inmates who, in effect, guarded other inmates. Many states were forced to hire new medical personnel and institute more comprehensive procedures to meet the medical needs of inmates. These sweeping changes might have occurred without court intervention, but there is no doubt that the groundbreaking court cases of the early 1970s played a role in the changes in the prison systems of this country in the latter part of the twentieth century.

One interesting development has been the creation and development of alternative dispute procedures in prisons. These procedures, which range from use of ombudsmen to grievance procedures, may be successful in resolving disputes before inmates feel the need to file a suit against prison officials. Under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA), the U.S. attorney general and federal courts may certify a grievance procedure in place, and under the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996, an inmate must exhaust all grievance procedures and appeals before filing a suit in federal court, whether it meets the certification requirements or not. A grievance procedure is basically an administrative process for investigating a prisoner grievance. Typically there is a grievance officer who investigates and/or a grievance committee made up of inmates and/or inmates and staff. Grievance procedures vary widely, from those that resemble hearings to those that are informal fact-finding procedures. Another alternative is to use an ombudsman who is an outside arbiter between the prisoner who is protesting and the prison officials. Critics contend that these alternatives are less than adequate protections for inmates because they often lack status independent from the prison administration. It is probably safe to say, however, that they have the potential to, and probably have, resolved disputes that would have otherwise ended up in court.

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