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October 9, 2021

"Creating Cautionary Tales: Institutional, Judicial, and Societal Indifference to the Lives of Incarcerated Individuals"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new article authored by Nicole Godfrey available via SSRN.  Here is its abstract:

As the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on American society in the spring of 2020, advocates for incarcerated people began sounding alarm bells alerting society to the impending devastation for incarcerated people once the coronavirus scaled the prison walls.  For too many incarcerated people, the alarms fell on deaf ears and the COVID-19 pandemic has had life-shattering consequences for thousands of individuals locked inside American prisons.  But to anyone with an understanding of the historical realities of and legal parameters around the American carceral state, the devastation came as no surprise.

Since the 1980s, America has led the world in imprisoning its own citizens, and, to many, American justice means locking human beings in overcrowded cages and throwing away the key.  This Article explores how American criminal “justice” has created a system wherein three interconnected strands of indifference render incarcerated people particularly vulnerable to devastating harms like those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.  First, the sheer enormity of the American carceral state has led to the creation of prison bureaucracies that operate with institutional indifference to the lives of the incarcerated.  Sympathetic to the complex task of administering enormous prison systems, the federal judiciary has created a doctrine of judicial indifference to harms experienced to incarcerated people.  Finally, the Article explores how a general societal indifference to the lives of incarcerated individuals in particular and marginalized groups in general has allowed the institutional and judicial indifference to develop and proliferate.  The Article posits that the damaging consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the incarcerated population are directly tied to these interwoven indifferences and calls on widespread reform and decarceration to avoid future cautionary tales.

October 9, 2021 at 11:11 AM | Permalink

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