Opinion ID: 221238
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Existence of a Ready Alternative

Text: The last of the Turner factors asks whether an alternative to the challenged regulation would fully accommodate the inmates' First Amendment rights at a de minimus cost to legitimate penological interests. We disagree with the plaintiffs' contention that such an obvious alternative exists. After Tappy reported the results of his investigation, in addition to banning inmates from advertising for pen-pals, the IDOC also placed limits on who can put funds into inmate trust accounts. The plaintiffs argue that since IDOC inmates may now only receive funds from non-family members who are enumerated on the inmates' visiting lists, the fraud concern has been addressed and the pen-pal prohibition is gratuitous. Certainly the restriction placed on the deposits helps prevent fraud, but it can hardly be said to eradicate it. As the IDOC points out, a person on an inmate's approved list could act as an intermediary who receives funds and then deposits them into the inmate's trust account. In this scenario, fraud could go quite easily undetected by prison officials. In our view, no single regulation can serve as a catchall for eliminating the potential for fraud. Though we agree that the restriction on deposits goes a long way toward accomplishing the stated goal, we defer to the judgment of the prison administrators when it comes to deciding whether a ban on solicitation is also necessary. This is consistent with our circuit's precedent of granting deference to matters of professional judgment by prison officials. See Singer, 593 F.3d at 534 (quoting Overton, 539 U.S. at 132, 123 S.Ct. 2162, for the proposition that [w]e must accord substantial deference to the professional judgment of prison administrators, who bear a significant responsibility for defining the legitimate goals of a corrections system and for determining the most appropriate means to accomplish them). We close by noting that constitutional rights are not eradicated by one's incarceration; the liberties enjoyed by the citizenry at large remain available to incarcerated individuals except to the extent that the exercise of such liberties is at odds with the objectives and administration of an effective prison system. Using pen-pal websites to engage in fraud is antithetical to the rehabilitative goals of confinement. Here, the IDOC reasonably perceived that continuing to allow inmates to use the sites would passively enable fraud. The regulation enacted to prevent it squarely addressed the threat and is therefore constitutional.