Reform At Long Last

• After more than a century's worth of overcrowding, violence, corruption, and abuse conditions were eventually ameliorated at the Tennessee State Penitentiary due to the landmark class-action lawsuit of Grubbs v. Bradley. Filed by the inmates themselves, the lawsuit ruled – among other things – that because the conditions in Tennessee's Adult Prison System violated the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the Eighth Amendment; it was therefore unconstitutional. The 1982 Grubbs v. Bradley decision sparked a wave of prison reform across the country and led to the eventual closure of the prison in 1992. Tennessee was forced to relocate a sizable portion of its prison population, including the state’s death row, to a newly constructed facility in Riverbend. The discussions that came out of the Grubbs v. Bradley decision led to the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act, which eliminated many obstacles that stood in the way of prisoners bringing their legal complaints to the courts. It meant that prisoners were now able to bring the courts’ attention to the sub-human conditions that could be found in prisons nationwide.