Abstract
This article analyzes the rise and fall of prison litigation by examining the case of Landman v. Royster, a class-action lawsuit launched by inmates at the Virginia State Penitentiary in 1969. In 1968, an integrated group of prisoners initiated a work stoppage, to which prison officials retaliated with disciplinary action—brutal in its own right but also imposed without due process. The litigation that emerged from this conflict demolished a century-old tradition, known as the “hands-off doctrine,” of courts treating prisoners as “slaves of the state” and deferring to prison officials. In establishing prisoners’ rights to procedural fairness, Landman was at the forefront of a judicial trend of reforming public institutions and addressing the rights of marginalized groups. In winning Landman, inmates challenged their status as “slaves of the state” and curtailed the unchecked despotism of prison officials, revealing that prison litigation had the potential to undermine the functioning of the prison. As such, prisoners and their opponents were integral to a concurrent national debate about who deserved state protection and the rights of citizenship. However, precisely because the waves of prisoner litigation that ensued coincided with and aggravated calls for law and order, in response, lawmakers erected procedural hurdles to insulate the prison from judicial review once again. As a result, by 1996, with the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, prisoners were returned to a kind of civil death.
