Strict Prison-Visit Rules Upheld

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld rigid restrictions on family visits to prisoners, rebuffing a challenge to Michigan rules that inmates said violated their right to freedom of association and the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

In a 9-0 decision, the court ruled that the Michigan Department of Corrections’ interest in maintaining prison security, curbing drug smuggling and protecting children from abuse outweighed inmates’ rights.

“The very object of imprisonment is confinement,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the high court. “Many of the liberties and privileges enjoyed by other citizens must be surrendered by the prisoner.” Kennedy also said the court “must accord substantial deference to the professional judgment of prison administrators, who bear a significant responsibility for defining the legitimate goals of a corrections system and for determining the most appropriate means to accomplish them.”

He said that “the burden ... is not on the State to prove the validity of prison regulations but on the prisoner to disprove it.”

The ruling could affect prisoners in other states. Twenty-one states filed friend-of-the-court briefs supporting Michigan, while almost 80 organizations, including the National Council on Crime and Delinquency and the American Civil Liberties Union, submitted briefs supporting the inmates.

The case grew out of regulations Michigan adopted in 1995, responding to an increase in prison visits coming on the heels of growth in the state’s inmate population. The new rules said inmates could not have visits with minors except their children and grandchildren. Visits from former inmates also were barred. In addition, any inmate with two substance-abuse violations in prison lost all rights to visits, other than from lawyers and clergy.

Monday’s Supreme Court ruling in Overton vs. Bazzetta (No. 02-94) overturned decisions by a federal trial judge in Michigan and a federal appeals court in Cincinnati, which ruled 3-0 last year that the regulations violated inmate rights.

“Under our constitution, even those lawfully imprisoned for serious crimes retain some basic constitutional rights,” Judge Gilbert Merritt of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote. “In the present case, the regulations fall below minimum standards of decency owed by a civilized society to those it has incarcerated.”

The Supreme Court disagreed. Although prisoners may have some rights to associate with family members, the state is entitled to place limitations on those visits, Kennedy said.

Inmates have alternative means of associating with those prohibited from visiting, Kennedy said. He rebuffed prisoners’ protests that letter-writing is inadequate for illiterate inmates and that phone calls are brief and expensive. “Alternatives to visitation need not be ideal, they need only be available,” he wrote.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer fully joined the opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote a separate opinion, concurring in the outcome, but saying the case was much clearer-cut than the majority opinion suggested.

“The history of incarceration as punishment supports the view that the sentences imposed [on the inmates] terminated any rights of intimate association,” Thomas wrote.

The decision was lauded by Thomas L. Casey, Michigan’s solicitor general, who had argued that supervising more visitors had diverted resources from other prison needs.

Charles Hobson, a lawyer with the Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, also hailed the ruling.

“This decision is important because it restricts the power of the lower federal courts to dictate corrections policy to the states,” Hobson said.

Deborah LaBelle, the Ann Arbor, Mich., lawyer who represented the inmates, said she was disappointed but saw a silver lining in language in the opinion which indicated that state officials could not impose a permanent ban on visits.

Elizabeth Alexander, a lawyer with the ACLU’s National Prison Project, expressed dismay at the ruling.

“What is particularly disappointing is that the policy the court refused to strike down is inappropriate public policy,” Alexander said. “One of the two most important factors of whether a prisoner gets rehabilitated is whether the inmate retains family ties. Today’s decision makes that maintenance even harder.”