Mass incarceration remains a serious criminal justice issue in the U.S. The country has the highest rates of incarceration in the world, with nearly 1% of all adult Americans serving jail or prison sentences at any one given time (oyez.org). The rate of incarceration in the U.S. is 5 times higher than in other developed democracies, such as Western European countries. Incarceration rates in the U.S. have been challenged on various occasion in the U.S. courts under the 8 th -Amendment, which offers protections against cruel and unusual punishment. One of the most recent legal suits related to mass incarceration is Brown v. Plata .
Brown v. Plata is a class-action legal suit that was filed by the Prison Law Office in Berkeley, CL, on behalf of Plata and other prisoners. In the case, the law office argued that the state prisons were violating the 8 th -Amendment by holding a large number of prisoners while denying them basic sustenance, including medical care. The office, in Brown v. Plata , argued that the practice constituted cruel and unusual punishment. A special panel of three judges was constituted, and after a lengthy trial, the bench ruled overcrowding in California’s prisons was a violation of the Eighth Amendment. Consequently, the judges ordered the state prison officials to release a sufficient number of inmates so that the prison population would remain within a range of 137.5% of the facilities’ design capacity (oyez.org). At the time, California’s 33 prison facilities were designed to hold about 80% prisoners, but the population was almost double that number (oyez.org). That meant that about 46,000 prisoners would find themselves free.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
The question that was pertinent to this lawsuit and that the court was addressing was whether releasing prisoners to address the issue of prisons overcrowding was constitutional. In its landmark ruling, the court noted that a correctional system that denies prisoners basic needs, including quality medical care, violates the doctrine of human dignity and is not compatible with the principles of human dignity. Further, the court noted that the government had fallen short in its mandate by failing to provide adequate space for prisoners, and thus, it was the responsibility of the courts to remedy the prisoners under the 8 th Amendment. The interests of the correctional system include punishing and rehabilitating inmates so that they would not reoffend and to make them productive members of the society. While trying to however, prison administrators face the challenge of housing and taking proper care of large numbers of incarcerated population. In the face of these challenges, however, the court observed that it cannot allow prison administrators to continue violating the prisoners’ constitutional rights simply because such remedy may be interpreted as an intrusion into the operations of the correctional system.
Ideally, Brown v. Plata is one of many cases that touches on the problem of high rates of incarceration in the U.S. The main challenge that courts face when trying to address this issue involves determining the population of inmates that each prison facility can constitutionally hold and the level of medical care that should be considered adequate or appropriate. In this case, the jury had to make careful considerations about the capacity of California’s state prison facilities while predicting the effect of releasing a large number of prisoners to reduce inmate population and to address the issue of overcrowding.
Reference
www.oyez.org/justices
