RIP Judge Morris Lasker, Soft-Spoken Advocate for Prisoners Rights

I’m a bit late in posting this news, but wanted to note the death late last year of federal judge Morris Lasker, who oversaw litigation over conditions in New York’s notoriously overcrowded, vermin-infested city jails. As noted in this obituary by the New York Times‘ Robert McFadden,

Judge Lasker, a soft-spoken jurist who often found himself at the center of controversies, was best known for rulings in the 1970s and ’80s in the Southern District of New York that forced the city come to grips with horrendous conditions in its jails and violations of the constitutional rights of prisoners that, as he once put it, “would shock the conscience of any citizen who knew of them.”

Though today, many judges shudder in fear of being labeled that worst of epithets — a “judicial activist” — Judge Lasker was unrepentant for his role in instigating reforms. As the New York Times obituary concludes:

Judge Lasker was often called an “activist” judge, intervening in government executive affairs in ways that critics said usurped legislative functions. But he defended the role of litigation in prison reform, especially “when either the legislature, or the executive, or both, are failing in their duties to assure constitutionally adequate conditions,” he wrote in an article for The Pace Law Review in 2004. [Note: That article can be downloaded here.]

He cited “gratifying progress” but an “unfinished agenda,” and warned: “Today, some 30 to 35 years after the courts began to accept responsibility for assuring decent prison conditions, the corrections community faces an even larger and more difficult problem — that is what I call America’s love affair with imprisonment.”

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