The Supreme Court and the Development of Law: Through the Prism of Prisoners’ Rights PDF
Preview The Supreme Court and the Development of Law: Through the Prism of Prisoners’ Rights
The Supreme Court and the Development of Law ’ through the prism of prisoners rights Christopher E. Smith The Supreme Court and the Development of Law Christopher E. Smith The Supreme Court and the Development of Law Through the Prism of Prisoners’ Rights Christopher E. Smith Michigan State University East Lansing, Michigan, USA ISBN 978-1-137-56762-8 ISBN 978-1-137-56763-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56763-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950201 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York In memory of George F. Cole (1935–2015) Teacher, Mentor, Friend P REFACE This book embodies the merger of two interrelated subjects—prisoners’ constitutional rights and the US Supreme Court—that have fueled much of my research and writing over the past 30 years. The very fi rst scholarly article that I published as a graduate student in 1986 focused on the role of judges in prisoner litigation. Decades later, I am still deeply interested in such subjects. Prisons and jails are closed institutions. The public can rarely gain information about what happens in day-to-day conditions and interactions behind the bars and walls. Explosions of violent confl ict in these institutions receive news media attention, but there is little opportunity to see the tedium, tension, fear, and frustration that characterize daily life. The public’s perceptions of these institutions are shaped too often by editorial writers’ false assertions about hotel-quality, comfortable living conditions. Even more distorted perceptions emerge from Hollywood’s despicable efforts to make prison rape a humorous subject through the inevitable references to placing frightened comedic actors facing television or movie incarceration in cells with large, menacing cellmates. While individual movies or television series may aspire to greater realism, each script’s demands for plot development, memorable characters and dialogue, and a tidy ending detract from efforts to capture the essence of this social context. Although the legal cases discussed in this book do not purport to describe comprehensively the details of prison life, the prisoners’ lawsuits underlying these cases help to shed additional light on the contexts and confl icts that defi ne incarcerated offenders’ daily lives. vii viii PREFACE My fi rst thoughts about the actual lives of imprisoned offenders and the conditions in correctional institutions date back to my awareness during high school that a few of my schoolmates and former sports teammates were being sentenced to incarceration for criminal offenses. For example, one of my former Little League teammates served six years in prison after being convicted as a 16-year-old armed robber. At age 58, he has only been free for three years of his adult life. He had subsequent convictions for armed robbery and assaulting a corrections offi cer. As a result of multiple convictions for non-homicide offenses, he is now ineligible for parole unless and until he reaches the age of 103. One of my former teammates from junior high school basketball made the news in the 1970s when he escaped from a secure mental facility while undergoing a psychiatric evaluation related to his activities as a teenage pimp. Sadly, there are other examples, too, of former schoolmates with whom I was well acquainted, who as adults, served prison sentences for such crimes as armed robbery, sexual assault, burglary, and drug offenses. As a teenager, what was striking to me was the fact that I could no longer lump all convicted offenders into a generic category as faceless, dangerous “bad people.” These were actual human beings that I knew well. I had seen with my own eyes the signs of their diffi cult childhoods, family confl icts, and behavioral problems. Moreover, I have had cordial encounters in recent years with a number of them, who are—as middle-aged adults—hardworking, solid citizens. In the course of acquiring my legal education by wandering my way through three different law schools, I volunteered to teach classes on legal research and constitutional rights in a program sponsored by the Black Prisoners Caucus inside the Washington State Reformatory (WSR) at Monroe. The Reformatory was a high-security prison in a fortress-like building dating back to 1910. My students included offenders serving life sentences for various homicide offenses. Every week I walked among the prisoners—with no corrections offi cers escorting me—along various hallways and stairways to reach my classroom. A few years later, I taught a community college course inside a medium-security institution when I was a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut. These experiences not only gave me the opportunity to hear directly from imprisoned offenders about their living conditions and their complaints concerning alleged rights violations, but also to glimpse for myself the conditions and social interactions inside correctional facilities. Subsequently, I have had additional opportunities to see slices of correctional contexts by undergoing searches when entering prison visiting rooms, while walking PREFACE ix across prison yards, and during my participation in a parole hearing. In my view, our society faces a soul-testing challenge in correctional contexts as we consider whether and how to live up to the constitutional values that we trumpet to the rest of the world—and that provide a source for our perpetual self-congratulation—when we decide how to treat offenders and arrestees whom we fear and despise. In many respects, this is primarily a book about the US Supreme Court. This should not imply that the nation’s highest court was the sole, or even the most important, actor shaping legal protections for incarcerated offenders. As other authors have made abundantly clear in prior scholarly works, lower court judges played a key role in the legal developments that reshaped American corrections through the recognition and enforcement of constitutional rights for prisoners. In essence, the central thesis of this book is that prisoners’ rights cases provide an especially illuminating vehicle for understanding the Supreme Court and its decision-making processes. Because of the controversial nature of prisoners’ rights cases, the Supreme Court’s encounters with these issues starkly illustrate competing judicial philosophies; the role of strategy, pragmatism, and compromise in judicial decision making; and the policy impacts of judicial decisions. Hopefully, the merger of my interests, as embodied in the chapters of this book, will contribute to readers’ understanding of both prisoners’ lives and the nation’s foremost judicial institution. Portions of several chapters were previously published in law journal articles. A portion of Chap. 5 originally appeared in Christopher E. Smith, “Rights Behind Bars: The Distinctive Viewpoint of Justice Clarence Thomas,” U niversity of Detroit Mercy Law Review 88 (2011): 829–72. A portion of Chap. 6 was originally published in Christopher E. Smith, “Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Corrections Law,” H amline Law Review 32 (2009): 477–97. A portion of Chap. 8 originally appeared in Christopher E. Smith, “The Malleability of Constitutional Doctrine and Its Ironic Impact on Prisoners’ Rights,” B oston University Public Interest Law Journal 11 (2001): 73–96. I am grateful to these journals and their editors for the opportunity to explore and develop ideas that appear with further refi nements in the pages of this book. Moreover, I am also grateful for these journals’ policies that return to article authors the right to revise and republish material in books that the authors subsequently write. While I am solely responsible for the contents of the book, I owe many debts for my acquisition of information and insights about both correctional institutions and constitutional rights. With respect to corrections, my
The list of books you might like
