Much will be written in the months and years ahead about the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling upholding a special three-judge court’s2 population reduction order in the California prison case, Brown v. Plata (2011). The decision, a culmination of more than 20 years of litigation about medical and mental health care in California’s massive prison system, 3 guarantees that in the short term, California will be forced to continue to find ways to reduce its prison population. What role the decision will play in unwinding California’s long term prison crisis, let alone America’s addiction to mass incarceration, will remain uncertain for some time to come. But the Brown opinion already counts as an important shift for its revitalization of dignity as a value in our constitutional jurisprudence. The concept of dignity has long been acknowledged as an important value underlying the ban on ‘cruel and unusual punishment’in the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution. But in recent decades it has fallen into a kind of oblivion, providing little basis to inform the way American prisons are evaluated and run. Brown v. Plata represents a potential turning point, toward a future where American political leaders and penal planners are forced to justify the comprehensive effect of imprisonment on prisoners and public safety. For now the re-emergence of dignity may seem of minimal importance. After all, the three-judge court’s findings of facts represented a litany of medical, custodial,