Integrating Inmates:  As noted here Monday, a contributing factor in the recent riot at California's Chino Correctional Facility may have been the Supreme Court's naive 2005 decision in Johnson v. California that required that inmates be integrated.  AP writer Don Thompson's report on the riot seems to bear this out.  Prison gangs are primarily racial and do not tolerate integration.  As one inmate puts it, "To me this is like using us as lab rats, to see if it works.  It ain't ever going to work.  All it's going to do is get somebody hurt, get somebody killed." 

A Boston Judge Denied an Inmate's Right to further taxpayer-funded electrolysis treatments to help with the convicted murderer's "gender identity disorder." According to this AP story by Mark Pratt, Robert Kosilek, who is serving a life sentence for murdering his wife, now calls himself Michelle, and since 1993 has been living as a woman in an all-male prison.  While the judge had initially allowed the treatments in 2002, he denied Kosilek request for a sex-change operation.  In an later suit, Kosilek claimed that denial of the surgery has made her suicidal.  When corrections officials suggested shaving as an alternative to electrolysis, Kosilek's lawyer retorted that shaving is a "quintessential male" activity.  There is always Nair.