22
Thomas, J., dissenting
of all sorts are the very essence of imprisonment, we made explicit the serious deprivation requirement to ensure that the Eighth Amendment did not transfer wholesale the regulation of prison life from executive officials to judges. That is why, in Wilson, we described the inquiry mandated by the objective component as: "[W]as the deprivation sufficiently serious?" Id., at 298 (emphasis added). That formulation plainly reveals our prior assumption that a serious deprivation is always required. Under that analysis, a court's task in any given case was to determine whether the challenged deprivation was "sufficiently" serious. It was not, as the Court's interpretation today would have it, to determine whether a "serious" deprivation is required at all.2
C
Given Estelle, Rhodes, Whitley, and Wilson, one might have assumed that the Court would have little difficulty answering the question presented in this case by upholding the Fifth Circuit's "significant injury" requirement.3 Instead, the Court announces that "[t]he objective component of an Eighth Amendment claim is . . . contextual and responsive to contemporary standards of decency." Ante, at 8 (internal quotation marks omitted). In the context of claims alleging the excessive use of physical force, the Court then asserts, the serious deprivation requirement is satisfied by no serious deprivation at all. "When prison officials maliciously and
2 While granting petitioner relief on his Eighth Amendment claim, the Court leaves open the issue whether isolated and unauthorized acts are "punishment" at all. This will, of course, be the critical question in future cases of this type. If we ultimately decide that isolated and unauthorized acts are not "punishment," then today's decision is a dead letter. That anomaly simply highlights the artificiality of applying the Eighth Amendment to prisoner grievances, whether caused by the random misdeeds of prison officials or by official policy.
3 I do not believe that there is any substantive difference between the "serious deprivation" requirement found in our precedents and the Fifth Circuit's "significant injury" requirement.
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