[zkms]

A major unaddressed issue is laws like PLRA (passed in 1996) that utterly wiped out federal court oversight of local/state prisons/jails. In addition, PLRA made it borderline-impossible for incarcerated people (whether convicted or not) to bring legit, non-frivolous lawsuits relating to unconstitutional conditions of confinement.

Pre-PLRA, there was some hard-won federal court oversight (consent decrees and the like) of state prisons/jails but PLRA forcibly evicted federal courts from that role (with nothing to fill their place). See https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-its-nearly-impo... or https://casetext.com/analysis/nineties-crime-and-punishment-... for more about this, as well as PLRA's ugly twin, AEDPA.

All this wanton brutality and abusive conditions of confinement in jails/prisons happens in part because PLRA countenances it, there's no other way around it.

[taxicabjesus]

A federal judge in Georgia recently responded to an inmate's plea for help. Timothy Gumm had been arbitrarily thrown in solitary confinement for being accused of attempting to escape:

"Gumm’s handwritten lawsuit made it to U.S. Magistrate Judge Charles H. Weigle, who acknowledged having “serious reservations as to the ultimate validity” of Gumm’s claims. Laws aimed at curtailing frivolous lawsuits make it hard for inmates to protest prison conditions, and judges set a high bar for hearing such complaints. But Weigle noticed that several other of the 180 or so inmates in the Special Management Unit at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison were making similar claims. He eventually let Gumm’s complaint go forward, and assigned lawyers from the Southern Center for Human Rights to represent him free of charge." [0] (emphasis added)

I was not aware of the PLRA when I read this last night, thanks for filling in that detail.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/one-america-s-harshest-...

Edit: Docket for Mr. Gumm's suit: https://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/PC-GA-0020-9000....

[quasse]

I've found it hard to find out who was responsible for PLRA, but what I do know is that it seemed to enjoy wide congressional support, received little scrutiny, was signed into law by Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden was one of the only senators who raised concerns about it preventing meritorious lawsuits. [1]

[1] https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-100-issue-2/please-pa...

[Ericson2314]

It's definitely reaks of 90s Clinton triangulation.

[dragonwriter]

It reeks more of Clintonian conservatism; while triangulation was a Clinton strategy, it gets overused to explain Clinton's policy actions recently, perhaps because people have bought in to decades of Republican propaganda labeling Clinton as some kind of Communist, forgetting that he was an active and vociferous conservative democrat, and before being President a leader of the center-right DLC, and that outside of healthcare and culture war issues his positions were a hairs breadth from Republican positions (at least the pre-1994 ones; his own conservatism contributed to a radical rightward shift of the Overton window, including a radical rightward move in the Republican Party.)

[Ericson2314]

Absolutely right. I should put "triangulation" in scare quotes because it's totally ineffective and dishonest as well.

[dragonwriter]

Triangulation is often (and was for Clinton) an effective near term political strategy (it's quite useful as an electoral strategy for a single election, in many cases), but it's a strategy which wins battles by setting your opponent up to win the long term policy war.

[dragonwriter]

> A major unaddressed issue is laws like PLRA (passed in 1996) that utterly wiped out federal court oversight of local/state prisons/jails.

Well, it greatly reduced it. It didn't utterly wipe it out, as California’s post-96 experience rather dramatically demonstrates.