Trial Court Enjoins Unconstitutional Iowa Religion-in-Prisons Program

Marty Lederman

Judge Robert Pratt of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Iowa yesterday issued a judgment and a 140-page opinion declaring unconstitutional the State of Iowa's establishment of a rehabilitation program operated in the state prison system by the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, a substidiary of Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries.

The court's opinion, which follows a very long bench trial, examines at great length the facts underlying the Iowa program. But the central facts are quite simple, and basically undisputed: In the court's words, "state funds were used intentionally to indoctrinate Iowa inmates [within the state prison], by a non-profit religious service provider preferred by the state in its selection process, into a form of the Christian religion in the belief that the indoctrination, combined with the communal rehabilitation model, would be of some help in their rehabilitation." The funded program is faith-intensive, and fundamentally religious in nature: "The overtly religious atmosphere of the InnerChange program is not simply an overlay or a secondary effect of the program—it is the program. There are no separate educational and religious functions in the InnerChange program as there were in Agostini . . . . Here, every activity—worship services, revivals, community meetings, daily devotionals—is organized and developed by the InnerChange program and is designed to transform an individual spiritually. Even the otherwise traditional rehabilitation classes themselves . . . have been turned into classes intended to indoctrinate inmates into the Christian faith."

Although the court's basic analysis is sound, there are several parts of the opinion's constitutional discussion that are a bit off-point, that may be controversial, and that detract from the central holdings, such as: (i) the court's nominal application of the three-pronged "Lemon Test" (a wooden and unilluminating "test" that, at this point, appears to be at most a placeholder in the Supreme Court's doctrine, and which IMHO obscures the important questions in most cases); (ii) an analysis of whether InnerChange is a "pervasively sectarian" program (a question that, in and of itself, almost certainly no longer has any purchase with the Supreme Court -- the important point in this case is simply that the secular and religious aspects of the program cannot be segregated: InnerChange is faith-intensive at its core); and (iii) a discussion of whether there is impermissible "entanglement." There's nothing especially wrong with any of those discussion, but they could easily have been eliminated, and the basic analysis would remain the same, to wit:

The court properly concludes that the Iowa program is unconstitutional for five of the six reasons I offered a few weeks ago for why a similar new federal prisons program is unconstitutional:

1. The program involves direct, and impermissible, financing of religious teaching and indoctrination. (The defendants argued that the money was only subsidizing the "secular" percentage of the program costs; but the Supreme Court, in cases such as Nyquist, Lemon, and Mitchell (the controlling O'Connor opinion) has expressly rejected such a "pro rata" allocation of religious and secular funding; and, in any event, the district court correctly found here that the secular and the religious are inextricably intertwined through the InnerChange program.)

2. Indeed, and wholly apart from the problem of funding, the program involves the state's own indoctrination of religion, because the officers and employees of InnerChange are, in this context, state actors.

3. The state has singled out a religious provider for favored treatment, and such favoring of religion is unconstitutional.

4. The program invovles a de facto denominational preference.

and

5. The program was gerrymandered to ensure that Prison Fellowships operates it.

In addition, the court found that the prison provides inmates with incentives to attend InnerChange.

Any one of these six reasons would be enough to invalidate the program. In the aggregate, the question isn't even remotely a close one.

Three other aspects of the opinion are noteworthy:

i. The court rejects one of the six grounds I offered for why such programs are unconstitutional -- namely, impermissible purpose. The court correctly notes that the state's primary purpose was to reduce recidivism rather than to inculcate religion. That's true, but there's a further purpose-based problem that the court does not discuss -- namely, that the government cannot specifically aim at religious transformation, as Iowa has done here, as a means of accomplishing legitimate secular ends.

ii. Second, apparently the defendants' primary defense of the program was that it was akin to a voucher program (see, e.g., Zelman, Zobrest, Witters), where the state merely subsidizes "genuine and independent private choice." The court properly explains at length why this is not a true "private choice" program. Moreover, even if it were a "private choice" program, it would still be unconstitutional, because the government itself may not engage in religious indoctrination, and the court correctly finds that the InnerChange program is state action.

iii. Finally, the court-ordered relief runs not only against the state, but also against Prison Fellowship and InnerChange, which are ordered to pay back more than $1.5 million in money that they have received from the state. In ordering this remedy, the court appears to have been strongly influenced by the fact that the constitutional questions here were not difficult ones, and that the defendants, "well-financed and sophisticated entities who know every contour of First Amendment law," had "retained experienced, knowledgeable legal counsel that should have been aware of the constitutional risks associated with state funding of InnerChange."
Posted 3:46 PM by Marty Lederman [link]