ALTERING OF COURT-ORDERED PRISON REFORMS MADE EASIER

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, January 16, 1992                   TAG: 9201160136
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium
ALTERING OF COURT-ORDERED PRISON REFORMS MADE EASIER
The Supreme Court made it easier Wednesday for government officials to seek changes in court settlements requiring them to improve conditions at prisons and mental hospitals or to desegregate public schools.
The court unanimously relaxed the standard that federal judges should apply when confronted by governmental requests to modify consent decrees.
The justices then split 6-2 in telling a federal judge to apply the new standard and restudy efforts by Suffolk County, Mass., officials to modify a 1979 consent decree in which they agreed not to put two jail inmates in any one cell while they await trial.
The decision on court-consent decrees focused on a dispute over jail conditions, but it also could affect court-approved agreements over conditions at state mental hospitals and over desegregation efforts in public schools.
Hundreds of state hospitals and school districts are operating under such consent decrees.
One typical consent decree, over conditions at three prisons in Michigan and care for mentally ill inmates, has cost the state more than $100 million so far.
"We would be very interested in any opportunity to amend that consent decree," said Gail Light, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections. "We haven't seen the actual decision, but we are cautiously optimistic it will help us."
Wednesday's decision came on the heels of a major policy reversal by the Bush administration regarding court-imposed limits on prison populations.
In a speech Tuesday, Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department will seek to put more violent criminals behind bars and keep them there longer by helping states escape consent decrees limiting inmate populations.
Barr said the department would help states seeking to alter decrees "that impose conditions that go well beyond the minimal requirements of the Constitution."
But writing for the high court in the Massachusetts case, Justice Byron White said consent decrees should not routinely be modified just because they go beyond constitutional requirements.
Prisoner-rights attorney Elizabeth Alexander called the ruling "a repudiation" of Barr's speech.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB