Justices Reject Segregation in State's Prisons

In a 5-3 decision, the court said the largest state prison system in the nation was dangerously close to violating the Constitution's ban on racial segregation by the government.

"We rejected the notion that separate can ever be equal

However, she left open the option for prison officials to segregate gang members or violent individuals from other inmates.

The ruling cast doubt on a 25-year unwritten California prison policy -- said to be the only one of its kind in the nation -- of separating incoming prisoners by race during a screening period that lasts as long as 60 days.

At seven "reception centers," new inmates and those being transferred to another facility are kept in a cell with an inmate of the same race or national heritage. Outside of their cells -- at mealtimes, on jobs and in the recreation areas -- prisoners mix without regard to race.

"You cannot house a Japanese inmate with a Chinese inmate. They will kill each other," an associate warden testified in a passage cited by the court. "The same with Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Filipinos."

Margot Bach, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections in Sacramento, said prison officials sometimes separated inmates of the same race or ethnicity.

"Southern California Hispanics and Northern California Hispanics don't get along, and you can't put them in a cell together," she said.

Another high-level state corrections official greeted the decision with alarm, saying that abandoning race-based housing would be "catastrophic and extremely dangerous."

"The only way the system has maintained any sense of control has been through our segregation policies," said the official, who asked not to be named for reasons of job security. "The fact is that inmates, when they are institutionalized, have their own moral standards, their own culture, and they just don't tolerate mixing of races."

Officials in other states, such as Texas, said that they separated new inmates for a few days; prison experts said California was the only state that relied on race for screening over weeks or months.