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Opinion of the Court
claims); Smith v. Maschner, 899 F. 2d 940, 950 (CA10 1990) (same); Gassler v. Rayl, 862 F. 2d 706, 707-708 (CA8 1988) (same). To resolve the conflict, we granted certiorari. 530 U. S. 1303 (2000).
II
In this case, we are not asked to decide whether prisoners have any First Amendment rights when they send legal correspondence to one another. In Turner, we held that restrictions on inmate-to-inmate communications pass constitutional muster only if the restrictions are reasonably related to legitimate and neutral governmental objectives. 482 U. S., at 89. We did not limit our holding to nonlegal correspondence, and petitioners do not ask us to construe it that way. Instead, the question presented here simply asks whether Murphy possesses a First Amendment right to provide legal advice that enhances the protections otherwise available under Turner. The effect of such a right, as the Court of Appeals described it, 195 F. 3d, at 1127, would be that inmate-to-inmate correspondence that includes legal assistance would receive more First Amendment protection than correspondence without any legal assistance. We conclude that there is no such special right.
Traditionally, federal courts did not intervene in the internal affairs of prisons and instead "adopted a broad hands-off attitude toward problems of prison administration." Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U. S. 396, 404 (1974). Indeed, for much of this country's history, the prevailing view was that a prisoner was a mere "slave of the State," who "not only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords him." Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union, Inc., 433 U. S. 119, 139 (1977) (Marshall, J., dissenting) (quoting Ruffin v. Commonwealth, 62 Va. 790, 796 (1871)) (alterations and internal quotation marks omitted). In recent decades, however, this Court has determined that incarceration does not divest prisoners of all constitutional protections. Inmates
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