The landmark right to counsel case of Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), famously involved a prisoner’s handwritten petition for certiorari that was granted and went on to change the legal landscape. In 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States granted another handwritten prisoner petition and ultimately ruled in favor of the inmate in Millbrook v. United States, 569 U.S. ___ (2013). Today, the Supreme Court granted another handwritten prisoner petition in Holt v. Hobbs, which seeks review of a decision by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, reported at 509 Fed. Appx. 561 (8th Cir. 2013). The key question presented is whether a policy of the Arkansas Department of Corrections that prevents inmates from having a beard of any sort (except that inmates with a diagnosed dermatological problem may wear facial hair no longer than one-quarter of an inch) violates inmates’ rights under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, 42 U.S.C. 2000cc (“RLUIPA”). The petition, filed by an inmate who asserts that his right to observe the principles of Islam by having a beard has wrongly been abridged, is available here.
A number of cases around the country have dealt with the interplay of prison policies regarding inmate beards with the religious rights of inmates. Many of those cases involve either Muslim or Orthodox Jewish inmates. Prison authorities have contended, among other things, that permitting beards would have significant security implications, including affording inmates the ability to change their appearance in order to facilitate escape or disobedience of prison rules, and to hide contraband or weapons in a beard or in their cheeks, cloaked by a beard. Inmates’ religous rights thus run up against the compelling governmental interest in safety and security in prisons.
The parties’ briefs in the Supreme Court do not cite any Third Circuit, District of New Jersey, or New Jersey state court decision on the issue of how the RLUIPA applies to inmate beards. Nonetheless, the issue is of importance in New Jersey, as elsewhere. The Supreme Court of the United States has never addressed this question. But now the Court apparently will do so.