At the East Mississippi Correctional Facility, where Mississippi sends some of the most seriously mentally ill people in the state prison system, even the most troubled patients are routinely ignored and the worst cases of self-harm are treated with certain neglect. The conditions at EMCF have cost some prisoners their limbs, their eyesight, and even their lives.

In 2013, the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, and prisoner rights attorney Elizabeth Alexander filed a class-action complaint on behalf of all the prisoners held at EMCF. As the case heated up, the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP joined as co-counsel, providing major staffing and support. Despite years of attempts by Mississippi to derail the lawsuit before our clients even saw the inside of the courtroom, the case will finally proceed to trial Monday.

The lawsuit against EMCF describes horrific conditions at the facility: rampant violence, including by staff against prisoners; solitary confinement used to excess, with particular harm to prisoners with mental illnesses; and filthy cells and showers that lack functional toilets or lights. It also sheds light on a dysfunctional medical and mental healthcare delivery system that puts patients at risk of serious injury and has contributed to deaths in custody.

Nowhere was this institutionalized neglect more clear than in the life, and death, of T.H., a patient at EMCF with a history of severe mental illness and self-harm. On Jan. 31, 2016, T.H. stuck glass into his arm. Instead of sending him to the emergency room, a nurse merely cleaned the wound with soap and water. The following day, he broke a light bulb and inserted the shards into his arm. This time he required eight stitches.

Less than two weeks later, he cut himself with a blade hidden in his cell and then tried to hang himself. It was only later that month, after he reopened his arm wound with more glass, that mental health staff finally placed him on special psychiatric observation status.

Yet, because he wasn’t properly monitored, T.H.’s series of self-injury continued unabated until April 4, 2016. Early that afternoon, he stuck his arm, dripping in blood, through a slot in his cell door and asked to see the warden. A lieutenant saw T.H.’s bloodied arm, but, rather than call for emergency assistance, simply left the area. Two hours later, T.H. was observed unresponsive on the floor of his cell.

In response, the prison warden opted to call for a K-9 team to enter the cell with dogs before letting medical professionals examine the patient. By then it was too late — T.H. was dead, having strangled himself with materials from inside his cell. He never once had a proper suicide risk assessment or any treatment to address his self-harm.

The lackadaisical and unconstitutional approach that EMCF staff takes toward prisoner healthcare cost T.H. his life and has caused well-documented suffering among countless other mentally ill prisoners. And it all happens in the context of a prison rife with violence, where security staff often react with excessive force to mental health crises and allow prison gangs to control access to necessities of life, including at times food.

The Constitution requires that if the state takes someone into custody, it must also take on the responsibility of providing treatment for their serious medical and mental health needs. This means, among other measures, hiring qualified medical staff to provide necessary care for people with mental health disorders, creating systems for access to care so sick patients can see a mental health or medical clinician, and making sure that medical care is provided without security staff impeding it.

The ACLU and our co-counsel are fighting to ensure that such care is available at EMCF, where the state of Mississippi has continued to lock some of the most vulnerable prisoners in dangerous and filthy conditions and deny them access to constitutionally required mental health and medical care.

I witnessed those conditions firsthand when I visited EMCF in January 2011 with fellow ACLU attorney Gabriel Eber and two medical and mental health experts. At that time, we were horrified to discover that Mississippi’s designated mental health prison was closer to a vision of hell on earth than a therapeutic treatment facility.

When I walked into one of the solitary confinement units, the entire place reeked of smoke from recent fires. I tried to speak to patients about their experiences, but I could barely hear them over the sounds of others moaning and screaming while they slammed their hands into metal cell doors.

Despite repeated warnings from nationally renowned experts brought in to assess conditions at the prisons, a meeting with top Mississippi Department of Corrections officials, and an offer by the ACLU to help MDOC pay to diagnose and fix the problems at EMCF, Mississippi officials permitted these conditions to continue unabated. Rather than take responsibility for fixing this prison, these officials merely switched contractors. In 2012, they swapped out private prison giant GEO Group, Inc. and replaced them with another private prison company, Management & Training Corp., which is perhaps best known for its horrific record of abusing and neglecting immigrant detainees. The state has also switched prison medical contractors multiple times, with little improvement from one to the next.

But the nightmare might soon be over. Over seven years since we first visited the cesspool that is EMCF, our clients will be allowed in court for the first time, asking that their constitutional rights finally be recognized. That recognition won’t undo the great harms they’ve suffered. But by fulfilling the Constitution's promise of protection, we can stop new harms and horrors at EMCF, of which there have been too many for too long.

Ahilan Arulanantham, Director of Advocacy / Legal Director, ACLU of Southern California & Michael Tan, Staff Attorney, ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Jennings v. Rodriguez, a class action lawsuit challenging the federal government’s practice of jailing immigrants for months or years while they litigate their deportation cases. The ACLU had argued that neither the immigration laws nor the Constitution permit such detention unless a judge determines, at a hearing, that the immigrant will pose a danger or flight risk if released.

In a 5-to-3 decision (Justice Kagan was recused), the court overturned a 2015 ruling from the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that required the government to give immigrants a custody hearing after six months of imprisonment. But in doing so the court only addressed one of the two arguments advanced by the ACLU. It rejected the ACLU’s claim that the immigration laws require hearings. But the ACLU had also asked the Supreme Court to rule on whether the Constitution permitted lengthy imprisonment without hearings, and on that question, the court sent the case back to the Ninth Circuit to address first.

In failing to address whether due process permits indefinite detention without hearings in the immigration system, the Supreme Court missed an opportunity to ensure justice for thousands of vulnerable immigrants. These are perilous times for immigrant communities, with the Trump administration bent on locking up and deporting more immigrants than ever before.

Alejandro Rodriguez, the plaintiff in the lawsuit brought by the ACLU, provides a good example. He came to the U.S. from Mexico with his parents as a baby, and grew up as a lawful permanent resident (a “green card” holder). As an adult, he worked as a dental assistant to support his children. But he also ran into legal trouble and was convicted of joyriding and misdemeanor drug possession. Immigration agents detained him after the second conviction and began deportation proceedings to send him to Mexico. He remained in an immigration prison for three years while he fought deportation – far longer than he had spent in criminal custody for his crimes – but never got a custody hearing to determine if his detention was necessary. After the ACLU filed suit, the government released Alejandro from custody. Ultimately he won his immigration case and kept his legal right to remain in the United States.

The Supreme Court ruling puts the freedom of thousands of people like Alejandro in jeopardy. Detained immigrants around the country – most of whom do not have lawyers  - will now have to file suits asking courts across the country to rule on the important constitutional question the Supreme Court did not decide.

While the road will be long, the fight is not over.  The answer to the question the Supreme Court left open – whether indefinite detention without a hearing violates the Constitution - is clear. The Fifth Amendment  protects all “persons”— including immigrants — from the deprivation of liberty without due process of law. As Justice Breyer wrote in his dissent:

The bail questions … at heart … are simple. We need only recall the words of the Declaration of Independence, in particular its insistence that all men and women have ‘certain unalienable Rights,’ and that among them is the right to ‘Liberty.’ We need merely remember that the Constitution’s Due Process Clause protects each person's liberty from arbitrary deprivation. And we need just keep in mind the fact that … liberty has included the right of a confined person to seek release on bail.

Nowhere else in the U.S. legal system do we let the government take people’s freedom away for months or years without a hearing before a judge who determines whether their incarceration is necessary. We’re confident that courts around the country will find that indefinite imprisonment without hearings violates due process, and that ultimately the Supreme Court will agree. Imprisonment without trial is contrary to our most basic values. We will end it.

Rashida Richardson, New York Civil Liberties Union & Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project

The TSA and Amtrak Police are trying out new see-through body scanners in New York City’s Penn Station that raise serious constitutional questions. And as is so often the case, the government is not being sufficiently transparent about the devices, how they will be used, on whom, and where they will eventually be deployed. We also don’t know who will have access to the information they collect or for how long.

There is also reason to believe the technology may not work as well as the TSA says it does.

This “passive millimeter wave” technology works by detecting the heat radiating from the human body and analyzing ways in which those emanations may be being blocked by objects hidden on a person’s body. The machines do not emit x-rays or other radiation. The theory is that the operator of the technology will be able to tell if large object such as a suicide vest device is present underneath a person’s clothing. The technology uses an algorithm to determine whether there is an anomaly. The two devices in use are the Stand Off Explosive Detection Technology created by QinetiQ, and Digital Barriers from Thruvis.

There are several concerns associated with this technology. First, it is not clear whether the anticipated uses of the technology are constitutional. Under the Fourth Amendment, the government is generally not permitted to search individuals without a warrant. Body scanners may be used in airports because of an “administrative exception” to the Fourth Amendment that the courts have found is reasonable because of the unique security vulnerabilities of aircraft. But it is far from clear that the courts will permit this exception to expand to cover every crowded public place in America.

Other factors that may affect its constitutionality include whether people are able to opt out of being searched (it appears they are not), the technology’s resolution and precision, and the extent to which it detects not only true threats but other personal belongings as well, such as back braces, money belts, personal medical devices such as colostomy bags, and anything else someone might have on their person. Will an alert from this machine be sufficient to constitute justification for detaining someone, or probable cause to search them?

We don’t know enough about the capabilities of this technology to know for sure — and we don’t know how its capabilities are likely to grow in the future. If it is as coarse a detector as television images suggest, it is likely to have a very high rate of false positives — and that’s likely to make the government want to make it ever more detailed and high-resolution. If it becomes higher resolution, that means it will see all kinds of other personal effects as well. Either way, there are serious privacy problems with this technology.

In addition, until the device can be scaled up so it scans everyone who goes through a certain area, the technology can be aimed at certain people. It’s up to the operator to determine which people get scanned and which don’t. This means people are subject to a virtual stop-and-frisk, a policing tactic historically known for its extremely discriminatory impact on Black and Latino people.

Will officials perform this digital stop-and-frisk on a white man in a suit, or a brown man with a beard or a black teen in a hoodie? If history is any guide, we know the answer.

Once an anomaly is detected, a computer algorithm determines whether the abnormality presents a “green,” “yellow” or “red” risk level. We don’t know what happens if someone provokes a “yellow” or a “red” alert or if even some “green” alerts will still cause further scrutiny. Does a security official make a judgment call on whether to interrogate or otherwise hassle that person? If so, will they decide to scrutinize our old friends white man in a suit or brown man with a beard? And will the NYPD have access to the technology or the scans?

We also don’t know how the algorithm is determining the threat level that gets spit out. We don’t know what factors it is considering, the weight of those factors, what tradeoffs occurred when the systems was developed, or the data it was trained on to determine if the system is accurate. When algorithms are not tested for potential errors or bias, they are often found to have discriminatory impacts on certain groups, particularly people of color.

However the technology is deployed, there are very good reasons to doubt that it would be effective in spotting threats. Even in the most controlled conditions, such as airport scanners, millimeter wave technology can produce a lot of false-positives. In a crowded, bustling location full of fast-moving people, the error rate would probably be even higher. And if there is any location where people are likely to have all kinds of things on and about their bodies, it’s a busy travel hub like Penn Station. If this device is generating alarms every minute it will quickly become useless — and it could mean that many innocent people will be needlessly subject to invasive searches or lengthy interrogations.

The technology may also miss true threats. Ben Wallace, a British politician who used to work for QinetiQ, told the Christian Science Monitor that the scanners would likely not pick up “the current explosive devices being used by Al Qaeda,” because of their low amounts of radiation.The Government Accountability Office and even Homeland Security itself have found in the past that body scanners have a high failure rate and are easily subverted.

From media reports on the new scanners, it’s unclear how long this pilot program will last or where else these devices could eventually end up across the country. But their sudden rollout is another example of potentially invasive and discriminatory technologies being deployed with little or no public input or accountability.