As the Collective announced previously, an attorney with the Portland Law Collective has the honor of representing inmates confined in the Government’s overly restrictive Communications Management Units (CMU) in a case entitled Aref et al. v. Holder et al. The Collective works on the Aref legal team, headed by the Center for Constitutional Rights.
In Aref, Plaintiff-inmates and Plaintiff-family members challenge the conditions of confinement and communications restrictions in the CMUs as violating the Plaintiffs’ First Amendment, Due Process, and Equal Protection rights and rights against cruel and unusual punishment. Plaintiffs also challenge the Government’s arbitrary assignment and location of Plaintiff-inmates into the CMU. Essentially, the CMU communications restrictions interfere with Plaintiffs’ abilities to maintain healthy relationships with their family members and interfere with Plaintiffs’ abilities to engage in free speech activities. A healthy relationship with family members is, of course, one of the best indicators that someone who gets out of prison will stay out of prison. In Aref, Plaintiffs argue that the CMU restrictions are not reasonably related to a legitimate government interest.
Recently, Plaintiffs filed their response brief to the Government’s motion to dismiss the case. Our preliminary statement provides a good summary:
This case arises from the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ (BOPs’) secret establishment, in 2006 and 2008, of two small and experimental prison units in the Midwest. These units, known as “Communications Management Units,” or “CMUs,” are explicitly designed to isolate prisoners from the rest of the prison population and the outside world. Plaintiffs are prisoners with innocuous disciplinary histories and no record of management or communications-related problems. Yet, they have been indefinitely designated to the CMUs, and there are subjected to communications restrictions that are harsher than those found in supermaximum security confinement. Plaintiffs have never been told why they were designated to the CMU. And more importantly still, they have never been given a chance to demonstrate that they do not belong there. This case presents their first chance to do so.
Rather than address Plaintiffs’ individualized allegations about the deeply troubling circumstances under which they were designated to the CMU, Defendants move to dismiss their claims by relying on broad and alarmist abstractions. “There have been cases,” they caution, “of imprisoned terrorists communicating with their followers regarding future terrorist activity.” Motion to Dismiss (“MTD”) at 25. The BOP, they assert, has a “legitimate penological interest in effectively monitoring the communications of high-risk inmates.” Id. at 2.
Neither of these statements is controversial, and nowhere do Plaintiffs suggest otherwise. But in issuing their blanket admonitions, Defendants entirely evade – and attempt to obscure – the nature and substance of Plaintiffs’ actual claims. As will be explained in the pages that follow, Plaintiffs present no unique security concerns. They are all low- and medium-security prisoners. They have no history of communications-related infractions that would justify their CMU designations. They have never been flagged as management problems at other facilities. Two of them were convicted of crimes entirely unrelated to terrorism. There are, meanwhile, thousands of “high-risk” and terrorist prisoners within the BOP. Yet Plaintiffs, who are litigious, hold politically unpopular views, or are devout Muslims, were designated to the CMUs.
Defendants, in short, move to dismiss the wrong case. Plaintiffs do not argue that the government may not monitor the communications of high-risk prisoners consistent with Constitutional principles. And they do not contest that the BOP has broad discretion in realizing that goal. Rather, Plaintiffs assert that the draconian communications restrictions to which they are being subjected do not fulfill this purpose. And Defendants’ conspicuous failure to provide for meaningful explanation or review of CMU placement has resulted in designations not based on security need, but on illicit rationales. Defendants’ repeated and strained attempts to avoid these troubling allegations result in a motion that never departs from the general, and as a result completely fails to address Plaintiffs’ well-pled and specific allegations.
Read the full response brief here. For more information (and for other substantive legal filings), check out the Center for Constitutional Rights website on Aref.
