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Penn Law professor David Rudovsky has consistently stood up for the rights of Philadelphia prisoners, recently winning a lawsuit against the city to change the conditions in area jails.

When Penn Law professor David Rudovsky walked through a Philadelphia prison this summer, he was disgusted by what he saw - severe overcrowding, prisoners without access to showers and inadequate medical care, among other issues.

So Rudovsky did what any lawyer does best - he filed a lawsuit.

Representing 11 inmates in Philadelphia prisons, Rudovsky filed a class-action suit against the city to improve those conditions.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Barclay Surrick ruled that the jail conditions violated the constitutional rights of hundreds of inmates and ordered the city to take immediate steps to fix the problem.

For Rudovsky, Surrick's decision served as a validation of all of the work he has done to protect the rights of prisoners.

"From the time I went to law school, I knew I wanted to spend my time protecting and expanding the rights of individuals," Rudovsky said. "If people are being held in a way that violates the Constitution, it's always an important issue."

When the prison population swelled in Philadelphia this past summer, inmates contacted Rudovsky to help them address the "intolerable" conditions that had overtaken the prison.

He took up their cause and filed a class-action lawsuit on their behalf, an effort he says was necessary considering the harsh treatment that the prisoners were receiving.

"The court was absolutely right in finding that the conditions of confinement as they existed this past summer violated the constitutional rights of everyone who passed through the system," he said. "The city literally ran out of space."

For Rudovsky, the case at hand is a deja vu of sorts.

While working in the public defender's office in 1971, he filed a lawsuit after discovering that similarly awful conditions were plaguing Philadelphia prisons.

As a result of his work, Philadelphia prisons were put under court monitoring for the next 30 years.

Combating these conditions once again, though, will be a difficult task that requires more work than simply improving the jails themselves, Rudovsky and co-counsel David Richman, a Penn Law graduate, said.

"The cause of the problem is, you have a continual growth in the Philadelphia prison population for no particularly good reason," Richman said.

Rudovsky added that, since building new jails is "hugely expensive," the best option is to "look very carefully at who's being held."

Dana Kaplan, a fellow at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights who is studying prison issues, agreed.

"In terms of overcrowding, the solution is frequently figuring out who can be let out of prisons and jails," she said, adding that parole, bail and sentencing reforms could all address the problem.

"It's important for local governments to look to reform before spending valuable taxpayer dollars on building new jails that haven't been proven to solve the problem," she said.

Rudovsky and Richman say the solutions aren't always that easy to implement - though they will continue to try.

"It's been professionally satisfying and frustrating," Richman said. "We're dealing with a very important social problem. We were able to make great use of the civil justice system in improving the criminal justice system."

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