Civil Rights Recent Case

Recent Case: Jones v. Carter

Prisoners lose many of their rights when they walk through the jailhouse door, but the free exercise of religion is not one of them.  Correctional officers must provide certain accommodations for prisoners’ religious exercise, including offering religious diets.  To accommodate such diets, the Indiana Department of Correction (DOC) has some facilities with kosher kitchens, and prisoners in those facilities receive kosher vegetarian meals.  Those in other facilities receive kosher meal trays with meat.  Roman Lee Jones, a Muslim prisoner, believes he must eat a halal diet but accepts kosher food as an alternative. Jones is at a facility with a kosher kitchen, and thus receives a kosher vegetarian meal.  The issue is that he believes halal (or kosher) meat must be a regular part of his diet, and he therefore requested one of the kosher meal trays provided to prisoners in other facilities.  The DOC denied his request, and he sued under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), claiming the DOC violated his free exercise of religion.

The sole issue on appeal was whether the DOC’s refusal to provide Jones with kosher meat was a “substantial burden” on his exercise of religion.  RLUIPA states that a correctional facility may not “impose a substantial burden” on a prisoner’s religious exercise unless it passes strict scrutiny, but does not define what makes a burden “substantial.”  The DOC argued there was no substantial burden because Jones could purchase halal meat from the prison commissary, which meant the lack of meat was the result of “his own spending choices.”  The Seventh Circuit rejected this argument.  The court noted that there had been splits among the circuits about what constitutes a “substantial” burden, but found that two recent Supreme Court decisions, Holt v. Hobbs (2015) and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014), cleared up much of the confusion.  In those cases, in which the religious parties faced either significant fines or disciplinary action, the Supreme Court did not “offset[] against the burden imposed by the rule any other religious accommodations offered,” and it did not say that significant fines or disciplinary action were the “floor” for finding a substantial burden.

In light of Holt and Hobby Lobby, the Seventh Circuit held that “there can be no doubt that when the state forces a prisoner to give away his last dime so that his daily meals will not violate his religious practice, it is imposing a substantial burden.”  Jones makes at most $8.40 per week in his prison job; it will cost him $14 per week to pay for halal meat at the commissary.  Even with this potential hardship, the court stressed that the recent cases disapproved of inquiring into the burdened party’s ability to pay at all, so even if Jones has access to more than just his job wages, the burden would still exist.

Judge Brennan dissented, arguing that the district court had not determined whether Jones was “indigent or suffer[ed] other financial hardship.”  Without knowing whether Jones was actually able to pay, the court could not judge “the severity of the burden commissary purchases place on him.”  Judge Brennan argued that Jones should only be permitted to receive a kosher meal tray if he could show “he is indigent and unable to acquire halal meat on his own.”

The Seventh Circuit’s decision not only fits well with recent Supreme Court decisions about burdens, but also honors the spirit of RLUIPA and recognizes its context.  RLUIPA was passed in the heyday of statutory religious freedom protections.  In 1990 the Supreme Court (in)famously held in Employment Division v. Smith that the First Amendment does not require religious exemptions from neutral and generally applicable laws, backtracking on earlier decisions that had applied strict scrutiny to government actions that burdened religious exercise.  Congress, furious about the decision, passed the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in response, which mandated strict scrutiny for all government actions burdening religious exercise.  After the Supreme Court struck down RFRA as applied to the states (rather than to federal action) in 1997, states began to pass their own RFRAs or otherwise interpret their state constitutional guarantees of religious freedom to require strict scrutiny.  RLUIPA, passed in 2000, was thus part of a broad movement to ensure strong protections for religious freedom.

RLUIPA was also important because it explicitly affirmed religious freedom in the context of prisons, not just generally (as RFRA had).  Before RLUIPA, the Supreme Court had recognized that prisoners retain the free exercise right but that burdens on that right would be judged under a more lenient standard: a regulation would be permissible if “reasonably related to legitimate penological interests.”  RLUIPA’s strict scrutiny mandate is a much higher bar, and shows Congress meant to put a thumb on the scale for religion even in the prison context.

Thus, the Seventh Circuit’s ruling for Jones is in line not only with the letter, but also the spirit of RLUIPA.  The dissent is certainly correct that Congress required strict scrutiny only for “substantial” burdens, not just any burdens.  But a fair consideration of RLUIPA’s context counsels a broad view of what is “substantial.”  Even in the face of concerns about prisoners claiming religious exemptions in order to game the system, Congress came down firmly on the side of protecting religious freedom, and the court’s ruling for Jones fits within that larger project.