The Southern Poverty Law Center fights to ensure that prisons and jails are not barbaric institutions. In Pugh v. Locke, a landmark 1976 case involving SPLC, a federal court ruled Alabama prisons were "wholly unfit for human habitation." SPLC attorneys worked for more than a decade to force the state to bring the prisons up to constitutional standards.

In 1995, Alabama took a giant step backwards when it brought back chain gangs, a relic of Alabama's racist past. SPLC attorneys sued in Austin v. James and secured an agreement that barred the state from ever reinstituting chain gangs.

The Southern Poverty Law Center also challenged the state's use of the "hitching post," a torture device to which inmates were handcuffed as punishment for refusing to work. A federal district court ruled in Austin v. James that the hitching posts were "cruel and unusual punishment" in violation of the Eighth Amendment, and permanently banned their use.

The client later sought monetary damages for his ordeal on the hitching post. That case, Hope v. Pelzer (2002), went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared that the hitching post was "obviously cruel" and "antithetical to human dignity."

A settlement agreement secured by SPLC attorneys in Bradley v. Haley (2000) brought dramatic improvements in health care received by Alabama's mentally ill inmates. Before the far-reaching agreement, inmates like Tommy Bradley, a paranoid schizophrenic, were banished to isolation cells 22 hours a day and offered little or no care. Now Bradley and others receive mental health services and interact with other inmates outside of their cells up to 18 hours a day.