The Supreme Court on Wednesday all but overturned California's policy of housing new prison inmates by race, declaring that the temporary segregation must be halted unless state officials could show it was the only way to maintain safety and security.
In a 5-3 decision, the court said the largest state prison system in the nation was dangerously close to violating the Constitution's ban on racial segregation by the government.
"We rejected the notion that separate can ever be equal … 50 years ago in Brown vs. Board of Education, and we refuse to resurrect it today," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said for the court.
However, she left open the option for prison officials to segregate gang members or violent individuals from other inmates.
The ruling cast doubt on a 25-year unwritten California prison policy — said to be the only one of its kind in the nation — of separating incoming prisoners by race during a screening period that lasts as long as 60 days.
At seven "reception centers," new inmates and those being transferred to another facility are kept in a cell with an inmate of the same race or national heritage. Outside of their cells — at mealtimes, on jobs and in the recreation areas — prisoners mix witout regard to race.
"You cannot house a Japanese inmate with a Chinese inmate. They will kill each other," an associate warden testified in a passage cited by the court. "The same with Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Filipinos."
Margot Bach, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections in Sacramento, said prison officials sometimes separated inmates of the same race or ethnicity.
"Southern California Hispanics and Northern California Hispanics don't get along, and you can't put them in a cell together," she said.
Another high-level state corrections official greeted the decision with alarm, saying that abandoning race-based housing would be "catastrophic and extremely dangerous."
"The only way the system has maintained any sense of control has been through our segregation policies," said the official, who asked not to be named for reasons of job security. "The fact is that inmates, when they are institutionalized, have their own moral standards, their own culture, and they just don't tolerate mixing of races."
Officials in other states, such as Texas, said that they separated new inmates for a few days; prison experts said California was the only state that relied on race for screening over weeks or months.
The policy drew little attention until it was challenged by a prisoner. Garrison S. Johnson, a black inmate from Los Angeles County, filed a lawsuit 10 years ago, contending the state's segregation policy was unconstitutional.
In 1987, he was sent to prison for 36 years for murder, robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. He was transferred to several prisons, and each time he was put in a cell with a black inmate.
Los Angeles lawyer Bert H. Deixler took up Johnson's case and, despite a series of setbacks in the courts in California, succeeded in getting the attention of the Supreme Court.
"The impact of this decision will be to end the disgraceful practice of racial segregation in the California prisons," Deixler said. "You can look at gang membership as a basis for special treatment, but you can't look at people coming off the bus and say: 'Blacks go through that door and whites go through the other door.' This policy assumes if you are of a certain race, you have a penchant for interracial violence."
Bush administration lawyers joined the case on Johnson's side when it reached the high court. They argued that the segregation policy was unneeded and unconstitutional. Moreover, they said, the federal prison system prohibited racial discrimination among inmates.
"I'm elated," said Johnson, who is incarcerated at Corcoran State Prison near Fresno. "It's still sinking in."
The 40-year-old inmate learned of the court's decision during a telephone call from state Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), head of an oversight committee on corrections. During the call, which the Los Angeles Times was allowed to monitor, Johnson said he was raised a "military brat" and lived mostly among whites as a youth. It was not until he arrived in prison, Johnson said, that he experienced racial discrimination.
Critics of the state's $6.5-billion prison system praised Wednesday's decision. Romero called on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger "to move with all deliberate speed to integrate our prisons once and for all."
But California prison officials said they were not ready to abandon the policy.
"This wasn't a clear-cut decision from the Supreme Court," Bach said. "Our legal affairs people are looking at the decision and are determining the next steps."
The case, Johnson vs. California, tested two long-standing doctrines of the Supreme Court.
One says that official racial segregation is forbidden, a violation of the Constitution's guarantee of "equal protection" under the law. However, some court opinions have noted that in an extreme case — such as a race riot at a prison — officials may separate people by race.
The second doctrine says judges should defer to prison managers. Inmates do not have the same rights as others, the court has said.
In Johnson's case, the often liberal-leaning U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco applied the second doctrine and said the California prison system's temporary segregation policy was a reasonable means of preventing violence.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court's majority relied on the first doctrine to say that racial segregation can rarely, if ever, be upheld. The justices set aside the 9th Circuit's ruling and sent the case back to California to be reconsidered under the court's doctrine that frowned upon racial segregation by the government.
Johnson's lawyer said he was confident his lawsuit would prevail.
"It's clear to me there is no way this policy can survive strict scrutiny," Deixler said. "I am hopeful Gov. Schwarzenegger will change the policy and not wait for any further hearings."
Lawyers who monitor conditions inside California prisons predicted the segregation policy would not withstand further scrutiny when returned to the 9th Circuit.
"I don't believe the prison officials will be able to show there is a compelling state interest in celling people according to race," said Steve Fama, a lawyer with the nonprofit Prison Law Office in Marin County.
Only Justice Anthony M. Kennedy agreed fully with O'Connor's opinion. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer agreed with the outcome but repeated their view that not all racial classifications — affirmative action policies, for example — were questionable as discrimination.
Justice John Paul Stevens dissented, saying he would have struck down California's policy. "Given the inherent indignity of segregation and its shameful historical connotations," California should have used racial separation "only as a last resort," Stevens said.
Officials could justifiably separate inmates based on their gang affiliations, he said, noting the current policy could result in housing together blacks who were members of rival gangs such as the Bloods and the Crips.
In a separate dissent, Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia said they would have deferred to the judgment of state prison officials.
Against "this backdrop of pervasive racial violence," prison officials acted reasonably in separating new inmates, Thomas said. "The majority is concerned with sparing inmates the indignity and stigma of racial discrimination. California is concerned with safety and saving their lives," said Thomas, arguing that the state had the stronger claim.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, ill with cancer, took no part in the decision.
California's prison system houses about 164,000 inmates. The disputed policy concerns new arrivals. In 2003, its seven reception centers took in 40,000 new male inmates and 72,000 others who were returned for parole violations.
In its opinion, the Supreme Court said it knew of no other prison segregation policy that matched California's.
During the oral argument in the case, a state lawyer said Texas and Oklahoma had a similar policy, but state officials there disputed the claim.
Mike Viesca, director of public information for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said new inmates were separated by race for a few days.
In a friend-of-the-court brief, state prison officials from Wisconsin, Georgia, Kansas, Alaska and Washington said they believed segregation was counterproductive and could increase racial violence rather than prevent it.
Some California correctional officers echoed that sentiment and warned of turbulence ahead.
Lt. Charles Hughes, an 11-year veteran at the state prison in Lancaster, said he welcomed the court's decision, arguing that California's practice of housing by skin color could have had the unintended effect of inflaming racial tensions.
But Hughes said integration would work only if it was carried out slowly and carefully.
"If they force integration immediately," he said, "it's going to be very violent."
Savage reported from Washington and Warren from Sacramento. Times staff writer Richard Fausset in Los Angeles and researcher Lianne Hart in Houston contributed to this report.
By David G. Savage and Jenifer Warren
latimes.com Staff Writers February 24, 2005 WASHINGTON
latimes.com Staff Writers February 24, 2005 WASHINGTON
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