Why Supreme Court's CA Prison Ruling is Good for Health Reform

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Source: Rolling Stone
By Tim Dickinson

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision mandating that California free 46,000 inmates from its cruel and unusual prison system is one of the most liberal decisions to emerge from the Roberts court. And considered primarily as a ruling about health care, it ought boost the spirits of defenders of Obamacare.

Writing for the majority, the Court's swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, stakes out a vision of government power and responsibility as it relates to health care that could easily have been penned by his former liberal colleague justice Stevens:

To incarcerate, society takes from prisoners the means to provide for their own needs. Prisoners are dependent on the State for food, clothing, and necessary medical care. A prison’s failure to provide sustenance for inmates “may actually produce physical ‘torture or a lingering death.’” Just as a prisoner may starve if not fed, he or she may suffer or die if not provided adequate medical care. A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society.

To give you a sense of how out of step Kennedy's expansive legal reasoning is from the right-wing justices whose decisions he habitually joins, look at the pissy dissent written by Justice Scalia (co-signed by Justice Thomas). Scalia calls the majority's invocation of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment "preposterous" because not all inmates suffer equally; the California penal system is also "undoubtedly" populated, Scalia writes, by "fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym."

More at: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/why-supreme-courts-ca-prison-ruling-is-good-for-health-reform-20110524