As American incarcerated populations grew starting in the 1970s, so too did court oversight of prisons. In the late 1980s, however, as incarceration continued to boom, federal court oversight shrank. This Article addresses the most central doctrinal limit on oversight of jails and prisons, the Supreme Court\u2019s restrictive reading of the constitutional provisions governing treatment of prisoners \u2014 the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause and the Due Process Clause, which regulate, respectively, post-conviction imprisonment and pretrial detention. The Court\u2019s interpretation of the Eighth Amendment\u2019s ban of cruel and unusual punishment, in particular, radically undermined prison officials\u2019 accountability for tragedies behind bars \u2014 allowing, even encouraging, them to avoid constitutional accountability. And lower courts compounded the error by importing that reading into Due Process doctrine as well. In 2015, in Kingsley v. Hendrickson, a jail use of force case, the Court relied on 1970s precedent, not subsequent caselaw that had placed undue emphasis on the subjective culpability of prison and jail officials as the crucial source of constitutional concern. The Kingsley Court returned to a more appropriate objective analysis. In finding for the plaintiff, the Supreme Court unsettled the law far past Kingsley\u2019s direct factual setting of pretrial detention, expressly inviting post-conviction challenges to restrictive \u2014 and incoherent \u2014 Eighth Amendment caselaw. The Court rejected not only the defendants\u2019 position, but the logic that underlies 25 years of pro-government outcomes in prisoners\u2019 rights cases. But commentary and developing caselaw since Kingsley has not fully recognized its implications. I argue that both doctrinal logic and justice dictate that constitutional litigation should center on the experience of incarcerated prisoners, rather than the culpability of their keepers. The takeaway of my analysis is that the Constitution is best read to impose governmental liability for harm caused to prisoners \u2014 whether pretrial or post-conviction \u2014 by unreasonably dangerous conditions of confinement and unjustified uses of force. In this era of mass incarceration, our jails and prisons should not be shielded from accountability by legal standards that lack both doctrinal and normative warrant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n