Darryl McGore v. Gene L. Wrigglesworth, Chief Sheriff Richard Chinelli, Administrator Ingham County Sheriff's Department

OPINION BOYCE F. MARTIN, Jr., Chief Judge.

“In a ease where the construction of legislative language such as this makes so sweeping and so relatively unorthodox a change as that made here, I think judges as well as detectives may take into consideration the fact that a watchdog did not bark in the night.”

Harrison v. PPG Indus., Inc., 446 U.S. 578, 602, 100 S.Ct. 1889, 1902, 64 L.Ed.2d 525 (1980) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting); see also United States v. Gonzales, — U.S.-,-n. 2, 117 S.Ct. 1032, 1039 n. 2, 137 L.Ed.2d 132 (1997) (Stevens, J., dissenting). When Congress penned the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Pub.L. No. 104-134, §§ 801-10, 110 Stat. 1321 (Prison Litigation Act), the watchdog must have been dead. The statute contains typographical errors, see Floyd v. United States Postal Serv., 105 F.3d 274, 276 (6th Cir.1997); creates conflicts with the Rules of Appellate Procedure, id. at 277; and is internally inconsistent, compare 28 U.S.C. § 1915(f)(2)(B), with 28 U.S.C. § 1915(a)(2), and 28 U.S.C. § 1915(b)(2). Moreover, the year in its name, 1995, does not correspond to the date of its enactment, 1996. We have even issued an unprecedented administrative order, see In re Prison Litigation Reform Act, 105 F.3d 1131 (6th Cir.1997), in an attempt to organize the chaos. Now, over a year after the statute was signed into law, we are provided the opportunity to engage in a comprehensive analysis of the statute.