Glover v. Johnson

• Decision Date: 19 February 1999
• Docket Number: No. 77-CV-71229.,77-CV-71229.
• Parties: Mary GLOVER, et al., Plaintiffs, v. Perry JOHNSON, et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Eastern District of Michigan

35 F.Supp.2d 1010

Mary GLOVER, et al., Plaintiffs, v. Perry JOHNSON, et al., Defendants.

No. 77-CV-71229.

United States District Court, E.D. Michigan, Southern Division.

February 19, 1999.

Deborah A. LaBelle, Ann Arbor, MI, Michael A. Barnhart, Detroit, MI, for plaintiffs.

Leo H. Friedman, Asst. Attorney General, Lansing, MI, for defendants.

OPINION

FEIKENS, District Judge.

Introduction

I have before me on remand the task to revisit the underlying constitutional issues of this complex prison reform case twenty years after my unappealed judgment against defendants on those same issues in Glover v. Johnson, 478 F.Supp. 1075, 1077 (E.D.Mich.1979). The procedural explanation for how the case has, in a sense, come to be reborn begins in December 1993, when defendants filed a motion to terminate my continuing jurisdiction pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. 60(b)(5) or, alternatively, Fed.R.Civ.P. 60(b)(6).¹ In Glover v. Johnson, 879 F.Supp. 752 (E.D.Mich.1995), I denied that motion, concluding that defendants still had not substantially complied with my remedial orders and plans. See id. at 759-60. On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ("Sixth Circuit") vacated my denial and defined the bounds of my task:

To restate the matter for purposes of emphasis, the federal court's authority — the district court's and this court's — to intrude itself into the operation of Michigan's prison system is limited to assuring (1) that sufficient parity is achieved between male and female inmates in matters of educational and vocational opportunities as satisfies the demands of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and (2) that female inmates have the level of access to the courts that is constitutionally required under the First Amendment.

Glover v. Johnson, 138 F.3d 229, 242 (6th Cir.1998) (emphasis added).

I addressed the concept of parity under the Equal Protection Clause in my original opinion in this case. See Glover, 478 F.Supp. at 1079. There I wrote:

The term "parity of treatment" describes concisely the standard to which, I believe, the State ought to be held in its treatment of female prisoners. In other words, Defendants here are bound to provide women inmates with treatment and facilities that are substantially equivalent to those provided the men — i.e., equivalent in substance if not in form — unless their actions, though failing to do so, nonetheless bear a fair and substantial relationship to achievement of the State's correctional objectives.

Id. The Sixth Circuit referred to this passage in its remand opinion, stating that I had "correctly identified the remedial goal to be achieved in this litigation—parity in the treatment of male and female prisoners." Glover, 138 F.3d at 241 (emphasis in original). The court then carefully outlined how I should pursue this goal:

[T]he district court shall conduct hearings and receive evidence, including stipulations by the parties, in order to determine with particularity the educational, vocational, apprenticeship, and work-pass opportunities presently being provided (1) to male inmates and (2) to female inmates in the Michigan correctional system. The district court will then make particularized findings of fact and conclusions of law determining whether the male and female inmates are presently being provided sufficiently comparable education, vocational, apprenticeship, and work-pass opportunities as to satisfy the requirements of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Id. at 243 (emphasis in original).

Finally, the court directed:

In undertaking this task, the district court must take into account the present conditions of custody and population size at various institutions; any differences in educational and vocational interests between male and female inmates; available educational and vocational training resources; and such other considerations as the district court may deem appropriate.

Id.

To restate the focus of my task, it is this: to determine whether sufficient parity of treatment under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has presently been achieved between male and female inmates in the Michigan prison system in the matters of educational, vocational, apprenticeship, and work-pass opportunities.² The scope of my task no longer includes consideration of the First Amendment right to access issue because the parties have recently agreed to settle that issue based on the Sixth Circuit's resolution of the Knop v. Johnson and Hadix v. Johnson appeals, as well as Chief Judge Richard A. Enslen's unappealed rulings and orders in those cases.³

Before I turn to the merits of the parity issue, I must delineate the standard of review that the Equal Protection Clause demands in the prison setting.⁴

I. Prisons and Equal Protection

At the time of my original opinion, the inmate plaintiffs' claim of facial gender discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause was novel. So much so, in fact, that my research uncovered only one case, an unpublished district court opinion, that dealt with facial gender classifications in the prison setting. See Glover, 478 F.Supp. at 1078-79 (quoting from Barefield v. Leach, No. 10282 (D.N.M.1974)). The Supreme Court had not spoken in any way on the issue of equal protection in a prison setting, although it had written on the deferential considerations a federal court must address whenever it applies constitutional law to prisons. See, e.g., Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union, 433 U.S. 119, 125, 97 S.Ct. 2532, 53 L.Ed.2d 629 (1977) (noting that judicial branch must give "appropriate deference to the decisions of prison administrators and appropriate recognition to the peculiar and restrictive circumstances of penal confinement"). Given that there was no case law in 1979 indicating that I should treat female prisoners differently than any other plaintiff alleging facial discrimination on the basis of gender, I chose to apply the heightened scrutiny standard of review first developed in Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190, 97 S.Ct. 451, 50 L.Ed.2d 397 (1976), to the plaintiffs' equal protection claim. See Glover, 478 F.Supp. at 1078 (quoting Craig standard).

After the passage of almost two decades, however, new case law and the hard lessons of this case raise a question as to whether a different standard of review should be applied to equal protection cases in a prison setting. The Supreme Court again addressed the issue of deference to legitimate institutional needs in the operations of state prisons. As the Court reasoned in Rhodes v. Chapman, 452 U.S. 337, 101 S.Ct. 2392, 69 L.Ed.2d 59 (1981):

[T]he problems of prisons in America are complex and intractable, and, more to the point, they are not readily susceptible of resolution by decree. Most require expertise, comprehensive planning, and the commitment of resources, all of which are peculiarly within the province of the legislative and executive branches of government. For all of those reasons, courts are ill equipped to deal with the increasingly urgent problems of prison administration and reform. Judicial recognition of that fact reflects no more than a healthy sense of realism.

Id. at 351, n. 16, 101 S.Ct. 2392 (quoting Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U.S. 396, 404-05, 94 S.Ct. 1800, 40 L.Ed.2d 224 (1974)). The now well-established policy of judicial deference springs from the related principles of institutional competence, federalism, and separation of powers. See Preiser v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 475, 491-92, 93 S.Ct. 1827, 36 L.Ed.2d 439 (1973) ("It is difficult to imagine an activity in which a State has a stronger interest, or one that is more intricately bound up with state laws, regulations, and procedures, than the administration of prisons"); Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 548, 99 S.Ct. 1861, 60 L.Ed.2d 447 (1979) ("the operation of our correctional facilities is peculiarly the province of the Legislative and Executive Branches of our Government, not the Judicial").

In Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 107 S.Ct. 2254, 96 L.Ed.2d 64 (1987), the Supreme Court hardened the policy of judicial deference into a reasonableness standard of review for prisoners' constitutional claims. The plaintiff prisoner class in Turner had challenged the constitutionality of a regulation restricting correspondence between inmates and a regulation limiting the inmates' ability to marry. See id. at 81-82, 107 S.Ct. 2254. In evaluating plaintiffs' claims, the Court defined its task as having "to formulate a standard of review for prisoners' constitutional claims that is responsive both to the `policy of judicial restraint regarding prisoner complaints and [to] the need to protect constitutional rights.'" Id. at 85, 107 S.Ct. 2254 (quoting Procunier, 416 U.S. at 406, 94 S.Ct. 1800). The Court held that:

[W]hen a prison regulation impinges on inmates' constitutional rights, the regulation is valid if it is reasonably related to legitimate penological interests. In our view, such a standard is necessary if "prison administrators ..., and not the courts, [are] to make the difficult judgments concerning institutional operations."

Id. at 89, 107 S.Ct. 2254 (quoting Jones, 433 U.S. at 128, 97 S.Ct. 2532). The Court justified its holding by reference to those same principles of institutional competence, federalism, and separation of powers that have become necessarily commonplace in constitutional litigation involving prisons. As the Court explained:

Subjecting the day-to-day judgments of prison officials to an inflexible strict scrutiny analysis would seriously hamper their ability to anticipate security problems and to adopt innovative solutions to the intractable problems of prison administration. The rule would also distort the decision-making process, for every administrative judgment would be subject to the possibility that some court somewhere would conclude that it had a less restrictive way of solving...