WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday all but overturned California's policy of housing new prison inmates by race, declaring that the temporary segregation must be halted unless state officials could show it was the only way to maintain safety and security.
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 ... 50 years ago in Brown vs. Board of Education, and we refuse to resurrect it today," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said for the court.
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.
The policy drew little attention until it was challenged by a prisoner. Garrison S. Johnson, a black inmate from Los Angeles County, filed a lawsuit 10 years ago, contending the state's segregation policy was unconstitutional.
In 1987, he was sent to prison for 36 years for murder, robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. He was transferred to several prisons, and each time he was put in a cell with a black inmate.
Los Angeles lawyer Bert H. Deixler took up Johnson's case and, despite a series of setbacks in the courts in California, succeeded in getting the attention of the Supreme Court.
"The impact of this decision will be to end the disgraceful practice of racial segregation in the California prisons," Deixler said. "You can look at gang membership as a basis for special treatment, but you can't look at people coming off the bus and say: 'Blacks go through that door and whites go through the other door.' This policy assumes if you are of a certain race, you have a penchant for interracial violence."
Bush administration lawyers joined the case on Johnson's side when it reached the high court. They argued that the segregation policy was unneeded and unconstitutional. Moreover, they said, the federal prison system prohibited racial discrimination among inmates.
"I'm elated," said Johnson, who is incarcerated at Corcoran State Prison near Fresno. "It's still sinking in."
The 40-year-old inmate learned of the court's decision during a telephone call from state Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), head of an oversight committee on corrections. During the call, which the Los Angeles Times was allowed to monitor, Johnson said he was raised a "military brat" and lived mostly among whites as a youth. It was not until he arrived in prison, Johnson said, that he experienced racial discrimination.
Critics of the state's $6.5-billion prison system praised Wednesday's decision. Romero called on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger "to move with all deliberate speed to integrate our prisons once and for all."
But California prison officials said they were not ready to abandon the policy.
"This wasn't a clear-cut decision from the Supreme Court," Bach said. "Our legal affairs people are looking at the decision and are determining the next steps."
The case, Johnson vs. California, tested two long-standing doctrines of the Supreme Court.
