Reed v. Faulkner

• Decision Date: 29 March 1988
• Docket Number: No. 87-1632,87-1632
• Citation: 842 F.2d 960
• Parties: Homer REED, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Gordon FAULKNER, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 960

842 F.2d 960

Homer REED, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Gordon FAULKNER, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 87-1632.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Submitted March 10, 1988.

Decided March 29, 1988.

Homer Reed, pro se.

David L. Steiner, Deputy Atty. Gen., Indianapolis, Ind., for defendants-appellees.

Before CUMMINGS, CUDAHY and POSNER, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

Homer Reed, an inmate in an Indiana state prison, has sued the prison's officials, charging that they infringed his religious liberty and deprived him of the equal protection of the laws by enforcing against him a prison regulation that forbids male inmates to wear their hair so long that it touches the collar. The defendants on one occasion forced Reed to cut several inches off his shoulder-length "dreadlocks" ("long, ropy, matted, woolly strands," Note, Soul Rebels: The Rastafarians and the Free Exercise Clause, 72 Geo.L.J. 1605, 1608 (1984)), and on other occasions disciplined him for his refusal to cut his hair. Reed claims that in doing these things the defendants violated his religious liberty as a Rastafarian and discriminated in favor of American Indians, against whom the regulation on hair length is not enforced. The district judge gave judgment for the defendants after a two-day bench trial (at which Reed did not have assistance of counsel), and Reed, still without counsel, appeals.

The Rastafarians are a religious sect that originated among black people in Jamaica but that has adherents among American blacks as well. Its tenets (well described in the Georgetown Law Journal note and confirmed by the record in this case), most of which are derived by interpretation of passages in the Bible, are that Haile Selassie, the deposed emperor of Ethiopia who died in 1975, is God and that Marcus Garvey (the Pan-African leader of Jamaican extraction) is his Prophet; that Ethiopia is heaven, and Jamaica hell; that the Rastafarians are the reincarnation of the ancient Israelites, and are the chosen people; that men should not shave, cut, or comb their hair (hence the "dreadlocks," which apparently are the natural result of letting one's hair grow wild); that black people are superior to white people and are destined eventually to rule the earth; that marijuana is a holy herb; and that meat should not be eaten. This assemblage of beliefs will strike most Americans as bizarre, but then most Americans are not Rastafarians, and religious beliefs often strike the nonbeliever as bizarre. (Ambrose Bierce's aptly named Devil's Dictionary defines "impiety" as "your irreverence toward my deity.") The district judge assumed that the Rastafarian faith is a bona fide religion for purposes of the First Amendment, and there is no reason to doubt that this is a proper assumption.

But the judge was inclined to doubt that Homer Reed is a sincere adherent to the faith. There was evidence that Reed had been seen eating meat, that his beard was so short that he must have shaved, and that his hair was so neat that he must have combed it. Apart from the oddity of taking evidence on such matters, one item of evidence is distinctly odd. The prison doctor testified that if Reed had not shaved, his beard would be the same length as his hair; this is a law of nature of which we have never heard and find hard to credit. From all this evidence the judge concluded that "the protestations of religious faith by this plaintiff are less than sincere." The judge did not stop there but went on to find "the following legitimate reasons" to support the regulation and its enforcement against Reed: "a security concern for the potential use of long hair for concealing and moving contraband; a security concern for potential racial conflict from the professed Rastafarian belief that dreadlock symbolizes black superiority; a safety concern for the potential danger of long uncombed hair getting caught in machinery or cell doors; a public health and sanitation concern arising from the increased risk of infection and lice ...; and finally, the disciplinary problems that arise from allowing an exception from the hair policy for some inmates and complaints about that exception by others." The judge did not mention the equal protection issue or remark the exception for American Indians.

"[W]hen a prison regulation impinges on inmates' constitutional rights, the regulation is valid if it is reasonably related to legitimate penological interests." Turner v. Safley, --- U.S. ----, 107 S.Ct. 2254, 2261, 96 L.Ed.2d 64 (1987). This is not a demanding standard, and it implies that if either Reed is not a sincere Rastafarian or the regulation limiting the length of male inmates' hair strikes a reasonable balance between the interest in religious liberty and the needs of prison safety and security, he must lose on his free-exercise claim. See, e.g., Hadi v. Horn, 830 F.2d 779, 784 (7th Cir.1987); Azeez v. Fairman, 795 F.2d 1296, 1302 (7th Cir.1986); Brightly v. Wainwright, 814 F.2d 612 (11th Cir.1987) (per curiam). And if the exception for American Indians is nonarbitrary he must lose on his equal protection claim as well. This is not because discrimination between religions is deemed on a constitutional par with those purely "economic" discriminations that the equal protection clause, in modern interpretations, treats so leniently, but because the religious dimension of the discrimination is governed by the religion clauses of the First Amendment, leaving for the equal protection clause only a claim of arbitrariness unrelated to the character of the activity allegedly discriminated against.

In concluding that Reed is insincere, the district judge appears to have attached conclusive weight to Reed's "backsliding"--his eating of meat, and his (inferred) shaving of his beard. Evidence of nonobservance is relevant on the question of sincerity, and is especially important in the prison setting, for an inmate may adopt a religion merely to harass the prison staff with demands to accommodate his new faith. Cf. Azeez v. Fairman, supra, 795 F.2d at 1298. That may well have been true of the plaintiff in Garza v. Miller, 688 F.2d 480, 483 (7th Cir.1982), who having converted to Judaism complained that there were too few Jewish inmates at Marion Federal Penitentiary to make up a minyan (a quorum for prayer, requiring a minimum of ten males above the age of 13); and of the plaintiff in Childs v. Duckworth, 705 F.2d 915 (7th Cir.1983), who complained that he had not been permitted to start a satanic church in his prison. But the fact that a person does not adhere steadfastly to every tenet of his faith does not mark him as insincere. Some...