Paying for Prisoner Suits: How the Source of Damages Impacts State Correctional Agencies' Behavior

This Note addresses an often overlooked issue facing state prisoners suing for federal civil rights violations: the impact of rules about the source of a monetary judgment or settlement on correctional agencies' litigation strategies. Using empirical data for fifteen states, it confronts traditional assumptions about government liability and practice and adds to the scholarly debate in at least two dimensions. First, it undercuts the view that state agencies do not pay damages from their budgets and are therefore unaffected by litigation or its threat. In fact, states take a variety of approaches to paying claims against their agencies ranging from a state-wide judgment fund to charging the agency budget. Second, it analyzes the impact of such state-by-state budgeting differences on litigation behavior ex ante and ex post. Broadly, the data suggest that when correctional agencies pay damages directly, they may internalize costs better but also settle less often than when agencies pay from a general judgment fund. The data also reveal considerable differences state to state, even within groups with similar policies for sourcing damages payments. No conclusive relationship exists between a state agency's source of damages payments and litigation outcomes. These mixed results suggest that making agencies pay damages from their budgets may not affect government behavior in the way past commentators suggested or hoped. Moreover, although a desire for uniform national standards originally motivated federal courts to intervene in state prisoner suits, the inconsistent findings lead this Note to caution, against any broad-brush policies to be applied to all states.