Hudson v. Palmer

Prisoners are afforded only those rights not fundamentally inconsistent with imprisonment itself or incompatible with the objectives of incarceration (to be free from racial discrimination and cruel and unusual punishment, to petition for redress of grievances, certain First Amendment religious and speech protections, due process). However, imprisonment also entails a series of personal deprivations. One of those deprivations, rationally and logically, is the loss of personal privacy. The Court held that “society is not prepared to recognize as legitimate any subjective expectation of privacy that a prisoner might have in his prison cell and that, accordingly, the Fourth Amendment proscription against unreasonable searches does not apply within the confines of the prison cell.”