Talkleft posts a story on inmates, who were stripped and left naked, some for days, winning a lawsuit against the Saginaw County Jail in Michigan.
One was 36 year-old Linda Rose who, arrested for drunk driving, was stripped and left to crouch before a surveillance camera for several hours in a jail cell.
The lawsuit involved 21 plaintiffs who received this humiliating treatment between 1996 and 2001. The county says they discontinued the practice in 2001 but the ACLU and plaintffs’ attorneys contend the practice continues to the present, involving perhaps hundreds of prisoners.
The jail’s excuse? The carte blanche “we have to protect you against yourself”. The offered reasoning was that they were protecting the prisoners from using their clothing to hang themselves, and that the policy was adopted in 1996 after a prisoner hanged himself in isolation. In 2001, after the filing of the lawsuit, the jail says they amended the policy so that the prisoners in isolation now receive a paper gown.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Christopher Pianto said the policy of taking away inmates’ clothes is not about safety, but about punishment by humiliation and discomfort.
Moveleft Media has a June 14 2004 articla by Eric Jaffa, Stripping prisoners of their clothes and dignity: overseas and in the US.
As one would expect, the subject is raised of Abu Gharib and nudity used as military intelligence process, an interrogation procedure. The article quotes the following from the NY Times:
An analyst from the 205th Military Intelligence Battalion…said…”That happened almost every night — having them naked. I wouldn’t say it’s abuse. It’s definitely degrading to them.”
And also this from the NY Times:
Soldiers in Nazi Germany paraded naked prisoners in daylight, and human rights groups have documented the use of nudity during conflicts in Egypt, Chile and Turkey, and in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Central Intelligence Agency training manuals from the 1960’s and 1980’s taught the stripping of prisoners as an interrogation tool. Nudity and sexual humiliation have also been reported in American prisons where a number of guards at Abu Ghraib worked in their civilian lives.
The article continues on to give examples of humiliation in the United States involving nudity and body cavity searches conducted without warrant, remarking on the similarity of treatment with Abu Gharib. Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, represented prisoners at Georgia’s Dooly State Prison in a suit seeking compensation for such treatment in 1996. Moveleft again quotes the NY Times on the result:
The suit charged that the inmates’ constitutional rights had been violated and sought compensation for the pain, suffering, humiliation and degradation they had been subjected to.
Fat chance.
The Prison Litigation Reform Act, designed in part to limit ”frivolous” lawsuits by inmates, was passed by Congress and signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996. It specifically prohibits the awarding of financial compensation to prisoners ”for mental or emotional injury while in custody without a prior showing of physical injury.”
Without any evidence that they had been seriously physically harmed, the inmates in the Georgia case were out of luck. The courts ruled against them.
This is the policy of the United States of America
Medialeft then goes to 2003 and Miami Florida where peaceful protesters against the “Free Trade for the Americas Act” were forced to strip, though they had never been convicted of anything.
From Indybay here is a South Florida Sun-Sentinel article by Diana Marrero on the November 2o03 arrests and subsequent lawsuit:
By Diana Marrero
Miami BureauMarch 6, 2004
Miami · Three activists arrested during free-trade demonstrations in downtown Miami four months ago filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court Friday against Miami-Dade County and several county corrections officials for what they called an unnecessary use of “invasive” strip-searches.
Judith Haney, Liat Mayer and Jamie Loughner allege in the lawsuit that corrections workers perform cavity inspections of female arrestees as they are booked at correction facilities throughout the county.
“For women, this is visual rape,” said Randall C. Berg, Jr., executive director of the Florida Justice Institute, who is suing on behalf of the three activists along with California attorney Mark E. Merin. “It’s about as bad as it comes.”
The lawsuit alleges that only women are selected for strip-searches — a claim that county officials deny. It seeks a permanent injunction against the practice and unspecified monetary damages.
Randy Duvall, an assistant county attorney, said he has not yet seen the lawsuit and could not address specific allegations outlined in the suit.
But Janelle Hall, a spokeswoman for the county jails, said corrections officers do not automatically conduct strip-searches on every detainee. She said jail policies permit men and women to be strip-searched only in accordance with state law.
Haney, 50, a project manager at a California biotech firm, said the way she was searched was demoralizing.
Once in jail, she says she was ordered to take off her clothes so corrections officers could inspect her. Haney said corrections workers told her to squat and “hop like a bunny” three times before she was allowed to put her clothes back on.
According to Florida law, people who have been arrested for minor offenses should not be subjected to strip-searches unless the person is arrested on a drug charge, is suspected of having contraband or is booked on a violent offense. The law requires supervisors to give written authorization for such a search.
The lawsuit filed on Friday against Miami-Dade claims that its corrections officials routinely flout state law by indiscriminately strip-searching female detainees.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys say they expect more women will come forward with their own stories of improper strip-searches.
Similar class-action lawsuits have resulted in million-dollar settlements across the country. In 2001, New York City officials agreed to pay $50 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging improper searches in jails, making it one of the largest civil rights settlements against a municipality.
“The states that have done it and have been sued have stopped doing it,” said Merin, who has filed five lawsuits alleging illegal strip-searches in counties across California.
Earlier this year, officials in San Francisco responded to similar lawsuits by announcing they would revise their policies on strip-searches in an effort to comply with California law.
That’s the kind of change attorneys for the three women would like to see in Miami-Dade, where Haney said she felt humiliated by the strip-search conducted as she was being booked at the Miami-Dade County Pre-Trial Detention Center. Haney, who had been charged with failure to disperse during the protests, said the hopping motions officers made her do as she was getting booked hurt her bad knees.
“It has been very dehumanizing going over it again and again,” said Haney, who lives in Oakland, Calif., but came to Miami in November to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas meetings.
Mayer, a 19-year-old student from New York City, claims in the lawsuit that she was also strip-searched at the pretrial center after being charged with failure to disperse during the protests.
Mayer said that she, Haney and two other women were ordered to take off their clothes, bend over and hop as they were getting booked. Mayer said the door to the area where she was getting strip-searched remained open and that people passing by could see her naked.
Loughner, a 39-year-old activist from Arlington, Va., claims she went through a similar ordeal at the Miami-Dade County Women’s Detention Center.
Loughner, who was charged with failure to obey a lawful order and resisting arrest without violence, said she was strip-searched after being transferred from another center.
Berg said that while strip-searches may be allowed for security reasons in state prisons, pretrial detainees should not be subjected to the same kinds of searches. He said most people would not know they have a right that protects them from illegal searches even in a county jail.
“These people knew what their rights were and knew it was illegal,” he said
Ok. Our prisoners in this country are routinely stripped for no reason other than to humiliate and intimidate. How in the world did we become so comfortable with debasing others?
A 2001 lawsuit in DC involves students from a middle school who, while touring the Washington City Jail, were forced to submit to a strip search. Some of the youth had been involved in an in-school suspension program and others had volunteered for the tour.
The boys allege they were told to strip so they could experience a strip search. When some refused, they allege D.C. jailers told them they could not leave until they complied, and then they stripped.
“One of the boys was held down by eight inmates while his shoes were stripped off,” Wayne Cohen, an attorney for the victims’ families, told a press conference announcing the lawsuit. “He was then told to take his boxers off. He had his hands covering his genitals. He was yelled at to remove his hands, to grab his ankles, to squat and to cough.”
On May 18, 2001, the lawyers allege a group of girls from the same school was also forced to strip. They allege they were taken through the men’s jail, while some inmates masturbated.
Greene County Virginia High School students were awarded a settlement of $5,000 for each student in a suit protesting the stripping of 50 students down to their underwear when a student reported $100 missing from his wallet.
Five boys of ages 10 and 11 won a suit against the city of New York for being subjected to a strip search at their public school after a teacher accused the boys of stealing her ring.
A Feb 17 2005 news report had three female students and one male student strip searched at the Toledo School for the Arts, a charter school in the Toledo Public School System, when cash and a money order wre found missing by an art teacher. The money order and $67 being found on one of the female students, the director apologized to the innocent but defended the strip search and said more would be done in the future if they were similarly warranted.
In Honolulu, a girl of 15 was subjected to a strip search in her public charter school, ordered to strip completely naked by the principal when singled out as a suspect in the alleged theft of thirty dollars from a school van driver. Two other girls were strip searched by the school secretary.
Strip searches were performed on two girls at a public school in Talladega, Alabama after a teacher reported missing seven dollars from her purse. Suits were filed for damages, alleging violations of freedom from unreasonable searches and an invasion of privacy. A federal judge dismissed the suit and a divided appeals court upheld the decision. The U.S. High Court turned down their appeal without any comment or dissent.
In 2001 a federal appeals court upheld a judge’s ruling that a strip search of eleven fifth graders at West Clayton public school in Georgia was unconstitutional but that a teacher and police officer involved could not be sued for conducting the search which was performed when $26 was found missing. But in June 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court revived the case and scolded the 11th circuit court for a “rigid overreliance” on prior court decisions that were factually similar and directed the 11th Circuit to reconsider the case. (I love the excuse for the search. The teacher stated that a loss of $26 would have a profound impact on any of her low income students. So she was just concerned with their well-being.)
Gavelston County District Attorney, responding in Jan 2005 to furor over the strip-searching of ten first grade students over a missing $10, said the law is that teachers and school officials can conduct searches with reasonable suspicion that some law or school rule has been violated.
Indeed, the U. S. Supreme Court has ruled that teachers and school authorities do not need a warrant before searching a student, and are not required to adhere to the　 requirement that searches be based on probable cause.
Now, how in the hell does one expect children to grow up with any sensible idea of self-worth and proper boundaries when they are strip searched for money and other possibly stolen items. It’s insane. We wonder at the treatment of suspects in police custody, and the horrifying treatment of prisoners of the “War on Terror”, but students in public schools are being told to remove their clothing when a teacher or fellow student comes up with a few missing dollars. The idea is that parents have turned over all parental rights to school officials and teachers during the time that a student is in school, and so school officials and teachers have the parental authority to conduct the searches.
When students are told it’s legal and doesn’t violate their rights to be strip searched, that they must submit, when they reach the age of eighteen and step out of that environment, what does one suppose many may think about strip searches? What are they going to know about probable cause? What value will they place on the privacy of others when they have been told, the duration of their school years, that they can be searched for any reason, emotional and physical boundaries betrayed for a few missing dollars? How are they to respond to sexual harrasment in their adult years when they have no clear idea on boundaries? How can they be expected to make judgments on what is abusive behavior on the part of the State, iin their adult years, when during their childhood they were afforded no privacy by the State?
It mystifies me. Mystifies me that this isn’t considered abuse, a violation of the child. There are many more such stories out there and it’s confounding to me that teachers and school officials would consider subjecting their students to this humiliation and expect them to afterwards feel secure in their school as a positive place for learning. Aren’t schools instead training pupils to submit to degrading treatment and even inflict it upon others?
One of our most recent displays of nudity used for degredation was the “leak” of photos of Saddam Hussein in prison. The White House offered “terrible, we’ll investigate” lip service on the photos, of which it had been said were released by the U.S. military with the intention of embarrassment and discouraging Iraqi insurgents.
If I was a student who had been subjected to strip search in the school, I might not have been very sympathetic with the rights of Saddam afforded by the Geneva Convention having been violated. I may have vengefully felt that if it was all right for me to stripped down for $10, then why should I care if Saddam had been wrongly exploited with a photo of partial nudity.
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