NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL: Members of the Supreme Court rarely speak publicly about their views on the sorts of issues that are likely to come before them. So it was notable when Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer recently and talked about the plight of the American criminal justice system…
“The corrections system is one of the most overlooked, misunderstood institutions we have in our entire government,” he said. He chastised the legal profession for being focused only on questions of guilt and innocence, and not what comes after. “We have no interest in corrections,” he said. “Nobody looks at it.”…
Justice Kennedy has often talked about human dignity in his nearly three decades on the court, and that principle figured into his assessment of one of the most widely used control techniques in modern American prisons: solitary confinement. The practice “literally drives men mad,” he said, describing one case the justices heard recently involving a man who had been held in isolation for 25 years… (more)
