soners. Forty state prison systems became subject to federal court orders which mandated that practices such as flogging and the failure to maintain adequate recreation, diet and hygiene violated the Eighth Amendment's ban against cruel and unusual punishment. In 1965, Congress enacted the Pell grant program and a small (less than one percent) portion of funds appropriated thereunder was used to finance educational programs for indigent prisoners.
Reasons for the Backlash of the 1990s
Beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the present time, public attitudes toward the treatment of prisoners hardened. A 1995 Time/CNN poll showed that 67 percent of those surveyed thought that inmates were treated too leniently. The reasons for this shift in public attitudes were as follows:
(1)Frivolous law suits. A 1961 Supreme Court case provided prisoners with direct access to the federal courts for the protection of their civil rights. Provided access to lawyers paid for by the government, indigent prisoners flooded the courts with law suits, which amounted to 33,000 cases in 1993, 15 percent of all federal civil cases. Dunn called most of these suits "a bounty of frivolous and groundless complaints," including a one million dollar claim against a state prison based on a guard's refusal to refrigerate a prisoner's ice cream and another case based on a state prison's refusal to provide a prisoner with chunky peanut butter.
(2) Prison overcrowding. In a 1981 case, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution "does not mandate comfortable prisons" and that state measures to double up convicts in cells to relieve overcrowding were constitutional so long as they did not "violate a contemporary standard of decency." By 1995, 1.5 million prisoners were in state and federal prisons and in jail holding facilities, an increase of approximately 700 percent since 1960. The rate of incarceration reached a nation-wide average of 455 persons ...