Civil Rights Injunctions Over Time: A Case Study of Jail and Prison Court Orders. Draft
Publication year:
2005
| Cataloged on:
Oct. 31, 2006
ANNOTATION: The use of institutional reform litigation and court orders to address civil rights abuses in correctional facilities is examined. Sections of this paper are: abstract; introduction; history and commentary -- early history, first generation, the purported fading of the structural reform injunction, revisionism and reports of the death of the structural reform injunction are greatly exaggerated; court order regulation of jails and prisons over time -- the correctional censuses, state-by-state changes over time, nationwide statistics on the volume of court order regulation, explanations for mid- to late-1990s shift in volume of court order regulation; the changing nature of court-ordered relief; possible changes in the nature of the regulation -- an agenda for future research; and conclusion. "There is every reason to believe that public law litigation and structural reform are alive and well in many many arenas, and that the story of the decline of public law litigation will frequently prove false on systematic inquiry, as it has in jails and prisons" (p. 75).