Constitutional Challenges to Prison Overcrowding: The Scientific Evidence of Harmful Effects

In the past two decades American courts have decided numerous cases involving the constitutionality of prison and jail conditions. A number of prison cases have turned on the court\u27s assessment of the constitutionality of narrow conditions, such as sanitation, fire safety, medical and mental health care, diet, exercise, or protection of inmates from assaults. This Article examines the harmful consequences of the more fundamental problem of prison overcrowding, working from the premise that consideration of the harmful effects of prison overcrowding and the constitutional implications of these effects is critical not just to inmates and courts, but also to prison administrators and legislatures. The Article first discusses the significance of the Supreme Court\u27s two recent overcrowding cases and the potential legal role of evidence of harmful effects. It next examines subsequent lower court decisions and the extent to which they consider harmful effects on inmates a decisive factor. The Article then reviews the scientific studies of the effects of prison overcrowding on prison rule infractions and violence, illness, mental health, stress and hypertension, and mortality. The Article concludes that there is substantial empirical evidence that prison overcrowding is harmful to inmates, that plaintiffs should present tangible evidence of harmful effects to support their constitutional claims, and that courts should carefully consider such evidence

Ozone decomposition kinetics on alumina: effects of ozone partial pressure, relative humidity and state of film oxidation

International audienceThe room temperature kinetics of gas-phase ozone loss via heterogeneous interactions with thin alumina films has been studied in real-time using 254 nm absorption spectroscopy to monitor ozone concentrations. The films were prepared from dispersions of fine alumina powder in methanol and their surface areas were determined by an in situ procedure using adsorption of krypton at 77 K. The alumina was found to lose reactivity with increasing ozone exposure. However, some of the lost reactivity could be recovered over timescales of days in an environment free of water, ozone and carbon dioxide. From multiple exposures of ozone to the same film it was found that the number of active sites is large, greater than 1.4×1014 active sites per cm2 of surface area, or comparable to the total number of surface sites. The films maintain some reactivity at this point, which is consistent with there being some degree of active site regeneration during the experiment and with ozone loss being catalytic to some degree. The initial uptake coefficients on fresh films were found to be inversely dependent on the starting ozone concentration varying from roughly 10?6 for ozone concentrations of 1014 molecules/cm3 to 10?5 at 1013 molecules/cm3. The initial uptake coefficients were not dependent on the relative humidity, up to 75%, within the precision of the experiment. The reaction mechanism is discussed, as well as the implications these results have for assessing the effect of mineral dust on atmospheric oxidant levels