Opinion ID: 349660
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Monitoring and Recording

Text: 50 In Lanza v. New York, 370 U.S. 139, 82 S.Ct. 1218, 8 L.Ed.2d 384 (1962), the Supreme Court addressed a Fourth Amendment challenge to the electronic interception of a conversation between a jail prisoner and a visitor, Lanza. Unknown to the two, jail officials, by means of an electronic device installed in the visitors' room at the jail, had listened to and transcribed the conversation. The transcript was then delivered to a state legislative committee investigating possible corruption in the state parole system. Lanza was called before the committee where, after receiving immunity, he refused to answer a series of questions. Because of this refusal, he was convicted of a misdemeanor. Lanza attacked the conviction, charging that the interception of the conversation was violative of Fourth Amendment principles incorporated in the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and that the committee interrogation was based on information derived from the improper interception. Accordingly, he argued, it was a denial of due process to convict him for failing to answer the committee's questions. 51 Regarding Lanza's Fourth Amendment claim, the Supreme Court observed that 52 to say that a public jail is the equivalent of a man's house or that it is a place where he can claim constitutional immunity from search or seizure of his person, his papers, or his effects, is at best a novel argument. To be sure, the Court has been far from niggardly in construing the physical scope of Fourth Amendment protection. A business office is a protected area, and so may be a store. A hotel room, in the eyes of the Fourth Amendment, may become a person's house, and so, of course, may an apartment. An automobile may not be unreasonably searched. Neither may an occupied taxicab. Yet, without attempting either to define or to predict the ultimate scope of Fourth Amendment protection, it is obvious that a jail shares none of the attributes of privacy of a home, an automobile, an office, or a hotel room. In prison, official surveillance has traditionally been the order of the day. 53 Id. at 143, 82 S.Ct. at 1220-21 (footnotes omitted). 10 54 Because of the obvious similarity between the facts in Lanza and the facts surrounding the making of the Tobin tape, and in response to the district court's reliance on Lanza, appellant argues that the case no longer has precedential value. In appellant's view, the Supreme Court's decision in Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967), effectively overruled Lanza or at the very least significantly reduced its precedential value. In Katz, the Court held that the government's electronic interception of Katz's conversation in a phone booth violated the Fourth Amendment. Rejecting Katz's formulation of the issue whether the phone booth was a constitutionally protected area the Court stated that the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. Id. at 351, 88 S.Ct. at 511. Appellant contends that it is this language that undercuts Lanza, with its discussion of private (business office, store, hotel room, house, car, and taxicab) and nonprivate (jail) places. See Lanza v. New York, supra, 370 U.S. at 143, 82 S.Ct. 1218. 55 Post-Katz decisions of this circuit dealing with jailhouse searches and seizures, however, have treated Katz and Lanza as compatible. United States v. Dawson, 516 F.2d 796, 805 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 423 U.S. 855, 96 S.Ct. 104, 46 L.Ed.2d 80 (1975); United States v. Hitchcock, 467 F.2d 1107, 1108 (9th Cir. 1972), cert. denied, 410 U.S. 916, 93 S.Ct. 973, 35 L.Ed.2d 279 (1973). Further, these cases relied principally on Katz which unquestionably continues to have precedential value, in developing a rule that defeats appellant's Fourth Amendment claim in the present case: An intrusion by jail officials pursuant to a rule or policy with a justifiable purpose of imprisonment or prison security is not violative of the Fourth Amendment. United States v. Dawson, supra, 516 F.2d at 805-06; United States v. Savage, 482 F.2d 1371, 1373 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 415 U.S. 932, 94 S.Ct. 1446, 39 L.Ed.2d 491 (1973). Under this rule, a prisoner is not deprived of all Fourth Amendment protections; the rule recognizes, however, the government's weighty, countervailing interests in prison security and order. Cf. Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U.S. 396, 404-14, 94 S.Ct. 1800, 40 L.Ed.2d 224 (1974). 11 56 Here the government adequately established that its practice of monitoring and recording prisoner-visitor conversations was a reasonable means of maintaining prison security. Indeed, appellant makes no very serious argument to the contrary. Rather, she focuses her arguments almost exclusively on the other end of the balance beam: the prisoner's interest in privacy. But once the government establishes that its intrusion is for  '(a) justifiable purpose of imprisonment or prison security,'  United States v. Dawson, supra, 516 F.2d at 806, citing United States v. Savage, supra, 482 F.2d at 1373, the Fourth Amendment question is essentially resolved in its favor. This approach is reflective of both the federal courts' broad hands-off attitude toward problems of prison administration, Procunier v. Martinez, supra, 416 U.S. at 404, 94 S.Ct. at 1807, and traditional notions regarding official surveillance of prisoners, Lanza v. New York, supra, 370 U.S. at 143, 82 S.Ct. 1218, with the concomitant reduction in reasonable prisoner expectations of privacy. United States v. Hitchcock, supra, 467 F.2d at 1108. 57 One further consideration in the present case reinforces our conclusion that the monitoring and recording of prisoner-visitor conversations was reasonable and therefore not violative of the Fourth Amendment. In Procunier v. Martinez, supra, 416 U.S. 396, 94 S.Ct. 1800, 40 L.Ed.2d 224, the Supreme Court was confronted with a First Amendment challenge to mail censorship brought by California prisoners. The Court did not prohibit all censorship. Rather, it recognized the weighty governmental interests in prison security and order and prisoner rehabilitation and permitted censorship that both furthered one of those interests and was no broader than necessary to accomplish its purpose. 58 In reaching its conclusion, the Court observed: 59 Perhaps the most obvious example of justifiable censorship of prisoner mail would be refusal to send or deliver letters concerning escape plans or containing other information concerning proposed criminal activity, whether within or without the prison. Similarly, prison officials may properly refuse to transmit encoded messages. Other less obvious possibilities come to mind . . . . 60 Id. at 413, 94 S.Ct. at 1811. It would be anomalous indeed to permit prison officials to intercept written correspondence between prisoners and outsiders in an effort to ferret out escape plans or other criminal activity, while at the same time prohibiting the interception of oral communications between prisoners and visitors conducted for essentially the same purposes: prison security and order. Yet this is practically what appellant urges. We do not believe that the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment require such an artificial distinction.