Wilkinson v. Austin, 545 U.S. 209 (2005), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that while the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment gives rise to a liberty interest in not being placed in a Supermax prison, Ohio's procedures for determining which prisoners should be placed there satisfied the requirements of due process.

The inmate may attend the hearing and offer "pertinent information" or objections to OSP placement, but he may not call witnesses.

If the warden concurs, he provides a written explanation and forwards both his recommendation and the committee's to the Bureau of Classification, an agency of the Ohio prison system.

§ 1983,[1] alleging that Ohio's procedure for determining which inmates will be placed at OSP violates their Fourteenth Amendment due process rights.

Of its own force, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not guarantee that state prisoners will not be placed in more restrictive conditions of confinement.

However, individual state procedural guarantees may give rise to a protected liberty interest, as the Court had held in Sandin v. Conner, 515 U.S. 472 (1995).

In Conner, the Court held that a protected liberty interest can arise only after examining the "ordinary incidents of prison life".

The Court did not find it necessary to define what the "ordinary incidents" of prison life were, vis-à-vis confinement in Supermax conditions, for "assignment to OSP imposes an atypical and significant hardship under any plausible baseline."

The Court found that the combination of these two sets of conditions rose to the level of an "atypical and significant hardship within the correctional context", and hence gave rise to a liberty interest in avoiding placement in OSP.

Having found a liberty interest in avoiding placement in OSP, the Court went on to consider whether Ohio afforded its inmates the required procedural protections.

The interest in avoiding assignment to a Supermax facility must be "evaluated... within the context of the prison system and its attendant curtailment of liberties."

Because the inmate will always have an explanation of the reasons for recommended OSP placement, he will always have something to argue against when he proceeds to the next level of review or comes up for his next suitability hearing.

The state was not directly trying to take away credit toward a sentence that an inmate had already earned, an action that requires greater procedural safeguards.