Jail Law Libraries, Part II

In Part I of this post, I set out the rule from Bounds v. Smith that “the fundamental constitutional right of access to the courts requires prison authorities . . . to provid[e] prisoners with adequate law libraries or adequate assistance from persons trained in the law.” 430 U.S. 817, 828 (1977). I then surveyed relevant law from the Fourth Circuit and concluded that Bounds applies to at least some sentenced inmates in the county jail. Today’s post gets into the details of how a jail might meet its obligation to provide those inmates meaningful access to the courts. If a jail chooses to meet that obligation through a law library, it needs to decide what materials to provide. The Bounds decision itself set out a lengthy list of prison library resources that had been approved by the lower court, including the North Carolina General Statutes, the North Carolina Reports, the North Carolina Rules of Court and Rules of Appellate Procedure, Strong’s North Carolina Index, Black’s Law Dictionary, the United States Code, the United States Reports, and LaFave’s Criminal Law Hornbook. Some North Carolina jails have, of course, been sued over the years for alleged failures to provide meaningful access to the courts, and some of those suits resulted in consent judgments in which the jail agreed to provide an approved list of materials. Resources common to those court-approved libraries include many of the same titles listed in Bounds, plus a handful of secondary sources like the Prisoners’ Self-Help Litigation Manual, [...]