The Supreme Court requires an exemption from the anti-beard policy for prisoners with religious needs.

As I predicted here, the prisoner who used the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act to challenge the prison policy against beards has won in the Supreme Court.

Here's the PDF of the just-issued opinion in Holt v. Hobbs. It's unsurprisingly unanimous. The main opinion is written by Justice Alito, and there are concurring opinions by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor.

The prisoner showed that he had a sincere belief that his religion — Islam — requires him to have a beard, so it didn't matter that some Muslims believe a believe a beard isn't required or that the prisoner believed that if the government forced him to shave, he'd get "credit" in his religion for trying to do what was required. There was a substantial burden on his religion within the meaning of the statute, and that meant the government had to show that imposing that burden was necessary to serve its compelling interest.

As explained at the earlier post — at the first link, above — the government's assertions came across as ludicrous because the prisoner's beard was only one-half inch long. Justice Alito wrote:

An item of contraband would have to be very small indeed to be concealed by a 1⁄2-inch beard, and a prisoner seeking to hide an item in such a short beard would have to find a way to prevent the item from falling out. Since the Department does not demand that inmates have shaved heads or short crew cuts, it is hard to see why an inmate would seek to hide contraband in a 1⁄2-inch beard rather than in the longer hair on his head....

We agree that prisons have a compelling interest in the quick and reliable identification of prisoners, and we acknowledge that any alteration in a prisoner’s appearance, such as by shaving a beard, might, in the absence of effective countermeasures, have at least some effect on the ability of guards or others to make a quick identification. But even if we assume for present purposes that the Deartment’s grooming policy sufficiently furthers its interest in the identification of prisoners, that policy still violates RLUIPA as applied in the circumstances present here. The Department contends that a prisoner who has a beard when he is photographed for identification purposes might confuse guards by shaving his beard....

Why did Justice Ginsburg write a second opinion? Only to write one sentence distinguishing this case from Hobby Lobby:

Unlike the exemption this Court approved in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U. S. ___ (2014), accommodating petitioner’s religious belief in this case would not detrimentally affect others who do not share petitioner’s belief.

Justice Sotomayor's concurring opinion is longer. She expresses approval for deferring to the expertise of prison officials (which had been stressed in an earlier Supreme Court case called Cutter v. Wilkinson):

I do not understand the Court’s opinion to preclude deferring to prison officials’ reasoning when that deference is due — that is, when prison officials offer a plausible explanation for their chosen policy that is supported by whatever evidence is reasonably available to them.

But in this case, the government had "little more than unsupported assertions."