United States ex rel. Wolfish v. Levi

• Decision Date: 26 September 1977
• Docket Number: No. 75 Civ. 6000.,75 Civ. 6000.
• Citation: 439 F. Supp. 114
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America ex rel. Louis WOLFISH et al., Petitioners, v. Edward LEVI et al., Respondents.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Southern District of New York

439 F. Supp. 114

UNITED STATES of America ex rel. Louis WOLFISH et al., Petitioners, v. Edward LEVI et al., Respondents.

No. 75 Civ. 6000.

United States District Court, S. D. New York.

September 15, 1977.

As Amended September 26, 1977.

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William E. Hellerstein, Phylis Skloot Bamberger, Michael Young, Michael B. Mushlin, David J. Gottlieb, Amy Rothstein, John Boston, for The Legal Aid Society, Federal Defender Services Unit, New York City, for petitioners.

Robert B. Fiske, Jr., U. S. Atty. for the Southern Dist. of New York, New York City, for respondents; Louis G. Corsi, Frederick P. Schaffer, New York City, of counsel.

OPINION

FRANKEL, District Judge.

In the explosively growing field of law about prison conditions lately developed in the federal courts, this case has one relatively rare feature: it concerns conditions in one of our own, federal places of confinement. The institution in question is the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) adjoining this courthouse. The action was brought for the MCC's involuntary occupants (both male and female) as a class, embracing the pre-trial detainees for whom the facility was primarily designed, sentenced prisoners either awaiting assignment to a prison facility or assigned here to serve their (usually relatively short) terms, prisoners here on writs to testify or to stand trial, witnesses in protective custody, and persons incarcerated for contempt.¹ Initially brought and conducted largely or wholly by the first-named petitioner, who has since been assigned elsewhere, the case for petitioners was assigned by the court to the Federal Defender Services Unit of the Legal Aid Society, which has proceeded with a quality of resourceful and dauntless vigor for which the court records its appreciation.

The petitioners have lodged a long roster of complaints resting upon an array of constitutional and statutory theories. Some issues have been decided upon motions for summary judgment. Thus, upon affidavits recounting undisputed facts, supplemented by the court's physical views of the premises, the transformation of rooms designed for single occupancy into double rooms was held unlawful and enjoined. 428 F.Supp. 333 (Jan. 5, 1977). Along with that determination, the court invalidated (1) a rule allowing petitioners' receipt of literature directly from publishers and from substantially no other source, (2) a practice of seizing property from inmates without giving receipts for it, and (3) the opening of inmates' outgoing mail. Id. Those determinations were accompanied by denials of petitioners' complaints regarding inspection of non-legal mail.

At earlier times, upon applications for interlocutory relief, the court issued preliminary injunctions relating to the MCC's telephone service and forbidding any change in visiting hours without notice to the court and petitioners.

Trial of the many questions still to be decided began on February 28 and extended, with some interruptions and truncated days, through March 30, 1977. In addition to the live testimony of inmates, attorneys, correctional personnel (including the Warden and Bureau of Prisons Director), and various experts, the court has considered deposition testimony, voluminous exhibits, and the observations made in two further visits to the MCC. These materials, as compounded and alchemized in post-trial memoranda and affidavits approaching a total of 1,000 pages, generate the findings and conclusions that follow.

In advance of enumerating what the court has decided, and why, it has seemed convenient to begin with a general description of the MCC, and then to sketch preliminarily the principles and restrictions (by no means fixed and certain) governing the involvement of federal judges in the conditions and management of federal prison facilities. Against these background observations, the facts and dispositions with respect to each subject of controversy will be the subject of our third, and lengthiest, chapter.

I.

The MCC, which opened on August 2, 1975, has an appearance, and results from a course of planning, markedly divergent from the bestial traditions of the American jail.² However well or ill they succeeded, a question we must presently address, those who conceived and designed this institution strove to be humane. They undertook to plan not merely for security and efficiency, but for modest amenities that might rescue from the wretchedness of incarceration some remnants of privacy, self respect, and, even, dignity. The MCC, at least upon first sight, is markedly different from the familiar pattern of barred cages, gray corridors, and clanging gates comprising the standard image.

Two features of the institution have basic significance for its structural character and some of the major complaints lodged by petitioners. First, built in a congested part of a congested City, next to our court building, it is 12 stories tall and has no open ground around it for recreational or other uses. Second, the five floors of the building housing inmates are divided into "functional," or "modular," units reflecting a carefully conceived idea of how best to organize relatively complete programs within subdivisions of the building rather than requiring or permitting aggregations of the population for such activities as meals and recreation. The modular unit, as its creator imagined it, would facilitate useful classifications of inmates (e. g., sentenced people, those awaiting trial, dangerous/nondangerous). Each functional unit, being self-contained, would include its own common area, eating place, some recreational facilities, and separate sleeping quarters. Since the total number within the unit would be relatively small, problems of mass traffic would be cut or eliminated. Long periods of lock-in time would become unnecessary. Inmates could circulate within the unit during much of the day, moving freely from the common area to the comparative privacy of a dormitory or the more nearly entire privacy of the single room, which was to be the most prevalent form of sleeping accommodation.

This design was implemented. As the MCC came to be constructed, almost every floor housing inmates has two modular units.³ Each unit has from two to six "clusters" or corridors of rooms or dormitories radiating from a central common area. One of the units contains dormitories, designed by the planners to house ten inmates each. The remaining units contain clusters of rooms, each designed for a single occupant, each originally equipped with its own key to be given to the inmate.⁴ Except for a unit now housing female inmates, each of the rooms has a washbasin and toilet.

The common areas are carpeted, and other details are designed to supply some color and interest for the eye. These areas, except for the one in the protective custody unit, are two stories in height, with flights of stairs leading to the rooms or dormitories. Each common area has a color television set, couches, chairs, tables, telephones, mail boxes, exercise apparatus, one or more typewriters, laundry facilities, a water fountain, an education area, and pantries with microwave ovens. There is equipment for closed-circuit educational TV, said at the time of the court's last visit to be verging toward employment. There are staff offices within the units (other than the protective custody unit). Carrying out the functional design, meals are brought on carts to the units, having been pre-cooked and apportioned onto trays, and reheated in the microwave ovens before being served and consumed within the unit.

Avoiding the bar or cage motif, the designers and builders of the MCC arranged narrow, but unbarred, windows facing the outside world, made of a powerful 3/8 -inch thick unbreakable polycarbonate plastic, which is colorless and transparent.⁵ The windows are recessed some 14 inches from the building's face and are soundproof.

Since the units are designed and used to accommodate nearly all the regular aspects of life in confinement, there is little or no reason in respondents' view, or opportunity, for an inmate's departure from the confines of the unit during the days and nights of his or her stay. Many inmates actually stay within their units continuously for long stretches of days or weeks. There is no gymnasium, chapel, commissary, or industrial work place. There is a rooftop recreation area equipped with an abbreviated basketball court, and for paddleball, handball, or open-air spectatorship. The area is surrounded by a wall 20 feet high and topped by a mesh of stainless steel wires welded to a steel gridwork. The inmates, proceeding by units, are allowed about an hour a day in this rooftop area, the desirability of which varies, of course, with weather conditions, and they vary widely in their uses of this opportunity. For the overwhelming majority of inmates, these excursions, the sick call, attorney visits, and court appearances are the only times they leave their units.

Other aspects of the functional-unit plan — touching, inter alia, visiting, religious activities, and library facilities — are best discussed in connection with specific issues to be decided.

II.

General propositions may not decide, but they define some useful perimeters for, concrete issues like those the petitioners have raised. In any case, the court has found it convenient to take some rough bearings before proceeding to the asserted grievances one by one.

We work in a new, but already substantial, field of law elaborated mostly by federal courts responding to demands of state prisoners for rights under the Federal Constitution and federal laws said to be offended by their treatment in state prisons. A host of cases have marked by now an array of rights to minimal decency in jails and prisons — some rights of expression and religious observance; rights to moderately civilized living quarters, food, and...