Cite as: 518 U. S. 343 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
III
There are further reasons why the order here cannot stand. We held in Turner v. Safley, 482 U. S. 78 (1987), that a prison regulation impinging on inmates' constitutional rights "is valid if it is reasonably related to legitimate peno-logical interests." Id., at 89. Such a deferential standard is necessary, we explained,
"if 'prison administrators . . . , and not the courts, [are] to make the difficult judgments concerning institutional operations.' Subjecting the day-to-day judgments of prison officials to an inflexible strict scrutiny analysis would seriously hamper their ability to anticipate security problems and to adopt innovative solutions to the intractable problems of prison administration." Ibid. (citation omitted), quoting Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union, Inc., 433 U. S. 119, 128 (1977).
These are the same concerns that led us to encourage "local experimentation" in Bounds, see supra, at 352, and we think it quite obvious that Bounds and Turner must be read in pari materia.
The District Court here failed to accord adequate deference to the judgment of the prison authorities in at least three significant respects. First, the court concluded that ADOC's restrictions on lockdown prisoners' access to law libraries were unjustified. Turner's principle of deference has special force with regard to that issue, since the inmates in lockdown include "the most dangerous and violent prisoners in the Arizona prison system," and other inmates presenting special disciplinary and security concerns. Brief for Petitioners 5. The District Court made much of the fact
upon all those institutions. However inadequate the library facilities may be as a theoretical matter, various prisons may have other means (active assistance from "jailhouse lawyers," complaint forms, etc.) that suffice to prevent the legal harm of denial of access to the courts. Courts have no power to presume and remediate harm that has not been established.
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