South Carolina Is Still Defending Its Neglectful Prisons

TheAtlantic

Over the objections of the state's best editorial writers and some of its leading legislators, South Carolina has chosen to fight a recent court order declaring its prisons to be unconscionable (and unconstitutional) dens of abuse and neglect for mentally ill inmates housed there. Lawyers for the state filed a motion Tuesday with Judge Michael Baxley, the link to which can be found here, asking him to "alter or amend" his January 8th order in which he found that...

… inmates have died in the South Carolina Department of Corrections for lack of basic mental health care, an hundreds more remain substantially at risk for serious physical injury, mental decompensation, and profound, permanent mental illness.

The motion will be denied, as it should be, and then the legal dispute over the treatment of the inmates will move to the state's appellate courts. The process will take years. It will cost a great deal. And so long as state officials are litigating the matter, and proclaiming themselves aggrieved by the rule of law, there is little reason to think that the wretched lives of the inmates will be rendered any safer. They will instead remain citizens with grand rights but no remedies.

The state's motion is remarkable for the assertions it makes that directly contradict the evidence in the case -- and also generally accepted notions of our rule of law. So, for example, after a contested trial in which mountains of evidence of systemic abuse and neglect were proven, including evidence established by the state's own doctors and investigators going back over a decade, the state's lawyers offered this nugget:

Even if the Plaintiffs have presented some evidence of systemic constitutional violations, which the Defendants deny, the extensive remedies ordered by the Court are far in excess of what might be necessary to remedy any alleged violation [emphasis added].

And even though the evidence before Judge Baxley amply established that the state's policies and practices toward mentally ill inmates had caused the death of some of those inmates, and terrible physical and emotional harm to others, state lawyers told the judge that he had erred in ruling against South Carolina because "only extreme deprivations are adequate to satisfy the objective component of an Eighth Amendment claim." Ponder for a moment what would constitute "extreme deprivation" in South Carolina if death doesn't do the trick. (To briefly summarize some of the points I listed in a previous piece, the state's mentally ill inmates were routinely placed naked in small spaces for hours at a time, or left for days sitting in their own feces and urine.)