Prisoner Lawsuits and the Tilted Playing Field

by Matt Kelley · 2009-06-18 05:48:00 UTC
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The Prison Litigation Reform Act, passed by Congress in 1996 in an attempt to stem frivolous lawsuits from prisoners, has failed to accomplish its goals and has instead stripped prisoners of a crucial constitutional right to equal protection under the law, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch.

The PLRA restricted federal courts' oversight of overcrowding and prison health care issues, it required that prisoners seeking to show personal injury demonstrate "physical injury" and excluded any lawsuits claiming emotional or mental suffering, it blocked access to courts for incarcerated children.

While a functioning filter for frivolous lawsuits can be a good protection, ensuring more attention to allegations with merit, the PRLA has gone too far.

The report points out that if the PLRA had blocked mostly frivolous lawsuits, prisoners would be winning more of the suits that make it through the filter. That's not the case. A comprehensive study shows that not only are prisoners filing 33 percent fewer federal civicl rights lawsuits, they are winning fewer as well.

This strongly suggests that rather than filtering out meritless lawsuits, the PLRA has simply tilted the playing field against prisoners across the board. The author of a comprehensive study on the impact of the act concludes that “the PLRA’s new decision standards have imposed new and very high hurdles so that even constitutionally meritorious cases are often thrown out of court.”

I wrote about this issue back in March when Mumia Abu-Jamal's book on Jailhouse Lawyers came out. Abu-Jamal makes the argument that the PRLA has silenced critical claims of civil rights and human rights abuses and has led suits filed by jailhouse lawyers to be blindly tossed out.

Prisoners had an extremely limited voice in our federal courts and our democracy before the PRLA was passed in 1996, and the law silenced it further. It needs to be reformed to be more effective and to ensure that human rights abuses in our prisons and jails can be exposed and challenged.

Read the full HRW report here.

Matt Kelley is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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