From Brennan Center for Justice:
Correctional institutions — prisons and jails — are considered closed facilities. Few visitors gain access to these institutions, even though they house people for months, years, decades, and, sometimes, entire lifetimes. As Justice Kennedy wrote in his 2015 concurrence to the Court’s opinion in Davis v. Ayala, “Prisoners are shut away—out of sight, out of mind, ” while their conditions of confinement are “too easily ignored” by the public and the legal academy.
These institutions are also coercive environments with marked power differentials between corrections staff and incarcerated people that make facilities ripe for abuse. Because jails and prisons exert total authority over individuals’ bodies and liberty, transparency and accountability are necessary to ensure that facilities uphold their duty of care to respect the dignity of people who are imprisoned and ensure that prisons are safe and secure.
One way to achieve the goals of transparency and accountability, while ensuring safe and humane conditions of confinement, is a formal and independent system of oversight of jail and prison operations. As the Brennan Center has noted before, although the U.S. has more people behind bars than any other country on the planet, “it lacks a cohesive or integrated system of oversight for its vast network of prisons and jails.” Continue reading >>>
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