In their 1998 book
Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America, Malcolm M. Feeley and Edward L. Rubin traced the history of prison reform in Arkansas to 1965 and the case of
Talley v. Stephens 247 F. Supp. 683 (1965), a
pro se petition for a writ of
habeas corpus filed in the
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas on behalf of prisoners at
Cummins prison, The presiding judge was Judge
J. Smith Henley, who was familiar with "the long series of scandals involving the Arkansas prison system". and that some aspects of the system were
unconstitutional and ordered administrators to implement changes and report on progress towards implementation. According to an October 1978 article in the
American Bar Association Journal, the ten-year long
litigation against the
Arkansas Department of Correction in
Supreme Court Hutto v. Finney 437 U.S. 678 (1978) began in 1969. SCOTUS determined that the
Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited the practice of using punitive isolation for more than 30 days. Defense attorneys for the prisoners, Philip E. Kaplan and Jack Holt Jr., began their work in December 1969 with the first litigation challenging conditions in the Arkansas prison system. Kaplan and Holt Jr. also defended the prisoners in
Holt v. Sarver. In his 2007 paper published in the
University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, professor Seth F. Kreimer traced the history of court decisions prior to
Hutto v. Finney, in relation to what constitutes "
cruel and unusual punishment" in prison systems, in terms of violating the
Eighth Amendment.
Jackson v. Bishop 404 F.2d 571 (8th Cir. 1968), in which then-judge
Harry Blackmun abolished
corporal punishment in
Arkansas' penitentiary system, "constituted a leading precedent in the application of the recently-incorporated Eighth Amendment to prison practices." == Procedural history ==