Deliberately Silenced

The Prison Litigation Reform Act is celebrating its 30^th birthday this year. It was designed to make it harder for incarcerated people to file lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of their conditions of confinement and to restrict their remedies even when they do so successfully. It has been wildly effective at achieving those objectives. It has also propped up mass incarceration and facilitated the persistence of dismal conditions of confinement in carceral facilities in the United States.<br><br>The PLRA’s exhaustion requirement—arguably its most damaging provision—silences carceral voices without regard for the merit of their complaints. It does so by mandating dismissal of prisoner plaintiff complaints if the plaintiffs have not managed to navigate labyrinthine carceral grievance procedures before filing their lawsuits. It thereby violates the tenants of social psychology’s procedural justice theory. It also causes profound epistemic injustice, while compounding the epistemic injustices already relevant to carceral populations. This Article thus confronts the dual procedural justice and epistemic injustice harms of PLRA exhaustion.<br><br>In this moment in the United States, where we are seeing a resurgence of tough-on-crime fearmongering (in spite of dropping crime rates), confronting the humanity of incarcerated people and the corrosive dehumanizing reality of carceral conditions is as essential as it has ever been. That means it’s beyond time to put a stop to the PLRA’s deliberate silencing of carceral voices, especially through its exhaustion requirement. The Prison Litigation Reform Act deserves no more birthdays.