It's crazy that people treat prisoner complaints from the American gulag as if everyone is just whining. We have some of the worst conditions in the developed world.
You do come off as very dismissive. It's kind of like JAQing off. You're not "just asking questions" you're "just offering suggestions." The suggestion here being that everyone take these kind of allegations with a grain of salt. I guess it's not necessity that those views conflict with each other, but they definitely do not seem congruous.
Well, then let me clarify: I know that there are a lot of abuses in the U.S. prison system. It's a national embarrassment, and I would be in no way surprised if these or virtually any other allegations a person might make turned out to be true. It is also true, however, that there is a huge number of meritless suits regarding prison conditions.
I used to work in the federal court system so I've seen both sides of this close up. I've worked on cases (many of them) where prisoners' allegations of hideous abuse were extremely credible including cases where the plaintiffs went on to win at trial, get sizable settlements, etc. At the same time, our courthouse had an entire office dedicated to triaging the enormous number of suits filed by prisoners, only a small percentage of which had any merit. (And this office is, by and large, staffed with very compassionate attorneys who do that job because they're interested in helping prisoners--these are not, on average, people who want, or have any incentive, to just sweep things under the rug.)
That's why I believe both that our prison system is rife with abuse and that the average prisoner complaint has a good chance of being bogus.
> I would be in no way surprised if these or virtually any other allegations a person might make turned out to be true
Sure. That does seemingly contradict the notion that I should take the filings with a grain of salt, though. I shouldn't be surprised if it's true, but I shouldn't think it's likely to be true? I think you need to pick one.
What is your experience with these that is the basis of you sharing these opinions?
Let's not waste effort debating what it means to be "surprised," which is beside the point. All I mean is that there are a lot of meritorious claims, because there genuinely is a lot of abuse. But as a fraction of the claims filed, this remains relatively small because of the extremely large number of unmeritorious claims that are actually filed.
As for my experience: I'm not sure what more information you want beyond what I have already given, except to add: my job in the federal courts included reviewing and advising judges on the small fraction of claims that made it through the triage stage I described earlier and might have had a decent chance of success, as well as occasionally reviewing claims that would otherwise have been filtered out at the triage stage to provide a second opinion.
Do you have any insight into why the less meritorious claims were being filed? I can imagine that given the amount of entirely legal abuse, prisoners attempt to fight back with a swing and a miss. Ofc, some people are just assholes and given they're in prison, they have nothing better to do, but it's pretty annoying to file a suit so I imagine many of them are motivated by something.
I'm not sure I can offer much more than educated speculation, but here it is: I think that prison (especially in America) sucks, even when your legal rights aren't being violated. It's full of indignities and unpleasant conditions. A lot of what makes prison unpleasant may genuinely feel like violations of your rights, even if the law would disagree. As a result, many prisoner suits are about conditions and situations that really are unpleasant, but not illegal. (Some suits also have to do with conditions that are illegal, but which the law requires prisoners to try to get addressed through the prison's own internal grievance system, before resorting to a lawsuit.)
Then mix in the fact that, as a prisoner, you have a lot of time on your hands and one of the few things you can spend your time doing is visiting the prison law library. Even better, if your lawsuit actually goes somewhere, you might have the hope that prison officials will have to take you to court appearances. This stuff would indeed be pretty annoying for most people, but less so for some prisoners (especially compared with their limited alternatives).
Prisoner lawsuits are so plentiful that there is actually a federal law that specifically restricts them, called the Prison Litigation Reform Act[1]. It doesn't block suits altogether, but it limits the situations where a plaintiff can file a suit without paying the filing fees. I have, at best, mixed feelings about it (which parallel my complicated feelings towards prisoner suits generally). But the law's existence helps to illustrate the scale of the problem.
