Last week, a federal court ruling supported claims of inadequate mental health care in Alabama prisons, requiring a review of staffing and cell suicide-proofing measures. The state could be allowed to hire fewer corrections officers to address mental health needs in state prisons under the same ruling last week, according to criminal justice reform advocates.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals last Friday largely sustained U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson’s ruling in the case, known as Braggs v. Lovelace, that inadequate mental health care in the Alabama Department of Corrections constituted cruel and unusual punishment.
“We were very happy with what the opinion says,” said Latasha Dejarnett, senior staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which represented plaintiffs in the case incarcerated in the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), in an interview on Wednesday. “We think that it affirms what we have long believed, which is that relief that was granted by the district court was necessary and warranted. And that the conditions within ADOC are inadequate, and that they don’t meet the level of constitutional care that is required.”
The three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit ordered the lower court to review three parts of the order for mental health remedies, including required staffing numbers; mandated cell configurations aimed at thwarting suicide attempts; and including the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka as part of the mental health remedies.
“The need for staffing is still a great need and is still an important concern,” Dejarnett said. “I still think that is something that Judge Thompson will continue to take seriously. What we, the plaintiffs, will have to show is that there are mental health concerns that exist throughout the prison that require staff to be able to respond to that.”
Michael B. Mushlin, an emeritus law professor at Pace University in New York who wrote a book on the rights of people in prison, said he was “impressed with the care” both Thompson and the 11th Circuit panel gave to the case. “It is really a careful, thoughtful opinion about a really significant issue plaguing American prisons,” he said. “It threads a careful path through this minefield of the Prison Litigation Reform Act.”
Sharon Dolovich, a UCLA law school professor and director of the UCLA Prison Law and Policy Program, also praised the appeals court’s thoroughness with the case. “In a judicial climate where courts are oriented largely in favor of the state, this court did not take the opportunity to easily swat away the district court’s opinion but went systematically through each aspect of the state’s arguments against the district court opinion, and in each case, in a basic application of law and fact, concluded that the district court had met its burden and that the remedial relief order should be upheld,” she said.
