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Opinion of the Court
favor. 482 U. S., at 89-90. In addition, courts should consider three other factors: the existence of "alternative means of exercising the right" available to inmates; "the impact accommodation of the asserted constitutional right will have on guards and other inmates, and on the allocation of prison resources generally"; and "the absence of ready alternatives" available to the prison for achieving the governmental objectives. Id., at 90.
Because Turner provides the test for evaluating prisoners' First Amendment challenges, the issue before us is whether Turner permits an increase in constitutional protection whenever a prisoner's communication includes legal advice. We conclude that it does not. To increase the constitutional protection based upon the content of a communication first requires an assessment of the value of that content.2 But the Turner test, by its terms, simply does not accommodate valuations of content. On the contrary, the Turner factors concern only the relationship between the asserted penological interests and the prison regulation. Id., at 89.
Moreover, under Turner and its predecessors, prison officials are to remain the primary arbiters of the problems that arise in prison management. Ibid.; see also Martinez, supra, at 405 ("[C]ourts are ill equipped to deal with the increasingly urgent problems of prison administration and reform"). If courts were permitted to enhance constitutional protection based on their assessments of the content of the particular communications, courts would be in a position to assume a greater role in decisions affecting prison administration. Seeking to avoid " 'unnecessarily perpetuat[ing] the involvement of the federal courts in affairs of prison administration,' " Turner, 482 U. S., at 89 (quoting Martinez, supra, at 407) (alteration in original), we reject
2 The Court of Appeals made such an assessment when it " 'balance[d] the importance of the prisoner's infringed right against the importance of the penological interest served by the rule.' " 195 F. 3d 1121, 1127 (CA9 1999) (quoting Bradley v. Hall, 64 F. 3d 1276, 1280 (CA9 1995)).
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