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NEWS & LETTERS, October 2004Voices From the Inside outAll the justice that money can buyby Robert Taliaferro Let’s talk about the price of justice. Some of us are of a generation when the only criminal justice-oriented television programs were Perry Mason and a few lackluster police dramas. At that particular time we all had faith in Perry’s prowess to get to the truth of an issue, knowing that no innocent man or woman would go to prison on his watch. Fortunately that naiveté no longer exists, for today we are permeated with the fallibilities and unnecessary excesses of American jurisprudence that is deathly sick on all levels, and no longer do we have undying faith in the nobility of American justice. Gone are the Perry Mason-like days when a sense of integrity drove the case, a time when a person was perceived to be innocent until proven guilty, unless, of course, you were a person of color. In today’s world, the largest untruths in the criminal justice system are often fueled by corporate-driven reporting by the media that is subjective in nature. In the 1990s this subjective reporting led to many so-called prison reforms that curtailed prisoner litigation but did not reform the system which instigated the litigation in the first place. One of the biggest changes came in the form of a piece of knee-jerk political legislation called the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) on the federal level, and state-legislated progenies of the federal act. The act effectively stifled prisoner litigation in this country at a time when big business had decided that prisoners were a growth industry. The restrictions of such legislation allowed for Abu Ghraib-style abuses to become so prominent in U.S. prisons that Amnesty International placed the U.S. on its list of human rights abusers. One of the most devastating aspects of PLRA is that it did not completely take away a prisoner’s right to redress of grievances, for that is a constitutional imperative, but it did require prisoners to comply with a principle called the "exhaustion doctrine." In essence, that doctrine states that the prison staff, or respective Department of Corrections (DOC), must first have the opportunity to review itself to see if it feels it did anything wrong. After months of this review process, and if the state decides that it has not done wrong, then the prisoner can appeal to the courts. NEW LEGAL SHACKELS In the 1990s there was a prison building boom that pretty much destroyed the funds that could have been geared towards developing the infrastructure that could help to alleviate the need for such insanely aggressive prison construction. This boom was sparked by politicians who fed upon the fears of the community in some well-publicized cases. Prisoners, and prisoner-related programming, started to be scrutinized with a microscope and with the Republicrat Clinton in office, federal legislation was finally passed and signed by him that Republicans had been attempting to pass for nearly 30 years. One of the main features of PLRA was that it eliminated the indigent status for prisoners--though keeping it in place for others as long as they were not prisoners. This meant that if a prisoner wished to file a lawsuit against abuses promulgated by prison staff, he would have to pay the filing fees for a court action after he concluded the exhaustion phase of his review. Though prisoners still can file as indigents, they are required to pay the cost of their filing fees, which can range from $50 to $500 depending on the court and type of case. Since, on the average, prisoners earn from zero to $500 a year in their prison accounts from jobs, often the thought of having to go without things like soap or toothpaste tends to dissuade the filing of suits. Most prison abuses lie within the processes that state prisons, and federal prisons to a lesser extent, use to compel order. When a person is alleged to have committed an offense in a prison, he is taken in front of a hearing committee that is made up of staff members of the prison. He can ask for an advocate--also a prison staff member--and he is alleged to have some due process rights that were defined, one might add, because of prison litigation. Though prisoners are not compelled to exist in a vacuum and do not forfeit all of their rights when they are incarcerated, most prisoner litigation revolves around what happens at these hearings, which prisoners often refer to as "kangaroo courts." Most prisoner litigation addresses aspects of the prison environment that require change, ranging from restrictions of cruel and unusual punishment such as torture, to holding prison employees accountable for their actions. One of the main ironies of the PLRA was that it allegedly would unclog state and federal court systems by creating a stringent set of guidelines that a prisoner had to follow before gaining access to the courts. Prior to PLRA, a prisoner-initiated action could be decided in about a year or less; now, with all the processes, such actions gain lives of their own lasting upwards of two years, often exacerbating the conditions which caused the suit to be filed in the first place. PRISONIZATION OF LEGAL SYSTEM As with all things prison-oriented, laws have a tendency to trickle down into the community. Litigation reform is now a big topic in the Bush campaign. Like PLRA, it is designed to protect the interests of the company, not the common person who might be abused. Today prisoners die within prisons through abuse and neglect; today sickness and disease is spreading through prisons around the country, largely going unreported often because prisoner lawsuits have not been filed--as they once would have been--to alert the media and community that such problems exist. Then the prison epidemic becomes a community epidemic. Litigation reform is said to be necessary to stop abuses of the court system in this country. In reality it is a political subterfuge that allows the erosion of equality, fundamental fairness and justice in order to protect large corporate interests. |
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