A former corrections officer in Florida has been sentenced to life in prison for federal civil rights violations. The officer put a prisoner into a situation where she knew he was likely to be assaulted by another prisoner, and even encouraged the assault. The officer “prosecutors said, knew of Delano’s reputation as a prison snitch and McCullah’s reputation as a notoriously violent inmate nicknamed “Animal,” who belonged to prison gang Aryan Brotherhood, a group that hated snitches.”
The report paints a terrifying picture of life in the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex, the country’s largest maximum security prison. It’s nothing unfamiliar to anyone who has watched Oz, or The Wire, but is all the more disturbing because the “chaotic, dangerous environment” in prison is not the invention of a writer. The inmate known as Animal needed a kill to earn his position in the Aryan Brotherhood.
The case, too, illuminates the crucial difference between deprivation of liberty and deprivation of rights.
Paradoxically, confinement may enhance some claims to rights the un-imprisoned do not have. Advocacy groups insist that prisoners have the right to medical care, for example, and the right to food and clothing, rights which a walk through any of our major cities will demonstrate are alien to much of the American public. Those claims, though, by no means guarantee access to care and clothing, and when they do, by no means guarantee access to adequate care and clothing. And many more rights we take for granted are denied by law. The Prison Reform Litigation Act, passed in 1995, makes it very difficult for prisoners suffering physical abuse to file suit, and limits the number of times a prisoner can litigate as a poor person (and thus have filing claims waived).
The Prison Reform Litigation Act harkens back to what is known as the “hands-off” period, when, before the civil rights era brought concerns about rights and discrimination to the fore, prisoners were considered slaves of the state. Prisoners were legally invisible, and deliberately so–judges were worried that prisoners’ claims would clog up the court system. (For the same reason, at least in North Carolina, for a very long time new trials were not granted in criminal cases even if new evidence appeared.) This began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, when inside and outside prisons, people began to force the government to acknowledge their rights. But it was not until the 1970s that Supreme Court Justice Byron White asserted that “There is no Iron Curtain between the Constitution and the prisons of this country.”
