Court Opinion

ID: 9454561
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:50:01.832715+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:10.142540
License: Public Domain

TAMM, Circuit Judge
(concurring only in the result):
Insofar as the majority opinion only remands these cases to the District Court for further proceedings, I am willing, reluctantly, to concur in that action. While rugged protestations of violations of constitutional guarantees are always heartening, I fear that the majority opinion magnifies the legal issue herein unhampered by a practical evaluation of all of the factors involved. Readily recognizing, if not accepting, the currently prevalent philosophy that hard-fisted treatment of prisoners is unconscionable, I cannot accept the proposition that a necessary corollary of that belief is that we display softheadedness. I fear that in situations like the present case our entire approach has somehow slipped out of synchronization when in our concentration of energies addressed to First Amendment guarantees, we completely lose sight of the objectives of a criminal law system utilizing imprisonment, in part at least, as a punishment for crime. It is not difficult to visualize situations in which judicial mandate would be justified, even required, to correct affirmative conduct upon the part of prison administrators which patently abrogates the constitutional rights of inmates, but the record before us in the present case does not arouse in me a challenge to strike down with the fervor of the agonized ancient mariner, a pernicious and constitutionally evil practice.
I do not share my brethren’s views, that the factual situation herein “stifle [s] fundamental personal liberties.” As footnote 10 of the majority opinion sets forth, the appellants do not “claim that the jail’s food service policies were applied to them in a discriminatory manner.” To the contrary, appellants request that the jail authorities discriminate against other prisoners by affording the appellants special privilege.
I am concerned that the majority’s opinion is creating the nucleus of a vacuum by finding real dangers of constitutional dimension in a record which does not justify the use of such appealing phrases as “retraction of rights,” “tax on conscience,” “burden of free religious exercise,” “degrades the inmate, invades his privacy,” etc. The record before us establishes that on a budget of ninety cents a day per prisoner the jail author*1004ities attempt to serve a balanced diet to all prisoners without any preferential treatment of any group on religious or other grounds. Moslem, Jew, Catholic and Protestant are served identical menus limited by budgetary considerations to uniformity for all prisoners. That this program in some way restricts an appellant or other prisoner from “reclaim [ing] his dignity and reassert [ing] his individuality” and “frustrates the ability to choose pursuits through which he can manifest himself and gain self-respect” certainly erodes my understanding of the dimensions of First Amendment protection. I fear that my learned brethren of the majority are in this case pursuing an abstract constitutional issue for its own sake and are creating an opus monstrous of ends without means. If the ultimate outcome of these proceedings is to be judicial supervision of penal institutions in such minute detail as to encompass even the selection and makeup of daily menus and direction of the service of coffee three times a day (as appellants demand) all bottomed upon the theory that there is religious freedom involved, the court having opened this Pandora’s Box must not hereafter complain about hornets.