Nelson Mandela famously said, “A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” If that is true, then the extent to which America provides access to justice for those marked by our government for punishment or confinement matters a great deal. Mandela’s challenge to us in dealing with these “lowest ones” points to the truth that access to fair treatment is not just a matter of individual human rights, but of collective and civic justice.
Nowhere is that aspiration more strained than when considering America’s growing jail and prison population. Ohio alone incarcerates 71,000 people today, one of the highest incarceration rates globally, per capita. The recent rise in immigration enforcement activity in Ohio suggest a continued rise in the number of people behind bars.
Nearly everyone incarcerated in Ohio (95% of those in state prison) eventually returns home to our counties, cities, and neighborhoods. With one in three people in Ohio possessing a criminal record of some kind, we can be sure that those returning are among us, our neighbors, friends, and family.
If access to justice means anything, it must mean that every person who calls our community home, regardless of where they are housed or how much power the government holds over them, has a fair opportunity to assert their legal rights. Yet for people who are or have been behind bars, our legal system erects some of the highest barriers to accountability found anywhere in American life. Lowering these barriers requires both providing legal counsel to those who need it and making it easier to bring claims vindicating rights.
For nearly 30 years, the Ohio Justice & Policy Center (OJPC) has confronted these realities head-on. Founded on a commitment to prison and jail reform, OJPC today is a civil rights law firm focused on building a redemptive, fair, and smart criminal justice system at every stage, through a mix of legal advocacy, policy reform, and community engagement. We expand access to justice for the most vulnerable people. Our work stems from the belief that we are stronger when all our neighbors have the ability to safeguard their human rights in our courts.
OJPC’s Human Rights in Prison Project (HRIP) exists as one of the few legal initiatives in the Midwest dedicated exclusively to exposing unconstitutional conditions and challenging abuses of power inside correctional institutions. Each year, OJPC’s litigation team receives a large volume of correspondence from incarcerated people across Ohio. Among other things, this correspondence describes excessive force, medical neglect, retaliatory acts of punishment, and failures to protect people from harm. Our legal staff rigorously examines each claim, filing lawsuits where appropriate, because every story reflects a basic truth: people behind bars are among the most vulnerable in our society, and among the least able to secure legal help.
This work builds on a long history of OJPC litigating to protect basic rights. In the early 2000s, OJPC brought landmark class action lawsuits, like Fussell v. Wilkinson, challenging Ohio’s unconstitutional prison medical care system. Fussell resulted in a settlement that created an independent Medical Oversight Committee to monitor and improve care. The following decade, in Serenity L. v. ODRC, OJPC secured reforms after filing a class action challenging the failure of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC) to provide release planning services for people with severe mental illness. OJPC has also defended the religious freedoms of incarcerated people, including the right to kosher meals.
In recent years, HRIP has represented individuals like Marcus Hill (named changed for privacy), who was violently assaulted by a corrections officer during a routine patdown. Mr. Hill alleged that the officer slammed and choked him without provocation, causing serious back injuries and violating his Eighth Amendment rights. OJPC’s representation ensured not only a favorable settlement, but also that his story was heard in federal court, no small feat given the procedural barriers that often shut people behind bars out of civil rights litigation.
HRIP has also recently taken on systemic issues, such as investigating solitary confinement and separately litigating prison policies that threaten the integrity of access to the legal system.
For example, since 2025, OJPC has been involved with civil rights litigation against officials at ODRC over its implementation of a policy instructing prison staff to screen legal mail sent to incarcerated people using a process ripe with potential for abuse. Specifically, ODRC replaced a brief process of opening and inspecting legal mail with an extended process of copying and shredding legal mail that has allowed for many opportunities for prison staff to read incarcerated people’s confidential legal communications. As OJPC has argued, ODRC’s policy violates the First Amendment rights of our currently incarcerated clients. It weakens their right to access the legal system, and their right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
In short, HRIP’s advocacy is built on a straightforward but often overlooked premise, people who are confined remain human beings, and the constitution continues to protect them.
Expanding access to justice for people who’ve had been involved with the justice system starts with building greater consensus in our community about the stakes for all of us.
In engaging lawmakers and the community, OJPC anchors its message in Martin Luther King Jr.’s creed: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Whether in legislative hearings or school classrooms, our message is consistent, how we treat justice involved people shapes their futures, and the wellbeing of the communities they return to.
The benefits are universal. Safeguarding the rights of the incarcerated improves public health, especially because re-entry so often involves individuals who have endured addiction, trauma, and mental illness. It positively affects family wellness, since children, partners and other relatives often shoulder the emotional and economic burden of loved ones being mistreated in custody. Finally, protecting such rights improves public safety by creating conditions for successful rehabilitation, safe working environments for law-enforcement, and post-release economic stability. Access to justice for incarcerated people is not just a matter of individual fairness. It is a matter of public interest. Strengthening the ability of justice-involved people to enforce their rights matters to everyone.
For all its promise, the law makes it extraordinarily difficult for people in custody to test whether their rights have been violated. The challenges are structural, not inevitable.
Take the nation’s landmark civil rights enforcement statute, 42 U.S.C. 1983 (Section 1983), which was first codified in the Civil Rights Act of 1871 with the goal of protecting newly freed enslaved people from state violence in the Reconstruction Era. At its simplest, section 1983 allows a plaintiff to bring a lawsuit against another person for violating a federally protected right, including a constitutional right, when the person who violated that right was exercising authority granted by state or local government. While Section 1983 can be a potent tool for accountability, it faces the following significant limitations, among others:
The result is an accountability vacuum. When misconduct occurs, whether by prison guards, sheriff’s deputies, police, or ICE agents, many victims have no meaningful legal avenue to challenge the abuse.
This gap becomes even more pressing as federal law enforcement expands into everyday American life. Ohio has seen increasing ICE operations and detention involving state prisons and jails. Reports nationwide, including recent killings and controversial incustody deaths, highlight the urgent need for legal mechanisms that allow courts to examine whether law enforcement has violated constitutional rights.
Without access to the courts, there is no accountability. Without accountability, abuses multiply.
Much has been written about problems with qualified immunity and the PLRA from an access to justice perspective. Less has been said about the need for fixes or workarounds addressing other problems inherent in Section 1983. At least two legal reforms should be considered.
First, Congress should resolve a gap in accountability with a simple one-sentence update to Section 1983 that applies its coverage to federal officials, not just state and local actors. In the wake of the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis, OJPC has called on Congress to take that step. Versions of such a bill have already been introduced by federal lawmakers over time. Passing one would allow people harmed by federal actors to be heard in court. It would restore parity between state and federal abuses and provide a straightforward, predictable mechanism for courts to adjudicate claims of excessive force, unlawful detention, retaliation, and denial of medical care.
Second, at the state level, Ohio needs a Universal Constitutional Remedies Act similar to that advanced by Protect Democracy and by former DOJ Civil Rights Division attorneys Kristy Parker and Samantha Trepel in a recent article published in The Guardian. The Universal Constitutional Remedies Act is a state law that would authorize any person whose rights under the U.S. Constitution have been violated by a government actor, irrespective of whether that actor was federal, state, or local, to sue in state court. Versions of this law have already been introduced in places like New York and California. Such an act could also authorize lawsuits in state court for violations of the Ohio Constitution.
Such changes in the law would not guarantee relief. They would simply guarantee access to justice, the opportunity to test whether rights were violated and whether a remedy is appropriate.
Every member of the bar has an interest in ensuring the courts remain open and the Constitution remains enforceable. Access to justice requires more than rhetoric. It requires willing advocates and open legal pathways for protecting the “lowest” among us.
Gabe Davis is the Chief Executive Officer of the Ohio Justice & Policy Center and formerly led Cincinnati’s Citizen Complaint Authority. He previously served in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and later practiced at Frost Brown Todd after beginning his career as an Assistant District Attorney in New York City. A Cincinnati native, Davis is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School.