From Filter:
In 1996, the Prison Litigation Reform Act was enacted in response to the rising number of lawsuits prisoners were filing in federal court. Not by addressing the alleged civil rights violations themselves, of course, but by making the court system significantly less accessible to prisoners: relegating our complaints to the realm of corrections departments’ grievance processes, making us responsible for more fees, etc.
So successful was this at reducing the volume of “frivolous” litigation that corrections departments around the country have come to understand that whatever the minimum required living space they were supposed to allocate—50 square feet per person, or 35 square feet unencumbered, or what have you—no one would get in trouble if they decided we didn’t need all that space.
Amid the United States mass incarceration crisis, the term “overcrowding” is used a lot. It’s indeed true that in many carceral institutions, especially local jails, people are being packed in past maximum capacity. But in many others, especially state prisons, the issue isn’t necessarily that there are more prisoners than beds—it’s that there are exponentially more prisoners than corrections officers (COs). Continue reading >>>
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