Prisoners maintain some constitutional rights and some
constitutional rights are limited while incarcerated. Prisoners do not have the right
to wages for their work, do not have unlimited right to privacy in their correspondence
or visitations. Prisoners do not have constitutional right to free speech while
incarcerated; however, they are allowed to practice their religion of choice, receive
medical care, and right to seek redress in a limited form for violation for civil
rights. The following cases outline a few of the restrictions of prisoner
rights’.
In Hudson v.
Palmer, 468 U.S. 517, 104 S. Ct. 3194, 82 L. Ed. 2d 393 (1984), the Supreme
Court declared that prisoners do not have a
Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures of their
property because the Fourth Amendment is inapplicable to
them.
Block v. Rutherford, 468 U.S.
576, 104 S. Ct. 3227, 82 L. Ed. 2d 438 [1984] held that prisoners do not have a
constitutional right to enjoy contact visits, as opposed to arrangements where prisoners
are only permitted to talk to visitors over a
telephone
Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S.
97, 97 S. Ct. 285, 50 L. Ed. 2d 251 [1976] held that a prison official's refusal to
provide medical care to a seriously ill inmate violates the Eighth Amendment's
prohibition against cruel and unusual
punishment.
Prisoners can sue
for violation of their constitutional rights, however, he most popular vehicle for
prisoner lawsuits has been a federal civil rights statute, 42 U.S.C.A. § 1983 (1871;
recodifies 1979) which has become more restrictive in the last 10 years. In 1995 the
Prison Litigation Reform Act sought to minimize frivolous prisoner law suits. The
statute requires prisoners to exhaust administrative remedies, expands the federal
courts' ability to dismiss lawsuits and forbids a prisoner from filing an action for
mental or emotional injury without a physical injury.
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