1. The Eyes-On Doctrine
- Author
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Pollock, Ryan Francis
- Subjects
Government regulation ,Judicial power -- Laws, regulations and rules ,Cruel and unusual punishment -- Laws, regulations and rules ,Executive power -- Laws, regulations and rules ,Prison administration -- Laws, regulations and rules ,Separation of powers -- Laws, regulations and rules - Abstract
For decades, American courts have taken for granted that the separation of powers severs the judiciary from prison administration. In its more stringent forms, this idea characterized the so-called "hands-off doctrine." Under the hands-off doctrine, courts would decline to intervene in prison government, even when presented with claims that conditions of life inside prisons were so bad that they violated inmates' constitutional rights. This stringent view fell away over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. But the gist of it survives. The separation-of-powers principle is a pillar of contemporary prison law. It supports vast judicial deference to prison administrators. It tends to rule out injunctive orders that might aim to regulate or remedy conditions of confinement. Courts find prison management to be all but exclusively the political branches' business. This Note discovers an earlier, more reasoned regime. In the thirty-odd years following American independence, the judicial power uniformly came to encompass supervisory authority over prisons. Judges could second-guess the warden. Sometimes they had to. Judges were called upon to appoint prison inspectors, to act on those inspectors' presentments, to frame rules of internal prison government, and to review a sheriff's selection of jailers. In some jurisdictions, on their own motion, they could remove a prison keeper for misbehavior. Nor is that all. The statutes vesting these powers in judges went on the books amid sustained debates over the meaning of the separation of powers, as Founding Era constitutions enshrined that principle. Its major exponents, Thomas Jefferson among them, were sometimes responsible for drafting these statutes and then lobbying for their passage. Across the germinal period of our constitutional and penological history, a ubiquitous, cohesive body of law gave force to the following view: supervision of prison government is consistent with, if not an incident of, a separated judicial power and its exercise. I call it the eyes-on doctrine. This Note argues for its studious revival., NOTE CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 202 I. BENJAMIN RUSH'S ENQUIRY 213 II. THE EYES-ON DOCTRINE IN THE FOUNDING ERA 222 A. Supervisory Authority Vested in Superior Courts 222 1. Virginia 222 2. [...]
- Published
- 2024