By: Heather Schoenfeld , Kimberly Rhoten and Michael C. Campbell

In recent years US prisons have failed to meet legally required minimum standards of care and protection of incarcerated people. Explanations for the failure to protect prisoners in the United States focus on the effects of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) and lack of adequate external oversight. However, very little scholarship empirically examines how different systems of accountability for prisoners’ rights work (or do not work) together. In this article, we introduce an accountability framework that helps us examine the prisoners’ rights “accountability environment” in the United States. We then compare two post-PLRA case studies of failure to protect incarcerated women from sexual assault in two different states. We find that the prisoners’ rights accountability environment is a patchwork of legal, bureaucratic, professional, and political systems. The patchwork accountability environment consists of a web of hierarchical and interdependent relationships that constrain or enable accountability. We argue that ultimately the effectiveness of prisoners’ rights accountability environments depends on whether protecting prisoners’ rights aligns with the priorities of dominant political officials. Our argument has implications for efforts to improve prison conditions and incarcerated people’s well-being.

Law & Social Inquiry Volume 00, Issue 00, 1–30, 2024

By Human Rights Watch

“A Nightmare for Everyone: The Health Care Crisis in Pakistan’s Prisons,” documents widespread deficiencies in prison health care in Pakistan and the consequences for a total prison population of more than 88,000 people. Pakistan has one of the world’s most overcrowded prison systems, with cells designed for a maximum of 3 people holding up to 15. Severe overcrowding has compounded existing health care deficiencies, leaving inmates vulnerable to communicable diseases and unable to get medicines and treatment for even basic health needs, as well as emergencies.

Washington, DC: HRW, 2023. 63p.

By Ashley Nellis

Before America’s era of mass incarceration took hold in the early 1970s, the number of individuals in prison was less than 200,000. Today, it’s 1.4 million; and more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences – one out of every seven in prison. More people are sentenced to life in prison in America than there were people in prison serving any sentence in 1970. Nearly five times the number of people are now serving life sentences in the United States as were in 1984, a rate of growth that has outpaced even the sharp expansion of the overall prison population during this period. The now commonplace use of life imprisonment contradicts research on effective public safety strategies, exacerbates already extreme racial injustices in the criminal justice system, and exemplifies the egregious consequences of mass incarceration. In 2020, The Sentencing Project obtained official corrections data from all states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons to produce our 5th national census on life imprisonment.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2021. 46p.

The The U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General

  The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) initiated this limited-scope review after certain operational issues became so serious at U.S. Penitentiary (USP) Atlanta and Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) New York that, in 2021, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) significantly limited operations at the former and closed the latter. The DOJ OIG sought to assess how critical issues at BOP institutions are identified, communicated to BOP Executive Staff, and remediated. At the outset of our limited-scope review, then BOP Executive Staff told us they had been largely aware of the long-standing operational issues at USP Atlanta and MCC New York and expressed confidence in the BOP’s existing mechanisms to communicate information about operational issues. However, they also described four foundational, enterprise-wide challenges that they said limited their ability to remedy institution operational issues, specifically: • weaknesses in the BOP’s internal audit function, • delays in the BOP’s employee discipline process, • inadequacy of BOP assessments of institution staffing level needs, and • the BOP’s inability to address its aging infrastructure. In light of then BOP Executive Staff’s prior awareness of the USP Atlanta and MCC New York operational issues, we modified the scope of this review following these initial meetings to focus on these four causes and the scope of the challenges, their effects on institutional operations, and the Executive Staff’s efforts to remedy them.  

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2023. 42p.

By The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs 

Hundreds of people held in the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) Special Management Unit (SMU) endured years of unconstitutional and abusive conditions. Those abuses were particularly extreme during the more than three years the program was located in the United States Penitentiary in Thomson, Illinois (Thomson). Over the past 18 months, more than 40 lawyers and legal staff members from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, Latham & Watkins LLP, Uptown People’s Law Center, and Levy Firestone Muse LLP, investigated the conditions in the SMU at Thomson. During that investigation we collected accounts of extreme physical and psychological abuse from more than 120 people. We also witnessed firsthand abusive and obstructive staff behavior, and saw with our own eyes injuries inflicted by Thomson employees. Guards regularly placed individuals in dangerous four-point restraints for hours, sometimes days, and often without food, water, or access to a toilet. Many individuals reported being beaten and sexually assaulted while in restraints. Guards fastened the restraints so tightly that they caused scars on individuals’ wrists, ankles, and stomachs. This happened so frequently that the resulting scars became known as a “Thomson Tattoo.” In addition to physical abuse, guards subjected people in the SMU to psychological trauma through the use of extended solitary confinement, referred to by the BOP euphemistically as “restrictive housing.”1 In the SMU, solitary confinement involved locking two people in a cell for up to 23 hours a day, a practice known as double-cell solitary confinement…

Washington, DC: Author, 2023. 29p.

By Tony Kirk, The HM Inspectorate of Probation (UK)

  The vision of HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS)’s Offender Management in Custody model is that ‘everyone in prison should have the opportunity to transform their lives by using their time in custody constructively to reduce their risk of harm and reoffending; to plan their resettlement; and to improve their prospects of becoming a safe, law-abiding and valuable member of society’. Our joint thematic inspection of OMiC pre-release found that OMiC was not working as intended. Part two of this thematic inspection focused on outcomes for prisoners after they are released. Inspectors considered how practitioners assessed, planned and reviewed the work required to support successful resettlement. We also considered the extent to which key outcomes were achieved when an individual was released from prison, including whether they secured settled accommodation and education, training and employment.  

Manchester, HM Inspectorate of Probation2023. 39p.

By Sharon Dolovich

In the prison law context, even when civil rights claims are strong on the merits, incarcerated litigants will lose most of the time. And even when lawyers win on behalf of their incarcerated clients, conditions don’t tend to change on the ground as much as they should. Regardless, prisoners’ rights lawyers do an enormous amount of good. In this essay, I argue for the indispensability of legal advocacy on behalf of people in custody despite how unfriendly courts are to claims brought from prison. Indeed, I suggest that, at this moment in the development of the carceral state, lawyering for the incarcerated is among the most impactful means we have to move our carceral system closer to consistency with the basic normative commitments of a constitutional democracy. In making this case, this essay describes (1) how lawyers help to lift the veil of secrecy that otherwise shrouds much of what happens in prison; (2) the work lawyers do as watchdogs, calling out and challenging the abuse and exploitation of the incarcerated; and (3) the way that, through their work, lawyers validate the humanity—and thus the dignity and self-respect—of their clients, who more typically exist in a systematically dehumanizing institutional environment

UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 23-07m 2023.