The Eighth Amendment is meant to protect prisoners against abuse. BI has found that Supreme Court decisions and federal laws have obliterated it.
·
2.6k reads
·
The Lede
The Eighth Amendment, which bars "cruel and unusual punishments," was intended by the founders as a bulwark against prisoner abuse. Over the years it came to mean any treatment that "shocked the conscience." But prisoners and civil-rights attorneys have said that it is now nearly impossible to win such claims in court. To investigate whether that constitutional protection holds, a Business Insider team read tens of thousands of pages of court records for nearly 1,500 Eighth Amendment complaints.
Key Details
- We uncovered a near evisceration of protections for this nation's 1.2 million prisoners, largely propelled by legal standards and laws put into place at the height of the war on drugs.
- In our analysis, plaintiffs prevailed in only 11 cases, including two class actions — less than 1%.
- For prisoners inside these systems, the courts are often the only backstop left. The 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act effectively carved out a separate and unequal system for prisoners who seek to file suit.
