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California Prisons Prepare to Desegregate

By Jonathan Simor

Tanya Schevitz reports in the SF Chronicle on California prisons gearing up to comply with a consent decree to desegregate housing for entering inmates. The state's practice of routinely segregating prisoners by race when they first enter or re-enter prison was challenged in the Supreme Court, which held in California v. Johnson (2005) that even in a prison setting, racial classifications must be reviewed with "strict scrutiny" (i.e., to survive, the state must show the classification was "narrowly tailored" to achieve a "compelling state interest"). The story reports on concerns that desegregation may lead to violence in a prison system divided among racially defined prison gangs. But the real question is why Californian's, who adopted Proposition 209 back in the 1990s to prevent higher education from taking race into account, has tolerated the massive expansion of a prisons system based on racial classification...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on May 29, 2008 (boomark / email).