Chapter 1
Prisons, Jails, and Prisoners' Rights: An Introduction
This Chapter provides background on American jails and prisons (What’s the difference between a jail and a prison? What is incarceration supposed to accomplish? How do prison abolitionists conceptualize and justify their goals? How did American incarceration develop?) It provides longitudinal and contemporary statistics. Finally, it offers narrative and case law background on the development of the modern conception of prisoners’ rights.
Most of this introductory chapter is available (without purchase of the book) here.
Featured Opinions
- Ruffin v. Commonwealth, 62 Va. 790 (1871)
- Cooper v. Pate, 378 U.S. 546 (1964) (per curiam)
- Cooper v. Pate, 324 F.2d 165 (7th Cir. 1963)
Featured, Cited, and Supplemental Litigation Documents
- Cooper v. Pate, 324 F.2d 165 (7th Cir. 1963)
Statutes, Treaties, and Regulations
- None
Non-case Excerpts and Supplemental Documents
- Andrea Armstrong, The Impact of 300 Years of Jail Conditions, The New Orleans Prosperity Index: Tricentennial Edition (Mar. 2018)
- Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba & David Stein, What Abolitionists Do, Jacobin (Aug. 2017)
- Sharon Dolovich, Teaching Prison Law, 62 J. Legal Educ. 218 (2012)
- Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (2017)
- Matthew L. Myers, The Alabama Case: 12 Years After James v. Wallace, 13 Nat’l Prison Project J. 8 (Fall 1987)
- Norval Morris, from a diary by Simon “Sam” Gutierrez, One Day in the Life of #12345, The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford University Press, Norval Morris & David J. Rothman, eds., 1995)
- David J. Rothman, Perfecting the Prison: United States, 1789–1865, The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford University Press 1995)
Data and Figures
See Data Supplement page
- Figure 1.1: U.S. Adult Jail and Prison Annual Admissions, 2017
- Figure 1.2. U.S. Jail and Prison Population and Incarceration Rate by Decade, 1880–2017
- Figure 1.3. U.S. Jail and Prison Population and Incarceration Rate, 1970–2017
- Figure 1.4: U.S. Local Jail Population by Conviction Status, 1982–2017
- Figure 1.5: Local Jail Incarceration Rates by Urbanicity, 1970–2019
- Figure 1.6: Immigration Detention, Average Daily Population, 1979–2020
- Figure 1.7: International Incarceration Rates
- Figure 1.8: U.S. Incarcerated Population, 2019
- Figure 1.9: State and Federal Prison Population by Criminal Offense, 2016/2017
- Figure 1.10: U.S. Prison Incarceration Rates by Gender and Race/Ethnicity, 2017
- Figure 1.11: U.S. Female Prison Incarceration Rate by Race/Ethnicity, 2000–2017
- Figure 1.12: U.S. Male Prison Incarceration Rate by Race/Ethnicity, 2000–2017
- Figure 1.13: U.S. Corrections Systems Populations, 1980 & 2016
- Figure 1.14: Correctional Control Rate by State, 2018
- Figure 1.15: Litigation Rate for Prisoner Civil Rights Lawsuits, 1970–2017
Additional Reading
Other Cited Sources
Nomenclature
- Blair Hickman, Inmate. Prisoner. Other. Discussed, The Marshall Project (Apr. 3, 2015)
- Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions, An Open Letter to Our Friends on the Question of Language (July 2017)
The reach of the criminal justice system: various institutions/punishments
- Gabriel J. Chin, The New Civil Death: Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration, 160 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1789 (2012)
- Peter K. Enns et al., What Percentage of Americans Have Ever Had a Family Member Incarcerated?: Evidence from the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS), 5 Socius 1, 5–6 (2019)
- Lauren E. Glaze & Laura A. Maruschak, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Parents in Prison and Their Minor Children (Aug. 2008)
- Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration (forthcoming 2021)
- National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction
- Ram Subramanian et al., Vera Institute of Justice, Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America (Feb. 2015, updated July 2015)
- Maddy Troilo, Prison Policy Initiative, Locking Up Youth with Adults: An Update (Feb. 27, 2018)
What is incarceration for?
- G. Armstrong, The Retributivist Hits Back, in Theories of Punishment 19–40 (Stanley E. Grupp ed. 1971)
- Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; Or, The Inspection-House (1791)
- Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham (John Bowring ed. 1843)
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Alan Sheridan, trans. 1979)
- Taja-Nia Y. Henderson, Property, Penality, and (Racial) Profiling, 12 Stan. J. Civ. Rights & Civ. Lib. 177, 179 (2016)
- Erik Luna, ed., Reforming Criminal Justice: Punishment, Incarceration, and Release (2017)
- Robert Martinson, What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform, The Public Interest 22 (Spring 1974)
- Karl Menninger, The Crime of Punishment (1968)
- Alexander Paterson, Paterson on Prisons: Being the Collected Papers of Sir Alexander Patterson (1951, S.K. Ruck, ed.)
- David Roodman, The Impacts of Incarceration on Crime, Open Philanthropy Project (Sept. 2017)
- Franklin E. Zimring & Gordon Hawkins, Incapacitation: Penal Confinement and the Restraint of Crime (1988)
Prison abolition
- Allegra M. McLeod, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, 62 UCLA L. Rev. 1156–1239 (2015)
- Dorothy E. Roberts, The Supreme Court 2018 Term, Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, 133 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (2019)
Prisoners’ rights litigation
- Alison Brill, Note, Rights Without Remedy: The Myth of State Court Accessibility After the Prison Litigation Reform Act, 30 Cardozo L. Rev. 645 (2008) (no free online version available; via Hein Online here)
- Ira P. Robbins, The Cry of Wolfish in the Federal Courts: The Future of Federal Judicial Intervention in Prison Administration, 71 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 211, 219 (1980)
- David J. Rothman, Decarcerating Prisoners and Patients, 1 Civ. Liberties Rev. 8, 14 (1973)
- Margo Schlanger, Beyond the Hero Judge: Institutional Reform Litigation As Litigation, 97 Mich. L. Rev. 1994 (1999)
- Margo Schlanger, Civil Rights Injunctions Over Time: A Case Study of Jail and Prison Court Orders, 81 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 550 (2006)
- Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (2017)
- Note, Beyond the Ken of the Courts: A Critique of Judicial Refusal to Review the Complaints of Convicts, 72 Yale L.J. 506 (1963)
For more information
Abolition
- Podcast: Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition (June 10, 2020)
Community Corrections
- Prison Policy Initiative, Report: Halfway Houses, and appendix (Sept. 2020)