Court Opinion

ID: 9426510
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:18:09.437019+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:00.304705
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stevens,
with whom Mr. Justice Brennan and Mr. Justice Marshall join, dissenting.
The Court’s rationale is more disturbing than its narrow holding. If the Court had merely held that the transfer of a prisoner from one penal institution to another does not cause a sufficiently grievous loss to amount to a deprivation of liberty within the meaning of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,1 *230I would disagree with the conclusion but not with the constitutional analysis. The Court’s holding today, however, appears to rest on a conception of “liberty” which I consider fundamentally incorrect.
The Court indicates that a “liberty interest” may have either of two sources. According to the Court, a liberty interest may “originate in the Constitution,” ante, at 226, or it may have “its roots in state law.” Ibid. Apart from those two possible origins, the Court is unable to find that a person has a constitutionally protected interest in liberty.
If man were a creature of the State, the analysis would be correct. But neither the Bill of Rights nor the laws of sovereign States create the liberty which the Due Process Clause protects. The relevant constitutional provisions are limitations on the power of the sovereign to infringe on the liberty of the citizen. The relevant state laws either create property rights, or they curtail the freedom of the citizen who must live in an ordered society. Of course, law is essential to the exercise and enjoyment of individual liberty in a complex society. But it is not the source of liberty, and surely not the exclusive source.
I had thought it self-evident that all men were endowed by their Creator with liberty as one of the cardinal unalienable rights. It is that basic freedom which the Due Process Clause protects, rather than the particular rights or privileges conferred by specific laws or regulations.
A correct description of the source of the liberty protected by the Constitution does not, of course, decide this case. For, by hypothesis, we are dealing with persons who may be deprived of their liberty because they have been convicted of criminal conduct after a fair trial. We should therefore first ask whether the deprivation of liberty which follows conviction is total or partial.
*231At one time the prevailing view was that the deprivation was essentially total. The penitentiary inmate was considered “the slave of the State.” See Ruffin v. Commonwealth, 62 Va. 790, 796 (1871). Although the wording of the Thirteenth Amendment provided some support for that point of view,2 “courts in recent years have moderated the harsh implications of the Thirteenth Amendment.” 3
The moderating trend culminated in this Court’s landmark holding that notwithstanding the continuation of legal custody pursuant to a criminal conviction, a parolee has a measure of liberty that is entitled to constitutional protection.
“We see, therefore, that the liberty of a parolee, although indeterminate, includes many of the core values of unqualified liberty and its termination inflicts a ‘grievous loss’ on the parolee and often on others. It is hardly useful any longer to try to deal with this problem in terms of whether the parolee’s liberty is a ‘right’ or a ‘privilege.’ By whatever name, the liberty is valuable and must be seen as within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment. Its termination calls for some orderly process, however informal.” Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U. S. 471, 482.
Although the Court’s opinion was narrowly written with careful emphasis on the permission given to the parolee to live outside the prison walls, the Court neces*232sarily held that the individual possesses a residuum of constitutionally protected liberty while in legal custody pursuant to a valid conviction. For release on parole is merely conditional, and it does not interrupt the State's legal custody. I remain convinced that the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit correctly analyzed the true significance of the Morrissey holding, when I wrote for that court in 1973:
“In view of the fact that physical confinement is merely one species of legal custody, we are persuaded that Morrissey actually portends a more basic conceptual holding: liberty protected by the due process clause may — indeed must to some extent — coexist with legal custody pursuant to conviction. The deprivation of liberty following an adjudication of guilt is partial, not total. A residuum of constitutionally protected rights remains.
“As we noted in Morales v. Schmidt, the view once held that an inmate is a mere slave is now totally rejected. The restraints and the punishment which a criminal conviction entails do not place the citizen beyond the ethical tradition that accords respect to the dignity and intrinsic worth of every individual.[4] 'Liberty' and 'custody' are not mutually exclusive concepts.
*233“If the Morrissey decision is not narrowly limited by the distinction between physical confinement and conditional liberty to live at large in society,[5] it requires that due process precede any substantial deprivation of the liberty of persons in custody. We believe a due regard for the interests of the individual inmate, as well as the interests of that substantial segment of our total society represented by inmates,[6] requires that Morrissey be so read.” United States ex rel. Miller v. Twomey, 479 F. 2d 701, 712-713.
It demeans the holding in Morrissey — more importantly it demeans, the concept of liberty itself — to ascribe to that holding nothing more than a protection of an interest that the State has created through its own prison regulations. For if the inmate’s protected liberty interests are no greater than the State chooses to allow, he is really little more than the slave described in the 19th century cases. I think it clear that even the inmate retains an unalienable interest in liberty — at the very minimum the right to be treated with dignity — which the Constitution may never ignore.
*234This basic premise is not inconsistent with recognition of the obvious fact that the State must have wide latitude in determining the conditions of confinement that will be imposed following conviction of crime. To supervise and control its prison population, the State must retain the power to change the conditions for individuals, or for groups of prisoners, quickly and without judicial review. In many respects the State's problems in governing its inmate population are comparable to those encountered in governing a military force. Prompt and unquestioning obedience by the individual, even to commands he does not understand, may be essential to the preservation of order and discipline. Nevertheless, within the limits imposed by the basic restraints governing the controlled population, each individual retains his dignity and, in time, acquires a status that is entitled to respect.
Imprisonment is intended to accomplish more than the temporary removal of the offender from society in order to prevent him from committing like offenses during the period of his incarceration. While custody denies the inmate the opportunity to offend, it also gives him an opportunity to improve himself and to acquire skills and habits that will help him to participate in an open society after his release. Within the prison community, if my basic hypothesis is correct, he has a protected right to pursue his limited rehabilitative goals, or at the minimum, to maintain whatever attributes of dignity are associated with his status in a tightly controlled society. It is unquestionably within the power of the State to change that status, abruptly and adversely; but if the change is sufficiently grievous, it may not be imposed arbitrarily. In such case due process must be afforded.
That does not mean, of course, that every adversity amounts to a deprivation within the meaning of the *235Fourteenth Amendment.7 There must be grievous loss, and that term itself is somewhat flexible. I would certainly not consider every transfer within a prison system, even to more onerous conditions of confinement, such a loss. On the other hand, I am unable to identify a principled basis for differentiating between a transfer from the general prison population to solitary confinement and a transfer involving equally disparate conditions between one physical facility and another.
In view of the Court’s basic holding, I merely note that I agree with the Court of Appeals that the transfer involved in this case was sufficiently serious to invoke the protection of the Constitution.8
I respectfully dissent.

 “No State shall . . . deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ...” U. S. Const., Arndt. 14, § 1.

 Section 1 provides: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,” U. S. Const., Arndt. 13, § 1 (emphasis added).

 Morales v. Schmidt, 489 F. 2d 1335, 1338 (CA7 1973), modified on rehearing en banc, 494 F. 2d 85 (1974).

"[4] In his dissenting opinion in Morrissey v. Brewer, Circuit Judge Lay quoted the following excerpt from the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, Task Force Report: Corrections 83 (1967) (hereinafter cited as Task Force Report):
'A first tenet of our governmental, religious, and ethical tradition is the intrinsic worth of every individual, no matter how degenerate. It is a radical departure from that tradition to subject a defined class of persons, even criminals, to a regime in which their right to liberty is determined by officials wholly unaccountable in the exercise of their power. . . .’ 443 F. 2d [942], at 952 n. 1.” 479 F. 2d, at 712-713, n. 21.

“[5] See Task Force Report, at 6-12. See especially the discussion of ‘Blurring Lines Between Institution and Community’ at 10-11.” Id., at 713 n. 22.

“[6] 'A substantial portion of our population is affected by the law in this area. Approximately 1.3 million people are at any one time subject to correctional authority; untold millions have criminal records. There is increasing doubt as to the propriety of treating this large group of persons as, in varying degrees, outcasts from society. And there is increasing recognition that such treatment is not in the ultimate interests of society. Denying offenders any chance to challenge arbitrary assertions of power by correctional officials, and barring them from legitimate opportunities such as employment, are inconsistent with the correctional goal of rehabilitation, which emphasizes the need to instill respect for and willingness to cooperate with society and to help the offender assume the role of a normal citizen.’ Task Force Report at 82.” Id., at 713 n. 23.

 “This does not mean, however, that every decision by prison officials should be subject to judicial review or that the courts rather than experienced administrators should write prison regulations. Morrissey reminds us that due process is a flexible concept which takes account of the importance of the interests at stake; thus, it is abundantly clear that a myriad of problems of prison administration must remain beyond the scope of proper judicial concern. Only significant deprivations of liberty raise constitutional issues under Morrissey. Moreover, in determining whether to require due process, we need not choose between the 'full panoply’ of rights accorded a defendant in a criminal prosecution, on the one hand, and no safeguards whatsoever, on the other. Rather, as Morrissey aptly illustrates, the requirements of due process may be shaped to fit the needs of a particular situation.” United States ex rel. Miller v. Twomey, 479 F. 2d, at 713.

 There is no question that respondents in this case suffered loss because of the transfer. Hathaway - lost his laundry business — a source of income — which he had been running at Norfolk; Dussault lost his job as a plumber, in which he had been performing “a difficult job especially well”; Royce was separated from counselors with whom he had a “good relationship” which had helped him in his effort “to get himself together.” These losses were in addition to the generally more restrictive conditions inherent in a maximum-security institution as compared to a medium-security institution.