Wednesday, June 24, 1998

Court opens gate for suits against prisons

The U.S. Supreme Court, in ruling the other day that the Americans With Disabilities Act applies to inmates in state prisons, has thus opened the spigot for a gush of lawsuits and has assured that state taxpayers will have to fork over many millions for major renovations benefiting felons whose chief hardship is the confinement they went out of their way to earn.

All of that might be justified if the ruling had anything much to do with the Constitution the court is theoretically supposed to be upholding, but you find yourself wondering what constitutional principle is at stake here.

The justices seemed much taken by the fact that Congress had not specifically excluded prisons in saying state agencies must comply with the law. The Bill of Rights, however, does not specifically exclude prisoners, and all those rights are to some extent abridged when criminals are incarcerated.

Interstate commerce?

Even if Congress had pointedly said states must take a host of steps for the sake of disabled inmates, it’s hard to see how that could have been constitutional. Congress found its justification for the act in the interstate commerce clause. By what stretch of the imagination would it facilitate trade between states — the purpose of that clause — to more solicitously accommodate inmates deemed disabled?

The Supreme Court’s answer was to say this issue was off bounds because it had not been brought up in the lower courts.

Keep in mind, too, that it’s not as if the states are making life especially miserable for inmates who happen to fall under some overly broad definition of being handicapped. In the case the court decided, the complaint was nothing more than that a man with high blood pressure stayed in prison longer than if he had been allowed to participate in a boot camp. (Suppose he had been so allowed and had suffered a heart attack. Guess who then would have sued whom and who probably would have won.)

The high court said changes in prison operations and facilities and lower court responses to suits by inmates can and should be limited to what is “reasonable.” We’ll see.

During the hearing on this case, Justice Clarence Thomas raised the possibility of somebody being sentenced to prison and then claiming the disability of claustrophobia. He may have thought he was indulging in hyperbole; but some prisoner may very well do just that sometime down the road, and some court may very well follow the “reasonableness” example of the highest court in the land and rule in his favor.