.

             Meanwhile, the pendulum swung back toward "harsher, moire punitive treatment of prisoners," according to the HRW. And Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, an advocate for allowing individual correctional facilities to make their own rules, is quoted as writing this about the Eighth Amendment: .

             "For generations, judges and commentators regarded the Eighth Amendment as applying only to torturous punishments meted out by statutes or sentencing judges, and not generally to any hardship that might befall a prisoner during incarceration." What Thomas was advocating - which was not the rule of thumb during the 1960s and 1970s - did indeed become the general rule in the 1980s and 1990s. .

             What caused the change in approach from protecting prisoners' rights to a hard line against prisoners? Several factors came into to play to reduce public concern about the rights of prisoners. One, the media became focused on the fact that incarceration had little if anything to do with rehabilitation; indeed, prisons were just huge holding tanks for criminals, keeping dangerous people off the streets. Two, there was a lot of attention paid to the high rates of recidivism (repeat crimes by those let out of prison). .

             Three, conservative judges (like Thomas) were appointed to prominent court positions by President Ronald Reagan - many of them, according to HRW, "anxious to repudiate the 'activist' approach represented by close judicial monitoring of prison conditions." Four, there was a sense of public outrage over the stereotype of the "pampered prison living in a college campus-like setting, watching television all day, and filing frivolous lawsuits over petty grievances." .

             'As generally portrayed in the media," HRW writes, "inmate litigation was reduced to stories of prisoners who went to court over broken cookies and lukewarm soup." Rarely were stories of legitimate inmate lawsuits, which challenged horrifying cruelty visited upon inmates, including "unchecked violence, and custodial sexual abuse," ever seen in mass media coverage.