Prisoners across the country were filing too many lawsuits.
There was the Missouri prisoner who sued because his facility didn’t have salad bars on the weekends.
Hatch insisted it wouldn’t affect prisoners who raised legitimate claims.
A few attorneys general from red and blue states alike took their case toThe New York Times.
“It was about resources,” a former attorney general who backed the legislation said.
“You are just struggling to run what was then the state’s largest law office.
So to me it was a question of degrees.
Some elected officials issued warnings.
In April 1996, Clinton signed the PLRA into law.
The PLRA changed that, effectively carving out a separate and unequal system for prisoners.
Prisoners could now winmonetary damages only if the harm they endured was physical, rather than mental or emotional.
The senators were right that there had been an uptick in prisoner lawsuits.
But legal scholars have found that the rate of prisoner legal filings had actually stayed relatively consistent.
Schlanger examined prisoner filings again in 2022 and found that the filing rate never rebounded.
Cases that prisoners have filed since the law’s passage, she found, have struggled to succeed.
Here’s what it takes.
But the vast majority clearly involved claims of substantive harm.
These include the case of Kenneth Coleman, a Florida prisoner.
He lost his case for failing to complete the prison’s grievance process before filing suit.
His case was dismissed at screening for failure to properly state his legal claim.
The Louisiana and Colorado corrections departments declined to comment on the record.
When prisoners' cases are knocked out by the PLRA, they rarely succeed on appeal.
Such appeals, BI found, failed nine out of 10 times.
“It is malicious, vindictive, and grossly unfair.”
Two years later, the lumps had grown considerably, Harrison’s complaint said.
Harrison said Hakala again assured him that nothing was wrong.
Concerned by what had become a gnarled mass, the doctor ordered a biopsy.
At 31 years old, Harrison was told he had a rare form of skin cancer.
He wore a bandage for months as his chest slowly healed, and he lived with debilitating pain.
His case was dismissed during screening.
As in many claims dismissed at screening, the judge gave Harrison 30 days to file an amended complaint.
“It just tilts the playing field against prisoners across the board.”
Several cases in BI’s sample dismissed at screening involved claims that negligence had left prisoners with permanent disabilities.
Eight prisoners who alleged that they’d been sexually assaulted had their cases dismissed at screening.
Prisoners in multiple cases said that requirement came with consequences.
But her I-60s to Hamilton went unanswered and the abuse continued, she said.
The office of the Texas attorney general, which represented Hamilton, did not respond to queries.
In early June 2016, officials moved Ornelas to a different prison.
“I couldn’t believe it was so hard to report something like that,” Ornelas said.
“They just completely ignored and disregarded the sexual-abuse report.”
Legal scholars have described prison grievance procedures as something out of Kafka.
In Florida, a grievance can be rejected if more than one issue is discussed in a single form.
In West Virginia, only one staple may be used to attach the pages.
Once filed, the form may go into oblivion.
“Nine times out of 10 it’s going in the garbage.”
She called this cycle the “prison pleading trap.”
The Arkansas Department of Corrections did not respond to queries.
The statute of limitations for civil suits is typically measured in years.
But most prisoners must file a grievance on a much tighter timeline.
If they don’t file on time, they can’t win in court later.
Paul Schnell, Minnesota’s corrections commissioner, said the department continually tries to improve its grievance system.
He expressed surprise at the lieutenant’s claim, “given the number of grievances we get.”
“If the door is closed for people, that’s not OK,” he said.
“We want to ensure people have a mechanism” for exercising their due-process rights.
In any case, filing a grievance comes with risks.
The risk of retaliation from other prisoners and staff, as Ornelas feared in Texas.
Or the risk of formal punishment.
Unintended consequences
From the moment it was enacted, the PLRA faced intense criticism.
“On the meritorious cases, prisoners just don’t have rights.”
“Theprocess is broken,” he said, quoting a letter his son wrote from prison.
“It feels like I’m playing poker in a rigged game.”
Hefoundthat the Nevada prisoner hadn’t filed suit because he preferred chunky peanut butter over creamy.
“I readily acknowledge that $2.50 is not a large sum of money,” Newman wrote.
“But such a sum is not trivial to the prisoner whose limited prison funds are improperly debited.”
“The complaint concerned dangerously unhealthy prison conditions, not the lack of a salad bar.”
Decades later, it was as if Newman’s article had never appeared.
His brief used the word “frivolous” 48 times.
