Notable new Business Insider analysis of prisoner Eighth Amendment lawsuits

Business Insider has recently published a series of pieces focused on prison Eighth Amendment lawsuits. The full title of this leading piece provide a summary of its findings and themes: "The gutting of the Eighth Amendment: When less than 1% of cases prevail, does a prisoner's right to be free of 'cruel and unusual punishments' still exist?". The piece is an interesting read, and here are a few excerpts:

The Eighth Amendment, which bars "cruel and unusual punishments," was intended by the founders as a bulwark against prisoner abuse. Over the years it came to mean any treatment that "shocked the conscience."  But prisoners and civil-rights attorneys have said that it is now nearly impossible to win such claims in court.

To investigate whether that constitutional protection holds, a Business Insider team read tens of thousands of pages of court records for nearly 1,500 Eighth Amendment complaints, including every appeals court case with an opinion we could locate filed from 2018 to 2022 citing the relevant precedent-setting Supreme Court cases and standards.  We reviewed hundreds of pages of training materials, medical records, incident reports, and surveillance footage.  We read cases from prisoners convicted of violent and nonviolent crimes — some who have spent decades behind bars for murder or sexual assault, others sentenced to short stints for marijuana possession or third-degree assault.  We spoke with more than 170 people, including prisoners and their families, attorneys and legal scholars, correctional staff and prison healthcare providers, and current and former federal judges.

We uncovered a near evisceration of protections for this nation's 1.2 million prisoners, largely propelled by legal standards and laws put into place at the height of the war on drugs.  In our analysis, plaintiffs prevailed in only 11 cases, including two class actions — less than 1%.  "If a right is unenforceable, then it's not much of a right," Paul Grimm, a former federal judge for the District of Maryland, said after reviewing BI's findings. "It is essentially unavailable."

Here are links to the other pieces in the series of notable articles:

• "Debunking the myth of 'frivolous' prisoner suits"
• "The Supreme Court's 'deliberate indifference' trap"
• "It's not excessive force unless it's 'malicious and sadistic'"
• "Federal courts have sanctioned medical neglect by private contractors"
• "Only 1% of prisoners win their claims. Here's what it takes."
• "How we analyzed 1,488 prisoner suits"