In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit

No. 00-1190

Mark Moran,

Petitioner-Appellant,

v.

Kenneth Sondalle,

Respondent-Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.

No. 99-C-1446--Myron L. Gordon, Judge.

No. 00-1206

Daniel L. Johnson,

Petitioner-Appellant,

v.

Kenneth Sondalle,

Respondent-Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.

No. 00-C-109--Myron L. Gordon, Judge.

No. 00-1220

Robert R. Paulk,

Petitioner-Appellant,

v.

Kenneth Sondalle,

Respondent-Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.
No. 99-C-1445--Lynn Adelman, Judge.

No. 00-1250

Terry Paul,

Petitioner-Appellant,

v.

Kenneth Sondalle,

Respondent-Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.

No. 00-C-69--Lynn Adelman, Judge.

No. 00-1291

Michael Spiess,

Petitioner-Appellant,

v.

Kenneth Sondalle,

Respondent-Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Western District of Wisconsin.

No. 99-C-0822-S--John C. Shabaz, Chief Judge.

Submitted May 4, 2000--Decided June 22, 2000

 Before Posner, Chief Judge, and Easterbrook

and Diane P. Wood, Circuit Judges.

 Per Curiam. We have consolidated five

cases in which prisoners required to

litigate under 42 U.S.C. sec.1983 instead

sought writs of habeas corpus. The Prison

Litigation Reform Act, which applies to

prisoners’ civil suits, imposes requirements different from those of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act,

which governs collateral attacks on confinement, making it important to classify

cases correctly. See, e.g., Pischke v.

Litscher, 178 F.3d 497 (7th Cir. 1999);
Valona v. United States, 138 F.3d 693

(7th Cir. 1998); Moore v. Pemberton, 110

F.3d 22 (7th Cir. 1997); Copus v. Edgerton, 96 F.3d 1038 (7th Cir. 1996). Prisoners may be tempted to choose one route

rather than another to avoid limitations

Congress adopted. For example, the filing

fee for an action seeking a writ of habeas corpus is $5, while the fee to commence a case under sec.1983 is $150, see

28 U.S.C. sec.1914(a), and the fee in a

sec.1983 case eventually will be collected from the prisoner’s trust account

under 28 U.S.C. sec.1915(b) even if the

prisoner cannot pay in advance. Frivolous

actions count as "strikes" under sec.191-

5(g), and a prisoner who has accumulated

three strikes must as a rule prepay the

fees in all future civil actions, while

collateral attacks are not subject to

limitation because of prior frivolous

suits.

 Four of the petitions, filed by Mark

Moran, Daniel Johnson, Robert Paulk, and

Terry Paul, contend that Wisconsin violated multiple provisions of the Constitution by transferring inmates to privately run prisons in other states. The

fifth, filed by Michael Spiess, alleges

that Wisconsin failed to use constitutionally required procedures before denying an application for release on parole.

All five prisoners claimed that relief is

proper under 28 U.S.C. sec.2241. In the

first four cases the district court,

citing Pischke, held that such claims

must be pursued as civil suits under

sec.1983. In each case the district court

dismissed the petition (without prejudice

to refiling under sec.1983), declined to

issue a certificate of appealability, see

28 U.S.C. sec.2253(c)(1)(A), and permitted the appeal to proceed in forma pauperis. In each case, despite ruling that

the action was frivolous, the district

court declined to certify that an appeal

would not be in good faith under 28 U.S.-

C. sec.1915(a)(3). The district judges

stated that the prisoners were "earnest"

and thus proceeding in good faith. In the

fifth case the district court did not

reach the merits, ruling that Spiess had

failed to exhaust his state remedies. See

28 U.S.C. sec.2254(b)(1)(A). The court

declined to issue a certificate of appealability and certified that the appeal

is in bad faith, so that all appellate

fees must be prepaid. Despite Newlin v.

Helman, 123 F.3d 429, 437-38 (7th Cir.
1997), which holds that a collateral

attack on a prison administrator’s decision is a "civil action" for purposes of

the plra, in none of the five cases did

the district court attempt to collect

filing fees from the prisoner’s trust

account under 28 U.S.C. sec.1915(b).

 Moran, Johnson, Paulk, and Paul ask us

to issue certificates of appealability so

that they may proceed on appeal. Spiess

wants both a certificate of appealability

and an order permitting him to proceed in

forma pauperis. Two opinions released

after the decisions under review affect

these requests.

 Lee v. Clinton, 209 F.3d 1025 (7th Cir.

2000), holds that an appeal in a frivolous suit cannot be "in good faith" under

sec.1915(a)(3), because "good faith" must

be viewed objectively. Because the district judges believed all five suits to

be frivolous, all five appeals should

have been certified as not in good faith,

and prepayment of all appellate fees

should have been required.

 Part II.B of Walker v. O’Brien, No. 96-

4010 (7th Cir. June 22, 2000), issued

contemporaneously with this opinion,

holds that state prisoners who desire to

protest actions by prison administrators,

and who are entitled to collateral review

(an important qualification), must meet

conditions laid down by sec.2254. Part

III of Walker holds that no petition for

a writ of habeas corpus is a "civil action" for purposes of sec.1915(b), overruling Part III of Newlin. The fee-collection mechanism of the plra therefore

does not apply to any of these cases.

(For the same reason, sec.1915(g) would

not preclude a court from excusing the

prepayment of the filing fees in the

district court and the court of appeals

in a case properly filed as a collateral

attack.) Finally, Part IV of Walker holds

that state prisoners require certificates

of appealability only when they contest

their convictions or sentences; prisoners

who contest prison discipline (for example, the deprivation of good-time credits) may appeal without them. Thus none

of our five appellants requires a certificate of appealability.

 This procedural victory gets them no

further, however, because none of these

five cases is a proper collateral attack.
Pischke holds that state prisoners who

want to challenge transfers to out-ofstate prisons must use sec.1983. Moran,

Johnson, Paulk, and Paul contend that

they have new arguments, but none of

these undercuts Pischke. Prisoners who

want to be confined in one state rather

than another are not demanding immediate

(or earlier) release and therefore must

use sec.1983; they are not entitled to

seek collateral relief under either sec.-

2241 or sec.2254. Spiess, who wants to

challenge the procedures used for parolerelease decisions, does not even attempt

to argue that he has new arguments that

would avoid this circuit’s cases requiring such arguments to be presented under

sec.1983. See, e.g., Clark v. Thompson,

960 F.2d 663 (7th Cir. 1992); Huggins v.

Isenbarger, 798 F.2d 203 (7th Cir. 1986).

 For most purposes, the line between the

domain of collateral review and that of

sec.1983 is simple. State prisoners who

want to challenge their convictions,

their sentences, or administrative orders

revoking good-time credits or equivalent

sentence-shortening devices, must seek

habeas corpus, because they contest the

fact or duration of custody. See, e.g.,

Preiser v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 475 (1973-

); Edwards v. Balisok, 520 U.S. 641 (199-

7). State prisoners who want to raise a

constitutional challenge to any other

decision, such as transfer to a new prison, administrative segregation, exclusion

from prison programs, or suspension of

privileges, must instead employ sec.1983

or another statute authorizing damages or

injunctions--when the decision may be

challenged at all, which under Sandin v.

Conner, 515 U.S. 472 (1995), and Meachum

v. Fano, 427 U.S. 215 (1976), will be

uncommon. See also Wallace v. Robinson,

940 F.2d 243 (7th Cir. 1991) (en banc);

Higgason v. Farley, 83 F.3d 807 (7th Cir.

1996). Legal rules, like physical surfaces, cause diffraction at the edges, see

Graham v. Broglin, 922 F.2d 379, 381 (7th

Cir. 1991); Thurman v. Gramley, 97 F.3d

185, 187 (7th Cir. 1996), but the exceptions (like the scattering of light) may

be ignored for most practical purposes.

Prisoners who follow the rule stated in

this paragraph rarely will go wrong;

those who ignore it rarely will go right.

Our five appellants ignored this line of

demarcation.

 The district judges resisted the tempta-
tion to "convert" the prisoners’ actions

into sec.1983 suits because, as we observed in Pischke and its predecessors,

actions under the plra and the aedpa have

different procedural requirements and

different potential consequences. All

four suits concerning transfers were

dismissed outright, and properly so. All

four judgments are summarily affirmed. We

recognize that two procedural assumptions

behind this conclusion are incompatible

with Montez v. McKinna, 208 F.3d 862

(10th Cir. 2000), which held that sec.22-

41 may be used to challenge transfers to

out-of-state prisons, and that prisoners

who employ sec.2241 in such cases need

certificates of appealability. But these

aspects of Montez are incompatible not

only with Pischke but also with Parts

II.B and IV of Walker. Moran, Johnson,

Paulk, and Paul are beneficiaries of the

difference between Walker and Montez, for

they have obtained appellate decisions

even though they could not establish, as

sec.2253(c)(2) requires, "a substantial

showing of the denial of a constitutional

right." See Slack v. McDaniel, 120 S. Ct.

1595, 1603-04 (2000).

 This does not end matters, however,

because Pischke warned prisoners that any

similar objection to transfer to privately run, out-of-state prisons would be

frivolous. See also, e.g., Olim v. Wakinekona, 461 U.S. 238 (1983); Stanley v.

Litscher, No. 99-3764 (7th Cir. May 16,

2000), slip op. 3. Filing a frivolous

sec.1983 action as a petition for a writ

of habeas corpus avoids sec.1915(b) and

(g), but it does not make the action any

the less frivolous; to the contrary, it

is more frivolous, because it is abusive

procedurally as well as substantively.

Before filing their appeals, these prisoners not only knew about Pischke but

also had been informed by the district

judges that their efforts to avoid Pischke are unavailing. Prisoners who play

games to avoid the plra should not expect

courts to cooperate.

 All four suits arising out of the transfers and, more importantly now, all four

appeals, are frivolous. Moreover, because

these appeals are not in good faith for

purposes of sec.1915(a)(3), we revoke the

orders permitting the appellants to proceed in forma pauperis. The filing and

docket fees for appeal must be paid in

full, and failure to do so will be han-
dled under the approach of Support Systems International, Inc. v. Mack, 45 F.3d

185 (7th Cir. 1995), as Part II of Newlin, 123 F.3d at 436-37, describes. (This

portion of Newlin is unaffected by either

Walker or Lee.) Because both the proceedings in the district court and the appeals are frivolous, each of these plaintiffs has accumulated two "strikes" for

purposes of sec.1915(g): any frivolous

suit or appeal by a prisoner counts, even

though only in a future "civil action or

appeal [of] a judgment in a civil action"

must a prisoner who has "struck out"

prepay the full filing fees.

 As for Spiess, who launched a collateral

attack on the procedures used to deny his

application for release on parole: once

again sec.1983 should have been used.

Spiess does not seek release from custody; he wants reconsideration of his application using different procedures.

Claims of this kind that have reached the

Supreme Court have uniformly been handled

under sec.1983. See, e.g., Board of Pardons v. Allen, 482 U.S. 369 (1987); Greenholtz v. Inmates of Nebraska Penal Complex, 442 U.S. 1 (1979). Clark and Huggins, our own opinions on the subject, also

say that challenges to procedures employed to consider applications for parole are civil actions under sec.1983 and

not collateral attacks under sec.2241 and

sec.2254, unless the prisoner contends

that application of his preferred procedures would have led to his immediate

release. The district court therefore

should not have dismissed the sec.2241

action as premature, inviting Spiess to

file another after exhausting state remedies; it should have dismissed the petition with prejudice on the ground that

sec.1983 provides the exclusive remedy.

Of course, Spiess faces obstacles under

sec.1983 too. For one thing, exhaustion

of administrative remedies now is required in prisoners’ sec.1983 suits. See

42 U.S.C. sec.1997e(a); Perez v. Wisconsin Department of Corrections, 182 F.3d

532 (7th Cir. 1999). For another, the due

process clause has nothing to say about

parole-release decisions unless states

have conferred entitlements sufficiently

definite to count as "liberty" or "property." Greenholtz; Jago v. Van Curen, 454

U.S. 14 (1981). Our examination of Wisconsin’s parole-release system in Felce v.

Fiedler, 974 F.2d 1484, 1491-92 (7th Cir.

1992), led us to say that prisoners who
have served two-thirds of their terms

have such an entitlement; other prisoners

may have no more than a hope or desire,

which Greenholtz holds is insufficient to

create a liberty or property interest.

Perhaps Wisconsin’s system has changed

since 1992; but if it has not, then any

sec.1983 suit Spiess may file would be

frivolous.

 The five applications for certificates

of appealability are dismissed as unnecessary. The judgment of the district

court in Spiess’s case is vacated, and

the matter is remanded with instructions

to dismiss the collateral attack as improper, but without prejudice to a civil

action under sec.1983. (Spiess’s application for leave to proceed in forma pauperis is denied, however, for he had no

hope of success on the merits or even of

obtaining a remand for decision on the

merits. His appeal was not in good faith,

and Spiess owes the entire fee under the

procedures of Newlin.) The other four

judgments are affirmed, two strikes are

assessed against each appellant, and the

appellate fees promptly must be paid in

full.