Kentucky U.S. Attorney’s Office Sues Prisoner Who Files Four Lawsuits a Day

I usually don’t link to articles lamenting frivolous prisoner litigation, because I don’t consider it a real problem. Of course there are recreational and vexatious litigants out there, but meanwhile the Prison Litigation Reform Act as well as institutional and cultural barriers make it exceedingly difficult for prisoners with legitimate grievances to get into court. On the whole, prisoners are actually less litigious than the general public, though you might expect them to have more claims to make since literally every aspect of their day is controlled by the state and thus brings opportunities for something potentially actionable to go awry.

That said, since Jonathan Lee Riches has his own Wikipedia page, has garnered coverage on the likes of Gawker and Above the Law, and has filed suit against everyone from Perez Hilton to Pervez Musharraf, I thought readers might find this item of interest. From the Telegraph:

The US Attorney’s Office in Kentucky said the persistent lawsuits were “a waste of judicial resources” and eat up court time that could be used for legitimate cases.

Prosecutors have now filed their own lawsuit asking for Riches’ outgoing prison correspondence to be screened by a court employee, and any frivolous legal filings stopped.

Riches has been in prison for nearly a decade after pleading guilty to using email to obtain credit card numbers from people online. He is due to be released in March 2012.

More here from the WSJ Law Blog. As I’ve noted before, the media has an unfortunate though not surprising tendency to focus on extreme cases like this one; meanwhile, the pressing need to reform the Prison Litigation Reform Act has been recognized by a broad coalition.

Families, Survivors Commemorate Anniversary of Attica Uprising

photo credit: Bronayur at the English language Wikipedia

Nearly forty years after the Attica prison riot, survivors and families of those who died are gathering at the prison in upstate New York today for their annual memorial service. In total, 43 people were killed at Attica — 11 corrections officers and 32 inmates — with 39 of those deaths on Sept. 13, 1971, when state authorities stormed the prison. As the Village Voice noted in introducing a package of first-person remembrances on the occasion of the uprising’s 30th anniversary, there followed a 27-year legal battle at the end of which New York State distributed $8 million in compensation among 502 injured prisoners and relatives.

Virginia Lawyer on Prison Rape: Prisoners Don’t Need Standards, But Access to the Courts

As the DOJ continues to delay in promulgating national standards for the prevention of prison rape, Virginia civil rights attorney Victor Glasberg recently published this letter to the editor in the Washington Post, offering a different take:

The United States neither lacks nor needs “standards” to prevent rape, in prisons or elsewhere. The Eighth Amendment of the Constitution and a host of laws and regulations outlaw the victimization, sexual and otherwise, of prisoners. The problem is that these laws and regulations are not enforced.

The federal judiciary has largely nullified the means prisoners might use to protect themselves. Given the judge-invented “deliberate indifference” standard and the “qualified immunity” defense as well as the stumbling blocks to valid and important prisoners’ claims created by the Orwellian-named Prison Litigation Reform Act, even horrible abuse in prison is routinely un-actionable except against the perpetrator, who is typically judgment-proof as a practical matter.

The promulgation or non-promulgation of “prison rape standards” is a sadly inconsequential sideshow to the main event: providing victims of abuse with legal recourse sufficiently effective to compel changes in the cultures of the prisons and jails where they live.

Sorting the Punditry from the Facts on the South Carolina Prison System’s HIV-Segregation Policy

The DOJ Civil Rights Division has threatened to sue South Carolina over its policy of segregating HIV-positive inmates from the rest of the prison population — an outdated practice in which South Carolina, along with Alabama, is now virtually alone among the states. (Mississippi abolished its HIV-segregation policy a few months ago.) Here’s the response of Jon Ozmint, the director of South Carolina’s prison system:

“This is about left-wing politics controlling the United States Justice Department,” Ozmint said. “This is about whether you want more AIDS or less AIDS.”

Never mind that, as Adam Serwer points out, the ACLU and Human Rights Watch have documented a host of ways in which the segregation of HIV-positive prisoners imposes additional punishment and hardship on top of their judicially-mandated sentence, or that the World Health Organisation has said the practice is “costly, inefficient, and can have negative health consequences for segregated prisoners.” Never mind that 44 of the U.S. prison systems that once segregated HIV-positive inmates, pursuant to policies adopted in the early days of the epidemic, no longer do so. Ozmint’s position has been hailed by at least one pundit as a vanguard policy, “effective and humane,” and Ozmint himself as “refreshing” for describing being incarcerated as “a voluntary activity.” One blog, in a particularly odious formulation, accuses the DOJ of seeking to enshrine “HIV transmission” as a “‘civil right.'” A blogger at the Daily Caller writes, “The Justice Department wants you to get AIDS and die.”

The notion underlying this punditry — that the only way prisons can prevent the transmission of HIV is to cordon off HIV-positive inmates and subject them to additional stigma and isolation — rests on some very ugly assumptions about prisoners, HIV-positive men and women, and the responsibilities of prison guards to protect those in their charge. The notion is also belied by the reality that 48 states and the federal prison system do not segregate HIV-positive inmates.

Latest in Lawsuit Over Idaho’s “Extraordinarily Violent” Private Prison: CCA Asks Judge to Throw Out Suit on Exhaustion Grounds

In March of this year, the ACLU filed a class action federal lawsuit alleging a pattern of rampant violence in an Idaho prison operated by the Corrections Corporation of America. The complaint (which can be downloaded here) begins:

ICC is an extraordinarily violent prison. It is known in Idaho as “Gladiator School” for a reason. More violence occurs at ICC than at Idaho’s eight other prisons combined, and the unnecessary carnage and suffering that has resulted is shameful and inexcusable. ICC not only condones prisoner violence, the entrenched culture of ICC promotes, facilitates, and encourages it. Indeed, ICC staff cruelly use prisoner violence as a management tool.

It goes on to describe the “symbiotic relationship [that] exists between certain staff and notoriously violent prisoners,” in which “guards persistently send vulnerable prisoners to live near predatory prisoners, and when these predators commit assaults, they receive mild punishment, and often no punishment.”

This week, CCA lawyers asked the judge to throw out the lawsuit on the grounds that the plaintiffs did not first exhaust their administrative remedies as required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act. (The PLRA was passed in 1996, ostensibly to block frivolous prisoner lawsuits. Yet, it has been roundly criticized by prisoners’ rights advocates for mounting insurmountable procedural obstacles to meritorious claims.) Note that earlier this year the ACLU reached a separate settlement with the state of Idaho, which agreed to “aggressively oversee compliance” with any federal court order that results from this litigation. Therefore, CCA is the only remaining defendant.

Regardless of what happens next in this lawsuit, the complaint is well worth reading in full — a disgraceful catalog of fractured ribs, broken noses, knocked-out teeth, wired jaws, and other injuries, all imposed by prisoners upon more vulnerable prisoners with impunity for the perpetrators, and often without even the necessary X-rays and medical care for the victims. The allegations at issue in this case have been shocking even to seasoned prisoners’ rights lawyers:

“In my 39 years of suing prisons and jails, I have never confronted a more disgraceful, revolting and inexcusable case of mass abuse and federal rights violations than this one,” said Stephen Pevar, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU. “The level of unnecessary human suffering is appalling. Prison officials have utterly failed to uphold their constitutional obligation to protect prisoners from being violently harmed and we must seek court intervention.”

“California prisoners’ rights often trampled”

That’s the headline of this Sacramento Bee investigation into the “602 process,” or the set of procedures by which the California prison system adjudicates grievances and disputes. Based on a review of CDCR data as well as a number of interviews, reporter Charles Piller found a pattern of “widespread suppression of inmates’ rights to contest allegations by guards or pursue claims of mistreatment”:

Current and retired officers, prisoners and parolees allege that correctional officers and their superiors routinely file bogus or misleading reports, destroy or falsify documentation of abuses, and intimidate colleagues or inmates who push back.

Sources with firsthand knowledge called the problem pervasive, offering dozens of examples. Even if the allegations are valid for a fraction of cases, thousands of prison terms could have been extended improperly at vast cost to taxpayers.

One of the more disturbing stories in the article is that of Kenneth Hernandez, who suffered from a skull fracture, facial paralysis, seizures, and vomiting after a prison guard threw him head-first into a metal locker, then was found guilty of assaulting an officer and lost five months of good-time credit and a year of family visits.

Supermax Prisons and the “Field of Dreams” Problem: If You Build It, They Will Come

David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, has an op-ed at Huffington Post on whether America’s supermax prisons violate international human rights law. The fact that extended isolation produces psychosis in humans has been recognized since America’s first (failed) experiments with solitary confinement at Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary in the 1830s. The idea was that prisoners kept in cells by themselves would have nothing to do but think about what they’d done wrong. In reality, as quickly became apparent to prison wardens, they simply went crazy. Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article remains the best general-audience summary of the case for defining solitary confinement as torture.

Fathi’s op-ed provides some essential historical background on just how the U.S. came to have tens of thousands of inmates in extended solitary confinement. As won’t surprise students of the past 30 years in criminal justice policy, it’s a story that combines “tough-on-crime” demagoguery, the criminalization of mental illness, distorted legislative and executive incentives, and a heavy dose of path dependence:

In the 1990s [supermax prisons] were a raging fad, yet another round in the perpetual “tough on crime” political bidding war. Suddenly every state had to build one — Virginia was so tough it built two. By the end of the decade, more than 30 states, as well as the federal government, were operating a supermax facility or unit. …

The official line is that these prisons are reserved for the “worst of the worst” — the most dangerous and incorrigibly violent — but most states have only a few such prisoners. In overcrowded prison systems, the typical response has been to fill the remaining supermax cells with “nuisance prisoners” — those who file lawsuits, violate minor prison rules, or otherwise annoy staff, but by no stretch of the imagination require the extremely high security of a supermax facility. Thus in Wisconsin’s supermax, one of the “worst of the worst” was a 16-year-old car thief. Twenty-year-old David Tracy hanged himself in a Virginia supermax; he had been sent there at age 19, with a 2 ½ year sentence for selling drugs.

The mentally ill are vastly overrepresented in supermax prisons, and once subjected to the stress of isolated confinement, many of them deteriorate dramatically. Some engage in bizarre and extreme acts of self-injury and even suicide. In an Indiana supermax, a 21-year-old mentally ill prisoner set himself on fire in his cell and died from his burns; another man in the same unit choked himself to death with a washcloth. It’s not unusual to find supermax prisoners who swallow razors and other objects, smash their heads into the wall, compulsively cut their flesh, try to hang themselves, and otherwise attempt to harm or kill themselves.

The good news is that it’s quite possible for states to turn back from this path. Between 2006 and 2007 alone, Mississippi slashed the number of inmates in solitary confinement from 1,500 to 150.

The New York Times Swings at the L.A. County Justice System—and Whiffs

I get it, even the New York Times needs page views now and then; and I know, Friday evenings aren’t the height of the news cycle. But even still, this is front page news (ok, well, homepage news)?

Meanwhile, I clicked on the NYT topic archive for “Los Angeles, Calif.” going back as far as October 2009 and found not a single article in that time span on the Los Angeles County criminal justice system’s actual problems. From a May 2010 ACLU report:

Idaho: 30-Year-Old Federal Lawsuit over Prison Conditions May Be Nearing an End

In the early 1980s, a federal judge found that “virtually every inmate” assigned to a particular unit of the Idaho state prison had been “brutally raped.” And that was on top of overcrowding, limited access to psychiatric and medical care, inadequate food, lack of warm clothing, and other unconstitutional conditions at the prison. A number of inmate lawsuits were consolidated into one, the so-called “Balla case,” which remains ongoing to this day. (The inmates were initially represented by one of their own, subsequently represented by the ACLU, and are currently represented by the Western regional law firm Stoel Rives.) Now, as the AP reports, U.S. district court judge Lynn Winmill will soon decide whether to discontinue the component of the lawsuit addressing violence and health care. Although overcrowding remains a problem, Judge Winmill suggests that it may be better addressed by new lawsuits.

The invaluable Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, a website of the University of Michigan law school, provides a summary of the litigation complete with copies of the filings. The clearinghouse notes that at least one result of the ongoing litigation has been to fuel privatization of Idaho’s prison complex:

In response to the decision, Idaho prison officials transferred more than 300 prisoners to a Corrections Corporation of America prison in Appleton, Minnesota, at a cost of $1.1 million. According to news reports, prison officials plan to ask the state legislature for $160 million to construct three new prisons, and for an additional $7.9 million to cover the cost of housing overflow prisoners both out-of-state and in county jail cells.

DOJ Releases Survey Results on Conditions in Juvenile Jails

Less than half of youth in state custody (whether residential placement or a juvenile detention center) report having access to a lawyer. That and other statistics are available in the new report, “Conditions of Confinement: Findings from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement,” published by the DOJ’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. The study is based on a survey of a representative sample of youth in custody, so keep in mind the limitations of self-reported data as you read the report. Here are some other data points that may be of particular interest to readers of this blog:

• Notice of rules: 75% of youth report they received a copy of the rules in their facility, 90% feel the rules are fair, and 75% feel they apply equally to all residents.
• Grievance process: 19% say they don’t know how to file a complaint, and 20% say they are concerned about retribution if they do.
• Fairness of punishment: Half of youth report that staff impose punishment without cause, over one-third think that staff use unnecessary force, and less than one-third say punishments are fair.
• Solitary confinement: Almost one-fourth of youth report being placed in solitary confinement as punishment. Over one-third report being isolated in some way (either sent to their room with no contact with other residents, or placed in a separate lock-up). Of those who were isolated, over half say their isolation lasted longer than 24 hours.
• Physical restraint: Over one-fourth of youth report that staff have used some form of restraint on them, whether handcuffs, wristlets, a security belt, chains, or a restraint chair. Just 4% report being placed in a restraint chair and 7% report being pepper sprayed. These last-resort restraints may have effects beyond the individuals on whom they’re used: 30% report living in a unit where one or more residents was pepper sprayed, and 29% report living in a unit where one or more residents was placed in a restraint chair.