{"id":3501,"date":"2011-05-23T22:18:51","date_gmt":"2011-05-24T03:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/?p=3501"},"modified":"2011-05-23T22:18:51","modified_gmt":"2011-05-24T03:18:51","slug":"brown-vs-plata-forcing-californians-to-be-citizens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2011\/05\/23\/brown-vs-plata-forcing-californians-to-be-citizens\/","title":{"rendered":"Brown vs. Plata – Forcing Californians to be Citizens"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some days, you are reminded that the framers were some pretty smart dudes. \u00a0Today, the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown vs. Plata<\/a> ordered the State of California to move 32,000 inmates from its state correctional facilities because their treatment constituted a violation of the 8th amendment’s restriction on cruel and unusual punishment. \u00a0Dalia Lithwick in Slate<\/a> does a nice summary of the on-going case law on this subject:<\/p>\n

In 2005, a federal court determined that “on average, an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six to seven days due to constitutional deficiencies in the medical delivery system.” But conditions continued to deteriorate, and in 2009 a three-judge panel ordered California to reduce its prison population to 137.5 percent of the prisons’ design capacity within two years. (The system was designed to hold just under 80,000 prisoners, but at the time of the oral argument, it had more than 142,000, and Kennedy notes that since then the state has transferred about 9,000 inmates to county jails.) The state appealed, arguing among other points that it hadn’t enough time to remedy the problems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his opinion, Justice Kennedy, perhaps recognizing the limits of reasoned argument on this issue, attached photographs of the overcrowded conditions to his argument (here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>). \u00a0I have lots of sympathy for the court in this instance. \u00a0They walk a fine line between having to uphold constitutional principles while at the same time legitimating them to a less informed but more petulant public. \u00a0In my courses, very few students ever take the position that people in prison should have any constitutional protections. \u00a0If we left it up to the public, the miserable conditions in state prisons would never be addressed. \u00a0As Schneider and Ingram pointed out in their fantastic book<\/a>, prisoners are constructed as deviant target populations and as such politicians have no incentive to adopt legislation that would aid them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But the court (at least five of them) know full well that the constitution is intended to protect minority interests, no matter how vilified they are by the public (even if that vilification is justified). \u00a0It does sadden me that the citizens of my state can’t show responsible citizenship in addressing the situation. \u00a0I grudgingly have to accept that the framers had it right in positing a dim view of their fellow citizens’ ability to rationally assess social problems. \u00a0Locking mentally-ill prisoners in a phone booth cell<\/a> isn’t humane or rational, even if it’s satisfying in a primal way. \u00a0Can we ever move to a place where the courts don’t need to step in to do what citizens themselves should be doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some days, you are reminded that the framers were some pretty smart dudes. \u00a0Today, the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown vs. Plata ordered the State of California to move 32,000 inmates from its state correctional facilities because their treatment constituted a violation of the 8th amendment’s restriction on cruel and unusual punishment. \u00a0Dalia Lithwick in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3501"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3505,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3501\/revisions\/3505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}