What is the current state of the law on the Eighth Amendment's protection against unsanitary conditions of confinement?

We reject this constrained conception of the Eighth Amendment's protections against unsanitary conditions of confinement. A brief tour of the applicable case law, as ably canvassed by the district court, will aid our discussion. The Eighth Amendment does not mandate comfortable prisons, Rhodes v. Chapman, 452 U.S. 337, 349, 101 S.Ct. 2392, 69 L.Ed.2d 59 (1981), but prisons nevertheless must provide humane conditions of confinement, Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 832, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994). A claim under for violations of the Eighth Amendment requires (1) an objectively, sufficiently serious ... denial of the minimal civilized measure of life's necessities and (2) a sufficiently culpable state of mind on the part of the responsible official. Id. at 834, 114 S.Ct. 1970 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted).

Our most recent opinion in this area is Gaston v. Coughlin, 249 F.3d 156 (2d Cir.2001), which reinstated an inmate's Eighth Amendment claim for exposure to human waste. In that case, the plaintiff had alleged that on several days the area directly in front of [his] cell was filled with human feces, urine, and sewage water. Id. at 161. The district court found that these conditions were neither severe nor protracted enough to rise to the level of an Eighth Amendment violation, but we reversed because we were unwilling to adopt as a matter of law the principle that it is not cruel and unusual punishment for prison officials knowingly to allow an area to remain filled with sewage and excrement for days on end. Id. at 162, 166.

This sentiment was in keeping with our decision from a generation earlier, LaReau v. MacDougall, 473 F.2d 974 (2d Cir.1972). There, an inmate spent five days in a cell whose toilet was a grate-covered hole in

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