Garrison S. Johnson v. State of California James H. Gomez, Director, Department of Corrections James Rowland

We must decide whether a prison reception center housing policy, which uses race as one factor in assigning a new inmate’s initial cell mate for 60 days, violates the Equal Protection Clause.

I

Garrison Johnson is an African-American prisoner in the California Department of Corrections (“CDC”), serving his sentence for murder, robbery, and assault with a deadly weapon. On June 22, 1987, he was received at the California Institution for Men in Chino, California, and since that time has been transferred to a number of different facilities within the CDC. He has been through the inmate reception centers at Chino, Folsom, Calipatria, and is currently incarcerated at Lancaster. At each facility he was double-celled with another African-American inmate.

According to the staff testimony in the record, when an inmate arrives at a CDC institution either as a transfer from another facility or as a new inmate, he is initially housed in a reception center. At the reception center, the inmate goes through a classification process. The CDC evaluates the inmate’s physical, mental, and emotional health. The inmate must also provide vocational and educational goals that he wants to…