National Prison Project

History

The NPP was founded in 1972 during a time when the federal courts were just beginning to address prison conditions. In the previous 10 years, the Supreme Court had made a series of decisions favorable to granting prisoners access to the federal courts. For example, in Robinson v. California(1962), the Court ruled that the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment applied to state and local governments. The Court also ruled, in Cooper v. Pate (1964), that prisoners could file lawsuits under a federal civil rights law (U.S. Code 42, §1983).

Due Process, Prison Conditions, and Access to Legal Advice

The NPP's initial strategy was to target the lack of due process in prison and parole hearings. Two years later, the Supreme Court granted due process rights in disciplinary proceedings and declared, “There is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country” (Wolff v. McDonnell, 1974). As encouraging as this was, [Page 623]the NPP was still faced with two major problems: a lack of meaningful change in the treatment of prisoners, and a lack of resources.

Attaining procedural due process did not guarantee fair treatment. According to Alvin Bronstein, a former executive director of the NPP, corrections officials provided what appeared to be fair hearings but they still made arbitrary, unfair decisions. Bronstein realized that what was needed was a more profound change. In order to achieve this, the NPP had to expand its litigation strategy. For the rest of the 1970s and all of the 1980s, the project focused on prison and jail conditions. Project attorneys challenged the constitutionality of a broad range of prison conditions. They also criticized the lack of parity in the treatment of male and female prisoners. Unfortunately, the NPP was simply too small to provide sufficient legal representation. Even though inmates had access to the federal courts, there were, and still are, no court-appointed attorneys available to prisoners who file civil rights lawsuits. Nor did the incarcerated population, in the early 1970s, have access to prison law libraries. In a 1968 Supreme Court decision (Johnson v. Avery), inmates were given the right to confer with each other on civil rights cases, but without formally trained legal advocates or law libraries, the opportunities for success were extremely limited.

A major breakthrough came in 1976 with the passage of the Civil Rights Attorney's Fees Award Act. This federal law guaranteed the recovery of reasonable attorney fees to those who were successful in prisoner civil rights cases. Somewhat predictably, this policy increased the number of private attorneys willing to take prisoner rights cases, as well as providing a source of funding that allowed the NPP to expand.

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