Months ago, in a nine-year-old lawsuit, a federal judge criticized the medical care at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Many inmates were hopeful that this would be a turning point. In her opinion, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick strongly criticized the state for its “callous and wanton disregard” for the health of those in its custody. “Rather than receiving medical ‘care,’ the inmates are instead subjected to cruel and unusual punishment,” Dick said. She ordered the appointment of three independent monitors to devise and implement a plan to reform the system. That plan, however, may never come to fruition, ProPublica reports. Before those monitors could even be chosen, the state appealed the ruling, invoking a federal law — the Prison Litigation Reform Act — that blocked a similar lawsuit over Angola’s health care nearly 26 years ago. The current case could suffer a similar fate. That class-action suit is before the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
If the ruling is thrown out, it would close off the most viable path for inmates to force improvements to a medical system that Dick found to violate the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment. And it would come as prison policy experts expect many new, tough-on-crime laws to increase the state’s prison population, further straining Angola’s medical system. The Prison Litigation Reform Act was passed to reduce the number of inmate lawsuits, particularly class-action cases that resulted in court-monitored reform efforts. Supporters of the law said it was needed to weed out frivolous suits that tied state officials up in court and invited judges to meddle in how prisons are run. The law “did considerable damage to the ability of courts to be a backstop for safe and constitutional prisons,” said University of Michigan law Profl Margo Schlanger, a former Justice Department civil rights division trial attorney. After the law was passed, inmate lawsuits nationwide dropped by nearly 40%. The percentage of inmates in prisons with court-monitored reforms also decreased.
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