XI. Conclusion

The PLRA has had a devastating effect on the ability of incarcerated persons to protect their health and safety and vindicate other fundamental rights. While justified by the PLRA’s sponsors as necessary to prevent frivolous lawsuits, the requirement that prisoners first take their complaints through the facility’s grievance system, no matter how complicated or multilayered the process or how short the deadlines, has barred relief for prisoner claims regardless of their merit. The provision prohibiting compensation for “mental or emotional injury” unless accompanied by physical injury has placed an entire category of improper and even abusive staff behavior beyond the reach of the law. And the PLRA’s application to children has made it even more difficult for courts to protect the rights of this vulnerable population, even in cases of ongoing physical or sexual abuse.

Even some judges who stand to benefit from reduced workload as a result of the PLRA have found the law unhelpful. One federal appellate judge expressed his frustration:

I ... wonder aloud why this sort of administrative/procedural detail under the PLRA has to be so complicated. I'd say that when an experienced district judge ... is reversed three times in the same case on a little point like this, something is rotten in Denmark.... I always thought the PLRA was supposed to make the handling of prisoner litigation more efficient. If that's its goal, and this sort of thing is its result, Congress should go back to the drawing board.[169]

Thirteen years after the enactment of the PLRA, it is time for Congress to amend the law.

Prisons, jails, and juvenile detention facilities are unique environments. On the one hand, they are places where liberty is severely restricted—where men, women, and children live, often for years or decades at a time, under the constant surveillance and near-absolute power of custodial staff. Even their ability to communicate with the outside world is restricted, with letters and telephone calls subject to monitoring and censorship.

At the same time these facilities are, of necessity, closed institutions to which outside access is limited. Most prisons severely restrict access by the news media and many flatly prohibit media interviews with prisoners, practices that have been upheld by the US Supreme Court.[170] Therefore, the kind of public and media scrutiny that helps prevent abuses of power in other government institutions simply does not operate in places of incarceration.

This combination of virtually unlimited power and lack of transparency creates a potential for abuse—a potential that, as this report makes clear, is realized all too frequently in prisons, jails, and juvenile detention facilities. If abuse is to be prevented, and remedied when it does occur, there must be an outside agency with the power to compel access to information and order a remedy in appropriate cases.

In the United States this role has historically been carried out by the federal courts. But the PLRA, by erecting barriers to court access that apply only to incarcerated persons, has severely limited the ability of the courts to perform this function. Reasonable amendments to the PLRA would remove these barriers while leaving intact the law’s central feature: the preliminary screening of prisoner cases and early dismissal if they are plainly without merit. Congress should enact these amendments without delay to restore the rule of law to prisons, jails, and juvenile detention facilities in the United States.