“Forcing those who cannot understand their punishment to live the remainder of their days behind bars appears to be exactly the type of excessive and cruel punishment that the Eighth Amendment was meant to protect against.”
California Prison Reform
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is pushing forward with an appeal which seeks to roll back court oversight over the settlement’s remedial plan — a legal agreement mandating sweeping reforms at the state prison, where incarcerated people with disabilities have said they’ve experienced widespread abuse and retaliation from corrections staff.
50 years after Attica uprising
In March 2021, the Bureau of Justice Statistics revealed that around a quarter of the 24,848 incarcerated people it surveyed across 364 prisons had an intellectual, developmental or cognitive disability. Across the entire prison and jail network, that would equate to some 550,000 people.
Abuse of disabled inmates
Inmates at the state prison in Lancaster in 2010.
(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)