Court Opinion

ID: 9458386
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 20:50:57.997343+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:35:45.060129
License: Public Domain

OAKES, Circuit Judge
(concurring):
By my concurrence in Judge Smith’s able and thorough opinion, I do not wish to indicate agreement with the strict lines drawn by Sostre v. McGinnis, 442 F.2d 178, 200-201 (2d Cir. 1971) (en banc), cert. denied, 405 U.S. 978, 92 S. Ct. 1190, 31 L.Ed.2d 254 (1972), for as I pointed out in concurring in Wright v. McMann, 460 F.2d 126 (2d Cir., 1972), Sostre itself invites a reexamination in particular cases of the extent to which there may be prison interference with inmate mail. 442 F.2d at 201. The First Circuit, since Sostre, has taken what seems to me. a little closer look at this issue than the court in Sostre, with many, many questions before it, was perhaps able to do. See Smith v. Robbins, 454 F.2d 696 (1st Cir. 1972), aff’g 328 F. Supp. 162 (D.Me.1971) (Gignoux, J.). See generally Note, Prison Mail Censorship and the First Amendment, 81 Yale L.J. 87, 108-111 (1971). See also Nolan v. Fitzpatrick, 451 F.2d 545 (1st Cir. 1971) (prisoners’ letters to news media).
Much less by my concurrence do I wish to indicate agreement with Mc-Closkey v. Maryland, 337 F.2d 72 (4th Cir. 1964), or any other case which permits the inhibition — even in the absence of a clear and present danger and even with “less drastic means” 1 available — of inmates’ first or sixth amendment rights. Perhaps these disclaimers are made out of an abundance of caution, but this is an expanding area of law where considerable flexibility of judicial viewpoint seems warranted. The principal portion of this concurrence is, however, directed to the underlying assumptions of the skillfully put dissenting opinion.
There is nothing in federal or state constitutional or statutory law of which I am aware that forbids prison inmates from seeking to form, or correctional officials from electing to deal with, an organization or agency or representative group of inmates concerned with prison conditions and inmates’ grievances. Indeed, the tragic experience at Attica, see Inmates of Attica Correctional Facility v. Rockefeller, 453 F.2d 12 (2d Cir. 1971), would make correctional officials, an observer might think, seek more peaceful ways of resolving prison problems than the old, ironclad, solitary-confinement, mail-censoring, dehumanizing methods 2 that have worked so poorly in *1246the past.3 Promoting or at least permitting the formation of a representative agency might well be, in the light of past experience, the wisest course for correctional officials to follow. A recognition of the need for new initiatives may be what prompted the Superintendent at Green Haven initially to permit the circulation of “organization cards.”
In this instance the proposed representative agency — perhaps for polemic or organizational reasons, perhaps to promote easier understanding of its purposes among the inmates, or perhaps because the civilian analogy was an apt one — has been designated as a “union” (whether by the inmates themselves or the Legal Aid Society does not appear). This has raised many specters — strikes, picketing, meetings, grievance procedures, jurisdictional disputes — that we associate with union-management controversy. And even if treated as rhetorical in part, the “union,” as the dissent rightfully points out, is proposed to engage in “collective bargaining” on the inmates’ behalf.
The formation of a prisoners’ “union,” even in its nonrhetorical sense, does not strike me as a proposal totally unacceptable to society. Indeed, unless positive steps are taken by “management” — the correctional authorities themselves — to meet legitimate grievances, radically to change a system that is at least one hundred years behind the times,4 and wholly to alter what Chief Justice Burger has referred to as the tendency “to regard all criminals as human rubbish,”5 one may surmise that inmate “unions,” or at least some form of collective inmate representation, are inevitable. Social progress may be slow in forthcoming, but yesterday’s illegal conspiracy is today’s legitimate agency and tomorrow’s constitutional prerogative, and the history of organized labor in the United States is not all that inept or far-fetched an analogy.
It may be, as the dissent quite rightly points out, that the advice given the inmates of Green Haven by the Prisoner’s Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society was neither all “legal” advice nor all sound.6 But the role of the lawyer in American society is a fluid one, and now we not only have legitimized group legal practice,7 but have recognized that a *1247lawyer’s advice to his clients, to be complete, may have to go beyond the traditional narrow concepts of Anglican jurisprudence and involve matters not wholly “legal” in nature, by earlier definition. See generally B. Abel-Smith & R. Stevens, In Search of Justice (1968).
As to the form of the advice, at least one reading of the Society’s proviso in its proposed letter that recognition of the union is dependent upon “the administration [being] willing to proceed in good faith” may be that it simply states fact (in the light of the administration’s having permitted the circulation of organization cards in the first instance), although the Society’s choice of language does subject it, unhappily as the dissent points out, to an alternative construction that was unnecessary and undesirable. Thus, it is true that, while not earthshaking perhaps, the words “in good faith” might better have been omitted. I cannot help but feel, however, that a prison administration wise enough to have permitted circulation in the first instance would not, absent an overly defensive reaction, have given the unfriendly alternative construction credence by an answer.
The dissent expresses the view, and a respectable one it is, that judges must be very careful not to substitute their judgment for that of correctional officials. The dissent also properly points out that our federal system demands that federal judges must be particularly careful to let the states handle their internal administrative problems, absent federal questions. Here, however, unless it is assumed that prison inmates do not have first and sixth amendment rights collectively to consult counsel and to communicate with counsel about individual and collective grievances as to prison conditions, there is a plausible, proper basis for federal judicial intervention. Cf., e. g., Nolan v. Fitzpatrick, 451 F.2d 545 (1st Cir. 1971); Gignoux, J., in Smith v. Robbins, 328 F.Supp. 162 (D.Me.1971), aff’d, 454 F.2d 696 (1st Cir. 1972).
The extent of judicial intervention, whether state or federal, of course, may not exceed the strict limitations upon the scope of review of administrative action. Here the judge gave no weight to the correction officials’ expressed fear of “open hostilities,” apparently because there was no substantial evidence to support it. In doing so he did no more than, for example, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Nolan v. Fitzpatrick, supra (prison ban on letters to press regarding inmate grievances not sustained despite alleged threats to prison security). The extent of permissible judicial review of correction officials’ action would seem to be no different from the extent of permissible review of the actions of .the NLRB, the FPC, the ICC, the CAB, and the like. As Chief Judge Bazelon of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals said, in the context of judicial review of treatment of mental hospital inmates, “many people seem to accept judicial scrutiny of, say, the effect of a proposed dam on fish life, while they reject similar scrutiny of the effect of psychiatric treatment on human lives. . . . While the importance of this factor can be overestimated, in the law as in all other areas we tend to accept the accustomed and fear the new.” Bazelon, Implementing the Right to Treatment, 36 U.Chi.L. Rev. 742, 743 (1969).
Nor is judicial nonintervention justified by the record’s failure to disclose an attempt by the Legal Aid Society to avoid this “federal case” by casting its proposed letter in a form acceptable to *1248the Green Haven “management.” We do not know the extent to which the determination of the Society to institute legal action was influenced by views informally or publicly expressed by correctional officials. We do know that the “management” took the flat position on February 9 that it would deny recognition to the inmates’ “union,” thereby negating any subsequent negotiation on the terms of the proposed letter.
In my view, it is not altogether irrelevant that the Prisoner’s Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society has responsibly done a great deal — for example, through its quiet but persistent representation of individual inmates having judicial as well as prison grievances, and, as disclosed by the record in Inmates of Attica Correctional Facility v. Rockefeller, 453 F.2d 12 (2d Cir. 1971), through its prompt efforts on behalf of the inmates of Attica — to warrant taking a charitable view of its efforts at Green Haven. One can surmise that the Society’s efforts have tended to help defuse by legal means what the tragedies at Attica indicate is an explosive situation in the New York state prison system. If the views expressed in this opinion tend to give the Society the benefit of the doubt, it is a benefit in short the writer believes earned.

. Shelton v. Tucker, 364 U.S. 479, 488, 81 S.Ct. 247, 5 L.Ed.2d 231 (1960); see Note, Less Drastic Means and the First Amendment, 78 Yale L.J. 464 (1969).

. See, e. g., Wright v. McMann, 460 F.2d 126 (2d Cir. 1972); Rodriguez v. McGinnis, 456 F.2d 79 (2d Cir. 1972) (en banc), petition for cert. filed, 40 U.S.L.W. 3523 (U.S.Apr.24, 1972) (No. 71-1369); *1246Carothers v. Follette, 314 F.Supp. 1014 (S.D.N.Y.1970); cf. Attica inmate Edward Young, quoted in N.Y. Times, Apr. 15, 1972, at 35, col. 1 (city ed.) (“You don’t have to put a hand on me to degrade me”). See also, e. g., Rabinowitz, The Expansion of Prisoners’ Rights, 16 Vill.L. Rev. 1047 (1971).
As the New York City Board of Correction put it recently: “Alienated from the community and from the Criminal Justice System itself, prisons have become warehouses of human anguish and mirrors of social injustice.” Crisis in the Prisons: New York City Responds 3 (1971 New York City Board of Correction Ann.Rep.).

. See, e. g., Inmates of Attica Correctional Facility v. Rockefeller, 453 F.2d 12 (2d Cir. 1971). New York is by no means alone, however. See, e. g., Landman v. Royster, 333 F.Supp. 621 (E.D.Va.1971) (Va. prison system’s disciplinary procedures violative of due process); Jackson v. Hendrick, 40 U.S.L.W. 2710 (Philadelphia, Pa.Ct.C.P., Apr. 7, 1972) (Philadelphia prison conditions violative of first, sixth, eighth and fourteenth amendments to United States Constitution). In New York City prisons there are some encouraging first steps. See Crisis in the Prisons: New York City Responds (1971 New York City Board of Correction Ann.Rep.).

. “Generally, prisons have not yet caught up to the Cincinnati Declaration [the Declaration of Principles of 1870 at the Cincinnati Prison Conference].” Spaeth, The Courts’ Responsibility for Prison Reform, 16 Vill.L.Rev. 1031, 1039 (1971).

. 5 Trial 15 (Oct.-Nov. 1969).

. One doubts, for example, that recognition by the PERB would be forthcoming, given the language of N.Y. Civil Service Law, Art. 14.

. Legal Aid itself is group practice for the indigent, and if union members can be represented as a group, Brotherhood of R.R. Trainmen v. Virginia ex rel. Virginia State Bar, 377 U.S. 1, 84 S.Ct. 1113, 12 L.Ed.2d 89 (1964); see NAACP v. Button, 371 U.S. 415, 83 S.Ct. 328, 9 L.Ed.2d 405 (1963), why not prison inmates? I do not see any difference be*1247tween representing one and representing several hundred inmates. Indeed, this court approved the practice in respect to an injunction request against brutality. Inmates of Attica Correctional Facility v. Rockefeller, 453 F.2d 12, 24-25 (2d Cir. 1971). This practice becomes more understandable when, as here, the Legal Aid Society no doubt represented many of the Green Haven inmates before their incarceration and apparently was ashed by those seeking to form a union to represent them.