Court Opinion

ID: 9660587
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 22:16:32.331477+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:14:20.813603
License: Public Domain

HAYS, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
If a classification made by a state has some reasonable basis it does not violate the equal protection clause. Dandridge v. Williams, 397 U.S. 471, 90 S.Ct. 1153, 25 L.Ed.2d 497 (1970).
There seems to me to be a reasonable ground for distinguishing in the award of good time credit between time spent in state prison under the supervision of the state prison authorities and time spent in county jail under the supervision of local authorities. It was surely not wholly arbitrary for the legislature to provide that the Parole Board should have the power to act upon a prisoner’s application only after the prisoner has spent a fixed proportion of his sentence in a place where his conduct has been under the observation of state prison officials rather than in a local jail.
Under the guise of applying constitutional principles federal judges are increasingly taking over from the states the administration of state prison systems. In this case, as in a number of others recently decided, the assumption of these new duties appears to be based rather on the judges’ conviction that they can administer state prisons more wisely than can the state authorities, and not on any compelling constitutional considerations.