Cite as: 532 U. S. 223 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
retain, for example, the right to be free from racial discrimination, Lee v. Washington, 390 U. S. 333 (1968) (per curiam), the right to due process, Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U. S. 539 (1974), and, as relevant here, certain protections of the First Amendment, Turner, supra.
We nonetheless have maintained that the constitutional rights that prisoners possess are more limited in scope than the constitutional rights held by individuals in society at large. In the First Amendment context, for instance, some rights are simply inconsistent with the status of a prisoner or "with the legitimate penological objectives of the corrections system," Pell v. Procunier, 417 U. S. 817, 822 (1974). We have thus sustained proscriptions of media interviews with individual inmates, see id., at 833-835, prohibitions on the activities of a prisoners' labor union, see North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union, Inc., supra, at 133, and restrictions on inmate-to-inmate written correspondence, see Turner, supra, at 93. Moreover, because the "problems of prisons in America are complex and intractable," and because courts are particularly "ill equipped" to deal with these problems, Martinez, supra, at 404-405, we generally have deferred to the judgments of prison officials in upholding these regulations against constitutional challenge.
Reflecting this understanding, in Turner we adopted a unitary, deferential standard for reviewing prisoners' constitutional claims: "[W]hen a prison regulation impinges on inmates' constitutional rights, the regulation is valid if it is reasonably related to legitimate penological interests." 482 U. S., at 89. Under this standard, four factors are relevant. First and foremost, "there must be a 'valid, rational connection' between the prison regulation and the legitimate [and neutral] governmental interest put forward to justify it." Ibid. (quoting Block v. Rutherford, 468 U. S. 576, 586 (1984)). If the connection between the regulation and the asserted goal is "arbitrary or irrational," then the regulation fails, irrespective of whether the other factors tilt in its
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