If only the court had listened to Ketanji Brown Jackson

such exercise deprivation: “He suffered from hallucinations, excoriated his own flesh, urinated and defecated on himself … became suicidal and sometimes engaged in misconduct with the hope that prison guards would beat him to death.”

Because of solitary confinement (“restorative housing,” in the mincing language of Virginia's Department of Corrections today), “A considerable number of prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane.” These are the Supreme Court's words from a ruling in

Whether prisons should try to be “correctional” institutions - straighteners of humanity's most crooked timber - is debatable. But certainly prisons should not make prisoners worse. When Johnson's mental illness made him difficult to manage, Pontiac's punishments drove him deeper into insanity, and Pontiac continued punishing him for his resulting behaviors.

If, however, Johnson were mentally competent - had he been incarcerated as, say, a coolly calculating offender - Pontiac's treatment of him would still have violated the Bill of Rights. The authors of the Eighth Amendment did not include a clause saying cruelty is unacceptable “unless the prisoner is unusually difficult or especially evil.” Just as the First Amendment protects even vile speech for the protection and betterment of society, the Eighth Amendment proscribes barbaric punishments for society's sake - to insulate it from its inhumane impulses, to which humanity is prey.

Conservatives, ever apprehensive about the abuses of power to which empowered people always and everywhere are susceptible, should be acutely alert about potential abuses of prisoners, who exist at the state's mercy, behind high walls and nontransparent procedures.

The Eighth Amendment makes originalists fainthearted. Spare us sermons about the public meaning of “cruelty” in 1790: No court today would sanction some punishments (e.g., flogging, branding, mutilation, the pillory) practiced when the amendment was ratified. Prolonged solitary confinement was not imposed then. Today, however, protracted isolation is far from “unusual”; it is now traditional and common. But the amendment's original meaning that matters is: We shall not countenance government-inflicted cruelty.

The court majority's dereliction of duty regarding Johnson illustrates how the labels ”liberal” and “conservative” can be inapposite in judicial contexts. The conservatives showed undue deference to government; the liberals correctly construed precedent and the Constitution's original public meaning.

George Will is a columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group.