Here's the paradox: we love the U.S. Constitution, but we hate prisoners and inmates. We love the guarantees provided in the Constitution, but we hate people who break the law. These contrasting impulses bob to the surface in litigation by inmates and their advocates in claiming that the conditions of their confinement violate the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Eighth Amendment says that the government cannot inflict cruel and unusual punishment against inmates and prisoners. I don't have any data on this, but I would bet that, if that language was put up for a public referendum, the Eighth Amendment would either fail to garner a majority vote or it would be pretty close. Thankfully, that Amendment (like the others) does not rest in the hands of the public but with judges who are able to resist the urge to let inmates suffer for no good reason.

I thought about this when I read the obituary of a federal judge, Morris Lasker, who served for 42 years in both New York City and Boston. His obituary in the New York Times focused on his role in ending the draconian jail conditions in New York City at a time when a new consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s raised questions about the treatment of society's most despised people. Here is an excerpt from the obituary:

Judge Lasker, a soft-spoken jurist who often found himself at the center of controversies, was best known for rulings in the 1970s and ’80s in the Southern District of New York that forced the city come to grips with horrendous conditions in its jails and violations of the constitutional rights of prisoners that, as he once put it, “would shock the conscience of any citizen who knew of them.�

The judge knew the conditions in jails not only from evidence in lawsuits, but also from his own visits to the Tombs, the notorious Manhattan House of Detention for Men, where he found overcrowding, noise, vermin and stench, and to Rikers Island, the city’s prison complex in the East River, which housed thousands of detainees awaiting trials or serving sentences of less than a year.

In 1970, when the Legal Aid Society filed the first of many class-action lawsuits on behalf of inmates, a prisoner entering the main detention center for men on Rikers Island faced a nightmare: locked in a filthy eight-foot cell with other inmates for 16 hours a day, with no easy access to telephones or medical care. Beatings by guards were common. Mental illness afflicted 25 percent of the inmates, and 75 percent were drug users. Cockroaches abounded. Toilets were foul. Meals were slop.

In the Tombs, a fortress in Lower Manhattan where suspects often waited up to a week to see a judge, the conditions were even worse. Cells and pens designed for 925 inmates were occupied by 2,000. Prisoners slept on concrete floors without blankets and contended with roaches, body lice and mice. Guards were frequently accused of brutality. A suicide was attempted every week.

Judge Lasker ordered the city to improve conditions. But after repeated warnings and hearings, in which the city pleaded for time and told of soaring prison populations and limited budgets, he ordered the Tombs closed in 1974. Over nine years, the Tombs was gutted and rebuilt at a cost of $42 million. When reopened in 1983, it resembled a school dormitory, with windowed, air-conditioned cells, a library, a commissary, a nurse’s station, a television area and other amenities.

The city spent $1 billion in the 1980s to expand and modernize jail facilities, but still had to house inmates on barges and in prefabricated structures. Judge Lasker ordered hundreds of inmates released or transferred to state prisons, and threatened officials with contempt when they resisted.

You may react to this with a shrug. Who cares about inmates? Here's my response. Some of these inmates are members of your family. They are our brothers and sisters. Some of them are losers, but they are family. Inmates look a lot different when you know them personally. Other inmates are allowed to go home years before their sentences run out because they are cleared by DNA evidence and the courts decide that they are innocent of rape or murder. Does that person deserve to live in roach-infested cells with disgusting toilets? Still other inmates are mentally-retarded and are not even fully responsible for their crimes. It's been said that we can judge society by how it treats its prisoners. Judge Lasker took that oft-quoted phrase seriously. God bless 'em.