Nolan v. Fitzpatrick’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

4 federal appellate · 1 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““2. So far as I know, no research has been performed on the effects of permitting or forbidding prisoners to correspond with the press. There is no published body of scholarly or professional opinion on whether such correspondence would be a good or a bad thing from the penological viewpoint. 3. When prisoners riot or go on strike, one of their demands is almost always access to reporters. Prisoners often feel that, in ordinary circumstances, they have no effective way of bringing their griev anees to public attention. Costly anil destructive prison riots are primarily designed to call public attention to felt abuses, rather than to bring about escape. Over the years, despite the good intentions of prison personnel, public concern and newspaper publicity have tended to be indispensable factors in bringing about prison reform, and these in turn have often resulted from prison disorders. Although one can never be sure, I think there is a good chance that letting prisoners correspond with newspapers and broadcasters would facilitate prison discipline by providing prisoners with a nonviolent and effective outlet for their grievances. In general, I think that the development of more effective correctional practices would be helped by greater ventilation of prison problems. 4. To the extent that correspondence with the press actually brought about reforms making prisons more effective and humane, it would, of course, favor the rehabilitation of prisoners. Being allowed to write to ”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Burnham v. Oswald