To Seek a Newer World: Prisoners’ Rights at the Frontier

Three Supreme Court decisions from this year could cause a massive shakeup in the law of prisoners’ rights. Kingsley v. Hendrickson not only alters the standard for use of force claims brought by pretrial detainees but suggests that the lower courts have gotten nearly every standard for claims by pretrial detainees dead wrong. Holt v. Hobbs jettisoned prior precedent on the standard for prisoners’ religious exercise claims — a ruling that throws hundreds of lower court decisions out the door. And a concurrence by Justice Kennedy in Davis v. Ayala signals that the Court may be poised to decide whether solitary confinement violates the Eighth Amendment. Why all of this now? Perhaps because the high court has not escaped a revolution in the politics and perception of mass incarceration.