20
Thomas, J., dissenting
was not until 1976—185 years after the Eighth Amendment was adopted—that this Court first applied it to a prisoner's complaint about a deprivation suffered in prison. Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U. S. 97 (1976).
B
We made clear in Estelle that the Eighth Amendment plays a very limited role in regulating prison administration. The case involved a claim that prison doctors had inadequately attended an inmate's medical needs. We rejected the claim because the inmate failed to allege "acts or omissions sufficiently harmful to evidence deliberate indifference to serious medical needs." Id., at 106 (emphasis added). From the outset, thus, we specified that the Eighth Amendment does not apply to every deprivation, or even every unnecessary deprivation, suffered by a prisoner, but only that narrow class of deprivations involving "serious" injury inflicted by prison officials acting with a culpable state of mind. We have since described these twin elements as the "objective" and "subjective" components of an Eighth Amendment prison claim. See Wilson v. Seiter, 501 U. S. 294, 298 (1991).
We have never found a violation of the Eighth Amendment in the prison context when an inmate has failed to establish either of these elements. In Rhodes v. Chapman, 452 U. S. 337 (1981), for instance, we upheld a practice of placing two inmates in a single cell on the ground that the injury alleged was insufficiently serious. Only where prison conditions deny an inmate "the minimal civilized measure of life's necessities," id., at 347, we said, could they be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Similarly, in Whitley v. Albers, 475 U. S. 312 (1986), we held that a guard did not violate the Eighth Amendment when he shot an inmate during a prison riot because he had not acted with a sufficiently culpable state of mind. When an official uses force to quell a riot, we said, he does not violate the Eighth Amendment unless he acts " 'maliciously and sadistically for the very purpose of
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