Solitary Confinement and Prison Labor: Exploring the Legal Ambiguity Surrounding Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Boasting the largest incarceration rate in the world, the United States’ treatment of its nearly two million prisoners has been the basis for legal scrutiny since the country’s inception. The vagueness of the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution has allowed for constant redefinition of how “cruel and unusual punishment” towards prisoners is understood throughout America. For instance, in the Supreme Court case Estelle v. Gamble (1976), a prisoner’s work-related injury caused him to be punished and denied adequate medical attention. As a result, the court ruled that the prisoner’s constitutional rights had been violated, creating the  precedent that the deprivation of necessary services or items to prisoners also qualified as cruel and unusual. More famously, the highly contentious issue of capital punishment has been either permitted or prohibited in prisons across state lines due to rulings regarding the Eighth Amendment; the absence of widespread legal consistency allowing for the injection of moral beliefs in decisions. For far too long, the ambiguity of the phrase “cruel and unusual punishment” has wrongfully protected many American prison systems from legal accountability for a multitude of mistreatments against prisoners–-including, but not limited to–a lack of basic worker’s rights and subjugation to solitary confinement.

If medically able, all U.S. prisoners are required to participate in some form of labor, usually in the form of maintenance, factory, or field work. However, because of a number of legal barriers, including staggeringly low wages, ranging from about 10 to 60 cents an hour, and an inability to unionize, prisoners are treated as second-class laborers. On one hand, the reality that U.S. prisoners are unable to access the same legal protections as regular citizens permits a larger range of workplace abuses. On the other hand, applications of the Eighth Amendment do establish, at the very least, some prison labor rights, leading to tension between the abusive and protective policies. The result of these two conditions is an often contradictory and inconsistent standard of what is legally acceptable. Some legal scholars, like Colleen Dougherty writing in the University of Pennsylvania's Legal Scholarship Repository, go as far as stating, “the body of caselaw that has denied inmates from seeking remedies for prison-related injuries cannot be consistent with the Eighth Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment.” The source case law failure that Dougherty mentions is primarily a number of opposing rulings and an unclear standard across federal districts. In a case that was decided in the Ninth Circuit, Morgan v. Morgensen (2006), an inmate named Steven Morgan noticed that a piece of factory equipment that he worked with was becoming increasingly hazardous and defective, which he reported to his supervisor, Tom Canady. Officials at Monroe Correctional Complex repeatedly told him to return to working with the dangerous equipment, which eventually tore some of Morgan’s fingers off.  Ultimately, the Ninth Circuit found the supervisor and prison to be in violation of the Eighth Amendment, citing officials being indifferent to measures of safety to be enough to establish grounds for a constitutional violation.

Conversely, the Eighth Circuit case Bibbs v. Armontrout (1991) settled a dispute between a prisoner who lost portions of his hand to a manufacturing machine at the Missouri State Penitentiary. The defendant alleged that creating a hazardous risk within the workplace violated his right to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, a claim that was not upheld in court as the Eight Circuit sided with the penitentiary. In Bibbs, the courts re-established the landmark precedent set in Wilson v. Seiter (1991), in which the Supreme Court argued "only the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain implicates the Eighth Amendment." The lack of widespread legal consensus regarding harm within prison labor is a source of mistreatment across the country. While these harms have yet to be clearly established within constitutional law, recent research from the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic and the American Civil Liberties Union found that the vast majority of prison labor practices were in direct violation of many basic human rights. The first-of-its-kind study concluded that 64% of workers worried about their safety while working, while more than three-quarters reported facing harsh punishments if they refused to work. Regardless of the seemingly glaring inhumane conditions across the American prison system, the ambivalence of legal precedent surrounding the issue has yet to adequately and consistently apply the Eighth Amendment across the country.

Similar to the questions of “cruel and unusual punishment” and fundamental human rights raised by prison labor, solitary confinement–a practice that remains constitutionally protected–is yet another subdivision of Eighth Amendment cases that often consists of contradictions. In the case of Farmer v. Brennan (1994), when a transitioning woman was placed in the dangerous situation of the jail’s male general population and was consequently severely assaulted, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the failure to protect someone from substantial risk of harm is indeed cruel and unusual punishment. However, there is a well-established link within academic research between solitary confinement and significant harm to individuals who are forced to endure it. The Prison Policy Initiative, for instance, reports that “the effects of solitary confinement on mental health can be lethal. Even though people in solitary confinement comprise only 6% to 8% of the total prison population, they account for approximately half of those who die by suicide.” Though the correlation between adverse mental illness and solitary confinement is well established, many federal courts have distinguished between this practice and other forms of physical torture. Unfortunately, clarity on the issue at the Supreme Court level seems unlikely in the near future. As recently as April 2023, a petition for the case to be pushed to the Supreme Court was denied in the case Hope v. Harris (2022). Defendant Dennis Wayne Hope was sentenced to 27 years of solitary confinement, and if accepted, the case would have settled the contradictions across federal circuits. As it stands at least five federal circuits rule that solitary in some circumstances violates the Eighth Amendment, while three others disagree. Legal professor John F. Stinneford disagrees with the Court’s rejection from an originalist perspective:

The word “cruel” was originally understood to mean “unjustly harsh” and the word “unusual” was understood to mean “contrary to long usage.” … Judged against this original meaning, the twenty-six consecutive years of solitary confinement to which Petitioner Dennis Wayne Hope has been subjected flagrantly violates the Eighth Amendment.

Like many of the country’s most contentious legal issues, clarity by means of Supreme Court decisions regarding prison laborer abuse and solitary confinement seem to remain uncertain for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the upholding of the Eighth Amendment continues to lack consistent legal precedent, sustaining inhumane treatment of prisoners in select parts of the country. Consequently, a substantial yet legally underrepresented faction of the American population is left to continue their fights through cases and appeals, with the future of prison rights appearing as vague and undefined as its history.

Edited by Jaaziel Olayinka