Cite as: 518 U. S. 343 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
jections raised by the inmates. Id., at 819-820. We praised this procedure, observing that the court had "scrupulously respected the limits on [its] role," by "not . . . thrust[ing] itself into prison administration" and instead permitting "[p]rison administrators [to] exercis[e] wide discretion within the bounds of constitutional requirements." Id., at 832-833.
As Bounds was an exemplar of what should be done, this case is a model of what should not. The District Court totally failed to heed the admonition of Preiser. Having found a violation of the right of access to the courts, it conferred upon its special master, a law professor from Flushing, New York, rather than upon ADOC officials, the responsibility for devising a remedial plan. To make matters worse, it severely limited the remedies that the master could choose. Because, in the court's view, its order in an earlier access-to-courts case (an order that adopted the recommendations of the same special master) had "resolved successfully" most of the issues involved in this litigation, the court instructed that as to those issues it would implement the earlier order statewide, "with any modifications that the parties and Special Master determine are necessary due to the particular circumstances of the prison facility." App. to Pet. for Cert. 88a (footnote omitted). This will not do. The State was entitled to far more than an opportunity for rebuttal, and on that ground alone this order would have to be set aside.8
8 Justice Stevens believes that the State of Arizona "is most to blame for the objectionable character of the final [injunctive] order," post, at 411, for two reasons: First, because of its lack of cooperation in prison litigation three to five years earlier before the same judge, see Gluth v. Kangas, 773 F. Supp. 1309 (Ariz. 1988). But the rule that federal courts must "giv[e] 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), is not to be set aside when a judge decides that a State was insufficiently cooperative in a different, earlier case. There was no indication of obstructive tactics by the State in the present case, from which one ought to have concluded that the State had learned its lesson. Second,
363
Page: Index Previous 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007