The Just Barely Sustainable California Prisoners’ Rights Ecosystem

Margo Schlanger

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2016, vol. 664, issue 1, 62-81

Abstract: Nationwide, litigation currently plays a far smaller role as a corrections oversight mechanism than in decades past, a change largely caused by the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). Yet no such decline is evident in the nation’s most populous state, California, where prisoners’ rights litigation remains enormously influential and was the trigger to the criminal justice “Realignment†that is the subject of this volume. Indeed, every prison in California is subject to numerous ongoing court orders governing conditions of confinement. This article examines why California is different. It argues that California’s very large bar includes a critical mass of highly expert prisoners’ rights lawyers. Working for both nonprofits and for-profit firms, they benefited from a pipeline of large-scale, pre-PLRA, fees-paying cases that sustained them while they learned to cope with the statutory obstacles. And the Ninth Circuit’s hospitable bench awarded them some favorable fee-related rulings in support of their coping strategies. In short, they learned how to—just barely—maintain a prisoners’ rights docket, notwithstanding very substantial financial hurdles. They continue to litigate old and new cases, but ongoing challenges pose a real threat to the fragile litigation ecosystem they have created.

Keywords: prison; litigation; civil rights; Realignment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716215598972 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:664:y:2016:i:1:p:62-81

DOI: 10.1177/0002716215598972

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().