Queen v. South Carolina Department of Corrections

• Decision Date: 05 January 1970
• Docket Number: Civ. A. No. 69-831 to 69-833.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of South Carolina
• Parties: William Horace QUEEN, Plaintiff, v. SOUTH CAROLINA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS et al., Defendants. J. C. McCRARY, Plaintiff, v. T. A. EDMONDS, Supervisor, Data Processing Center, et al., Defendants. Paul Ulysses DEMPS, Plaintiff, v. William D. LEEKE, Director, J. W. Strickland, Warden, Central Correctional Institute, et al., Columbia, S. C., Defendants.

307 F. Supp. 841

William Horace QUEEN, Plaintiff, v. SOUTH CAROLINA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS et al., Defendants.

J. C. McCRARY, Plaintiff, v. T. A. EDMONDS, Supervisor, Data Processing Center, et al., Defendants.

Paul Ulysses DEMPS, Plaintiff, v. William D. LEEKE, Director, J. W. Strickland, Warden, Central Correctional Institute, et al., Columbia, S. C., Defendants.

Civ. A. Nos. 69-831 to 69-833.

United States District Court D. South Carolina, Columbia Division.

January 5, 1970.

Herbert W. Louthian (court-appointed), Columbia, S. C., for plaintiffs.

Daniel R. McLeod, Atty. Gen., Emmet H. Clair, Asst. Atty. Gen., Columbia, S. C., for defendants.

OPINION and ORDER

DONALD RUSSELL, District Judge.

All the plaintiffs are inmates of the South Carolina Penitentiary and they have filed their various proceedings separately, complaining of arbitrary and discriminatory treatment. The defendants are the officials of the State Correctional Department, with responsibility for the operation of the State Penitentiary. Because all involve a like complaint of unreasonable and discriminatory prison treatment, the actions were appropriately consolidated. A hearing was had and each plaintiff was afforded full opportunity to present his evidence of alleged discriminatory treatment. At such hearing, the plaintiffs were represented ably and competently by assigned counsel, whose diligence and ingenuity in their representation are to be commended. The defendants, represented by the office of the State Attorney General, also, offered evidence in support of the action taken in each of the cases by the prison authorities.

The controlling principles involved in these proceedings have been marked out fairly clearly in recent decisions. In keeping with the "new emphasis on the rights of the accused",¹ the Courts, while recognizing that the administration of a penal institution is an executive and not a judicial function² vesting wide discretion in the prison officials for maintaining discipline and order,³ have steadily eroded the old "hands-off" doctrine in dealing with complaints of prisoners⁴ and have increasingly accepted the principle that the penal inmate is not stripped of all his civil rights when he crosses the threshold of the prison but those that "are fundamental follow him, with appropriate limitations, through the prison gate."⁵ Nor do the prison walls "foreclose his access to the courts to protect those rights."⁶ As our own Court of Appeals has phrased it, "If a tractable inmate is subjected to cruel and unusual punishment or if his exercise of a constitutional right is denied without semblance of justification arising out of the necessity to preserve order and discipline within the prison, he may have a right of judicial review."⁷ Thus, where there is a restriction upon a prisoner's constitutional right of religious freedom⁸ or right of access to the courts⁹ or where he is subjected to punitive treatment so out of proportion to his infraction of prison rules as to constitute a violation of the guarantees of the Eighth Amendment¹⁰ or where the prisoner's "discipline or discrimination" is "of such character or consequence as to shock general conscience or to be intolerable in fundamental fairness, and so to amount to illegal administration of prison sentence",¹¹ the prisoner has been held entitled to judicial protection of his rights.¹² But, on the other hand, it seems settled that "routine security measures and disciplinary action rests solely in the discretion of the prison officials"¹³ and "the necessity for effective disciplinary control is so impelling that judicial review of them is highly impractical and wholly unwarranted".¹⁴ Absent unusual circumstances involving, as I have said, some infringement of constitutional rights or punishment intolerable in fundamental fairness and "so unreasonable as to be characterized as vindictive, cruel or inhuman", courts are not available for review of prison administration and, as one Court has wisely suggested, they must be careful to guard against being used or invoked by prisoners as "mere outlets for general discontent in having to undergo penal restraint or of personal satisfaction in attempting to harass prison officials."¹⁵ Or, as a recent commentator has summarized it:

"It is doubtful that the goals of modern penology will be saved in a prison where the administration is handcuffed by judicial controls, and the prisoners (armed with habeas corpus, mandamus, the Civil Rights Act, the Federal Torts Claims Act, with the First and Eighth Amendments) run the institution. In a country where the sky rocketing crime rate has become a national issue and law enforcement is having its own problems with judicially imposed restrictions, a breakdown of the prison system hardly seems desirable."

Friend, Judicial Intervention in Prison Regulation, 9 William & Mary L.Rev., 178 at p. 192 (1967).

Measured by the foregoing judicial standards, it would seem that the several complaints of the plaintiffs concern matters that fall properly within the discretionary powers of the prison officials and are not therefore justiciable. These complaints involve no denial of freedom of religion; there has been no interference with the right of access to the courts; the channels for complaints within the institutional structure, whether against individual officials or against prison regulations, have been kept open. The plaintiffs offer no reliable evidence of any inhumane attitude on the part of the penal authorities; they proffer no proof of any personal bias or prejudice, of any "vindictive" action, against them on the part of the prison officials. On the contrary, the evidence shows that the complaints concern routine determinations made in good faith by prison officials. There are no unusual circumstances surrounding such determinations. They are the determinations with which courts will not normally interfere. The plaintiffs have wholly failed to meet their burden of proof. The defendants, however, are not content to rest their defense on the non-justiciability of the complaints. They have preferred to go beyond the legal requirements of their defense and have justified the reasonableness of their actions by proof that is both clear and convincing.

To review the facts connected with each of the claims asserted by the plaintiffs as established by the record herein:

1. J. C. McCrary

This plaintiff, serving a life sentence for murder imposed in the Court of General Sessions for the County of Greenville, South Carolina, claimed he was unfairly and discriminatorily denied admission to a data processing training program organized in 1967 by the penal institution. This program was largely federally financed. It was an experimental program, authorized for a single class and intended to cover about six months' instruction. In its application for financial support from the federal government for such program, the penal authority had outlined the program as one intended to provide released prisoners with a skill that would make their conversion to normal life easier. In keeping with such purpose, the program was designed to admit only those prisoners subject to reasonably early release. As thus submitted, the program was approved by federal authorities and a financial grant in support authorized. The program as approved by federal authorities required a minimum of twenty federal students under the program. However, the classroom facilities available at the penal institution were sufficient to accommodate twenty-four students. The penal authorities determined to utilize these four additional places, not required under the federal program, for training four inmates not subject to early release, it being their intention to use such trainees in their own data processing center. The plaintiff, who did not seek admission until some time after the class was formed, claimed originally the right of admission as a federal trainee. Admittedly, the plaintiff was not entitled to admission as a federal trainee: His release date, if ever, was many years away. He could only have sought admission as one of the four state trainees. The refusal of the plaintiff's application for admission to the program, according to the prison authorities, was based on the fact that, at the time plaintiff sought admission he was not qualified as a federal trainee and all the slots for state trainees had been filled by persons who were already engaged in the prison's data processing and who had expressed a desire to work in that unit. The authorities emphasized, also, that the plaintiff, when interviewed, indicated he had no interest, after training, in working in the prison's data processing center. The prison authorities pointed out that they had no interest in training an inmate, under a long sentence, with a skill he did not wish to utilize in prison. The prison authorities indicated, however, that, if a new program was approved by the federal authorities, they would be pleased to consider plaintiff's application for admission in that program, if he could qualify at that time under the standards established for such program. The prison authorities were scrupulous in explaining to the plaintiff both the reasons for the denial of his admission to the program and in indicating, if a new program was authorized, a willingness to counsel with him about it. Their conduct was fair and proper in every respect.

The plaintiff offered no proof that would give any reason to conclude that the prison authorities were prejudiced in any way against him. He did contend that one of the state trainees did not meet the standards asserted by the prison authorities. There was some conflict in the testimony on this point but I am convinced that the prison authorities acted in good faith and that their version of the impartial selection of the state trainees was accurate.

In sum, I find no reliable evidence that the plaintiff was unfairly...