Prisons: Cruel & Unusual Punishment

Convicted of assault with force during an attempted rape, Robert C. Jordan Jr. was sent to California’s Soledad prison in 1958 for an “indeterminate” sentence of six months to ten years—with a chance for early parole if he behaved. He did not. By last year, Jordan was a familiar tenant of Soledad’s Adjustment Center, in what the prison calls a “strip cell” for “incorrigibles.”

On his last visit to one of the totally bare cells, claimed Jordan, he was kept naked for almost eleven days, deprived of heat, light, bedding, ventilation, medical treatment and the most basic sanitary facilities. He appealed to San Francisco’s U.S. District Judge George B. Harris, who thereupon indignantly issued his circuit’s first federal injunction against state prison officials. Impressed with Jordan’s “clear and convincing” testimony, which vividly described cells caked with human excrement, Judge Harris saw a patent violation of the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against “cruel and unusual punishment.” He ordered California to clean up strip cells in keeping with the “primal rules of a civilized community.”