Justices Curb Suits on Prison Conditions : Judiciary: Ruling holds that overcrowding, bad food, vermin are not proof of inhumane treatment unless inmates can show culpability by officials.

The Supreme Court Monday made it harder for prisoners to challenge the conditions of their confinement, ruling that overcrowding, rat-infested kitchens and bad food are not enough to prove that inmates are living under inhumane conditions.

On a 5-4 vote, the court ruled also that, even if inmates establish the existence of an inhumane environment, they may not obtain judicial relief unless they show that these conditions resulted from “deliberate indifference” by prison officials.

Unless prisoners can prove that officials acted with a “culpable state of mind,” they cannot say their living conditions amount to unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment,” the court majority said.

The dissenting justices said the ruling would leave judges helpless to intervene in cases in which state budget cuts cause suffering in the prisons.

Lawyers said Monday’s ruling is not likely to negate existing court orders under which judges supervise living conditions at scores of prisons throughout the country. But they predicted the decision would make it significantly harder for prison conditions to be successfully challenged by new lawsuits.

The ruling again sends the message that the court under Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wants the management of prisons left in the hands of prison officials, not federal judges.

In the 1970s, prisons throughout the nation came under court scrutiny. Typically, prisoners’ attorneys sued state officials, contending they violated the Constitution by holding inmates under inhumane conditions.

In response, judges frequently assumed the authority to set standards of care for prisoners. Currently, prison systems or individual facilities in 41 states operate under court supervision, according to data compiled by the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

In recent years, however, the Supreme Court has undercut the authority of judges to intervene in prison matters. For example, the court ruled two years ago that prison managers may censor publications and mail received by inmates, despite the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech.

At issue in the case decided Monday were the standards a judge should apply in deciding when inmates’ living conditions constituted a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.”

In 1986, Pearly Wilson, an inmate at a state prison in southern Ohio, filed a suit against the state prison director, Richard Seiter, contending conditions at the facility were abysmal. Wilson’s suit charged that he and other inmates were crammed into small cells, that the prison’s kitchens were vermin-infested and that the facility was stifling hot in the summer and “nearly frigid” in winter.

In disputing the complaint, state officials acknowledged that the prison, built as a tuberculosis sanitarium, was old, but they contended it was well maintained.

A federal judge dismissed the suit. A federal appeals court in Cincinnati agreed and went further, ruling that inmates had to prove that prison officials acted with “persistent malicious cruelty” to win their case.

All nine justices voted to overturn that extreme standard.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the five-member majority, said the prisoners must show that officials acted with “deliberate indifference” to their welfare.

Scalia cited an instance in which a prison boiler malfunctions, giving the inmates a chilly night. Although that condition may be unpleasant, it is not “cruel and unusual punishment,” he said, because officials did not intend to punish the inmates.

The decision (Wilson vs. Seiter, 89-7376) sends the case back to a federal trial judge to be reconsidered under the new standards established by the high court.

In dissent, Justice Byron R. White complained that the majority had ignored earlier rulings that focused on the “objective severity (of the prison conditions), not the subjective intent of government officials.”

He was joined in dissent by Justices Thurgood Marshall, Harry A. Blackmun and John Paul Stevens.