States which have created “minimum standards” for corrections facilities may inadvertently create a false sense of liability security.  The creation of such standards may be helpful in establishing a baseline by which a facility can be audited or inspected but the inspection will be incomplete.  By definition, minimum standards cannot include all pertinent legal requirements for corrections officials to consider but instead are written to focus on those subjects which are determined by committee or organization to be of higher importance.  This subjective approach ignores the fact that adherence to ALL constitutional requirements, federal legislative acts, Supreme Court and other judicial rulings, and state specific statutory requirements are required for corrections administrators to know and follow.  They do not have the right to selectively pick and choose which case law, statute, or ruling is not important on any given day or which requirement can be ignored to safely avoid a lawsuit.  A facility may get an A on the inspection report card and unknowingly be noncompliant with statutory laws, a federal act, or a Supreme Court ruling.  Many tenured administrators have found themselves wondering how years of successful annual inspections and national accreditations with plaques on the walls failed to protect them from a lawsuit after the fact.