362
Opinion of the Court
that lockdown prisoners routinely experience delays in receiving legal materials or legal assistance, some as long as 16 days, 834 F. Supp., at 1557, and n. 23, but so long as they are the product of prison regulations reasonably related to legitimate penological interests, such delays are not of constitutional significance, even where they result in actual injury (which, of course, the District Court did not find here).
Second, the injunction imposed by the District Court was inordinately—indeed, wildly—intrusive. There is no need to belabor this point. One need only read the order, see App. to Pet. for Cert. 61a-85a, to appreciate that it is the ne plus ultra of what our opinions have lamented as a court's "in the name of the Constitution, becom[ing] . . . enmeshed in the minutiae of prison operations." Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U. S. 520, 562 (1979).
Finally, the order was developed through a process that
failed to give adequate consideration to the views of state prison authorities. We have said that "[t]he strong considerations of comity that require giving a state court system that has convicted a defendant the first opportunity to correct its own errors . . . also require giving the States the first opportunity to correct the errors made in the internal administration of their prisons." Preiser v. Rodriguez, 411 U. S. 475, 492 (1973). For an illustration of the proper procedure in a case such as this, we need look no further than Bounds itself. There, after granting summary judgment for the inmates, the District Court refrained from " 'dictat[ing] precisely what course the State should follow.' " Bounds, 430 U. S., at 818. Rather, recognizing that "determining the 'appropriate relief to be ordered . . . presents a difficult problem,' " the court " 'charge[d] the Department of Correction with the task of devising a Constitutionally sound program' to assure inmate access to the courts." Id., at 818-819. The State responded with a proposal, which the District Court ultimately approved with minor changes, after considering ob-
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