In the February 28 issue of Commonweal, Michael Chapman, inmate No. 98764 at the Louisiana State Prison, Camp J, Angola, Louisiana, reflected on why prisoners become “hardened.” He listed a series of factors and concluded: “Add to that having to deal with a cold, callous, uncaring prison system, and a judicial system more interested in the money.”
Now, much of the nation has heard about another Camp J inmate, No. 91888. He is thirty-two-year-old Keith J. Hudson, sentenced to twenty years for armed robbery. Last month the Supreme Court, by a vote of 7 to 2, ruled that Hudson’s constitutional rights were violated by prison guards at Angola in 1983. They heat him en route to a solitary confinement cell, striking him repeatedly in the head, face, and body, even though he was handcuffed and shackled. There were no amateur video cameras present (although two corroborating witnesses did come forward later). Hudson got “only” a battered face and body, a split lip, loosened teeth, and a broken dental plate. But he took up his pen and, unassisted, filed a complaint. He sought $50,000 in damages and an order “to prohibit cruelty to myself and other inmates housed at Camp J.”
In 1987, a judge awarded Hudson $800 in damages, not only for the physical abuse, but for the crude and racist remarks made by the guards. In 1990, however, a three-judge federal court of appeals reversed the decision. The judges wrote that the guards had used unreasonable, excessive, and wanton force, but that their actions had not been unconstitutional.
Hudson appealed to the Supreme Court. In his petition he argued that the appeals court had failed to protect his rights, guaranteed by the Eighth Amendment, against cruel and unusual punishment. The appeals court ruling fell short, he wrote, because of its negligence in not “considering the ‘mental injury’ sustained, which is more significant than physical damage.” Writing for the Court majority, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor agreed that Hudson’s Eighth Amendment rights had been violated: “When prison officials maliciously and sadistically use force to cause harm, contemporary standards of decency always are violated.”
Simple enough. Justice had been righted; case closed. Not quite.
In fact, the Court’s Hudson decision has much more to teach. In his dissenting opinion, signed also by Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that “a use of force that causes only insignificant harm to a prisoner may be immoral, it may be tortious, it may be criminal…but it is not ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ ” under the Constitution.
Last fall during his confirmation hearings, Justice Thomas told the Senate Judiciary Committee that almost every day he looked out the window of his appeals court office to see bus loads of prisoners being driven away. He told the committee that he hoped to bring “something different to the Court,” an understanding of the underprivileged.
Thomas’s dissent in Hudson may indicate the thrust of his judicial doctrine, but it shows little understanding of inmates and less compassion. The Eighth Amendment, Thomas writes, does not generally apply to prisoners because the framers of the Constitution “simply did not conceive of the Eighth Amendment as protecting inmates from harsh treatment.” Furthermore, he states, the Court’s majority finding is “yet another manifestation of the pervasive view that the Federal Constitution must address all ills in our society….The Eighth Amendment is not, and should not be turned into, a national code of prison regulation.”
Since ascending to the Court, Justice Thomas’s decisions have been consistent: in every case but one (a death-sentence case in which he was the lone dissenter) he has voted with Justice Scalia. Thomas’s votes include the limiting of political asylum for refugees fleeing forced conscription (in the case of a young Guatemalan, fearful that rebels in that country’s civil war would murder him if he did not join their ranks); the refusal to stay the deportation of Haitian refugees; limitation on the scope of the Voting Rights Act in an Alabama case in which newly elected black representatives were stripped of some of their powers by white commissioners before they could take their seats; and a weakening of National Labor Relations Board regulations that allowed union organizers to leaflet in parking lots adjacent to stores they are attempting to organize.
Yet, it is his strongly written dissent in Hudson that most clearly articulates Thomas’s approach to the law and how it affects vulnerable individuals it is meant to protect. Not only had Hudson not suffered “a serious deprivation,” according to Thomas, but the Court had extended him constitutional protection “beyond all reasonable limits.” In her majority opinion, Justice O’Connor countered Thomas head on. His dissent, she wrote, ignores the “concepts of dignity, civilized standards, humanity, and decency” that animate the Eighth Amendment.
Back at Angola, where 85 percent of the inmates are black, word has spread of Thomas’s opinion. Wilbert Rideau, editor of the prison newspaper, reacted this way: “[Thomas] has forgotten his roots, or may remember them too well and…is trying to distance himself from them,” he told a reporter. “There’s no sense of obligation, no sensitivity, no nothing.” Justice Thomas’s direction ought to be a concern for all of us, whether on the “inside” or the “outside.” For like some Camp J inmates, he too has a lifetime term. Unfortunately, already it seems to be hardening him.
