Supreme Court to review 'supermax' prisons


Read Other News on Supermax Prisons

By GINA HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer
(Updated Friday, December 10, 2004, 10:37 AM)

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court agreed Friday to consider how much flexibility corrections officials have to put inmates in super maximum-security prisons.

Most states and the federal government have such prisons, intended to separate the most dangerous prisoners from other inmates.

Justices will review an appeal next year from Ohio, which opened a super-security prison with about 500 beds in 1998 after a deadly inmate riot five years earlier at a state prison.

In the so-called Ohio "supermax," inmates are held in 23-hour-a-day lockdown, in 90-square-foot cells built to prevent prisoners from communicating with each other. They also face tighter security with strip searches and less access to telephones and personal items.

Civil rights groups filed a class-action lawsuit against the state on behalf of prisoners in 2001, claiming that the inmates were not given a chance to prove they didn't belong in the Ohio State Penitentiary near Youngstown.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled earlier this year that prisoners are entitled to hearings, with witnesses, before being assigned to the prison.

Ohio Solicitor Douglas Cole told justices that the requirements imposed by the appeals court make it almost impossible to "neutralize the threats posed by dangerous inmates."

"The question presented here has significant safety implications for tens of thousands of state prisoners," he wrote in a court filing.

Lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union, representing the prisoners, said the confinement "imposes an atypical and significant hardship" on the detainees. The 6th Circuit decision, they said, appears to be the first to declare that prisoners in super maximum security prisons have a constitutionally protected liberty interest.

The case forces the Supreme Court to revisit a 1995 decision that limited prisoners' rights to have hearings before they lose privileges or are disciplined for misconduct.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote in that opinion that inmate liberty interests are "limited to freedom from restraint which ... imposes atypical and significant hardship on the inmate in relation to the ordinary incidents of prison life."

The case is Wilkinson v. Austin, 04-495.

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