And when you’re insolent you’re placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard really.
But yeah, that’s really pretty much the drill. Not horribly humiliating, but not my idea of a date, either. Nemo, have you ever had someone object strongly to the search?
I’m surprised that they don’t strip search you in Houston. I’ve only been lucky enough to be actually inducted into county, not city lock-up. That might make all the difference. In the county lock up I was in, there wasn’t a distinction between the people who were going to be there for a few hours or a few days. Getting searched and issued a jumpsuit came at the end of talking your prints.
Not horribly humiliating to me, I’ve been through it on a weekend stint in county many eons ago, but then I am not anywhere near prudish about naked human bodies. The opinion mentions nuns undergoing such a procedure, though. I am pretty sure they have a decidedly different opinion about nude bodies.
However, the dissent also correctly distinguishes between “criminals” and “arrestees”, which you do not. That is not to say that the decision is wrong, just that defending it on the grounds that Criminals Are Bad People is silly.
All we have to do is pay anyone jailed due to faulty information in the database about $1000 a day. We can take it out of the database manager’s account. I bet things would improve right quick.
If they are admitted to general population, yes. That is, if they surrender their clothes and get orange jumpsuits, they are strip-searched. If they are simply held while bail is arranged or released on a personal bond, then no.
I’m upset that I am not the first person to respond to this.
It seems fairly obvious why this should not be allowed.
In Florida, it was revealed that out of 23,000 prisoners, only one was hiding contraband that would otherwise not have been found.
Is it worth it to strip search thousands of prisoners in order to try to catch one smuggling in contraband? Even if this actually caused the death of more than one person due to suicide?
Would it then be legal to do a cavity search since it is possible that someone is trying to smuggle something through those means? Force feeding laxatives in case something is smuggled through the stomach?
Additionally, there was a reasonable suspicion clause. This says that the guards must have some sort of reasoning as to why strip search the prisoners. Not just, “I feel like it”. More like “I have an actual reason why he/she may be smuggling something”. Now it can just be “I feel like it”, or “I am attracted to the person and want to see them naked” or “I would like to humiliate him/her because he/she is being rude to me”
Additionally, it is already permitted to search an arrestee down to his underwear, as part of general procedure. Also, these are arrestees, not convicts, indicating that these are not criminals yet but regular citizens.
Do you suppose that the existence of this procedure has the effect that people don’t try to smuggle things in this way? We’re not talking about tiger charms here, people do smuggle things in to jails.
If I were detained in a jail, I would have an expectation that some sort of search like this would be done. I might not like it, especially if I was innocent, but it seems reasonable to me. This seems like an area where the courts rightly defer to the legislators.
I think part of the disconnect here is that to a lot of people, a “jail” is like the cell that Otis lets himself into on The Andy Griffith Show or the cage in the detectives’ bureau on Barney Miller. “Holding cells” or “drunk tanks” aren’t as common as they used to be, and in a lot of places the county jail is a high-tech, high-security operation that often leases out space for actual prisoners, not just people being held temporarily. A lot of jails are set up in a way that they are of higher security than a usual minimum-security prison.
Correct. And again, this has nothing to do with the severity of the offense, but the procedure the local jail follows. If they have a judge on call all of the time, you could be arrested for something like car jacking and if someone comes down to post your $100k bond, then you never change into the jumpsuit or get strip-searched.
Conversely, if you get arrested for shoplifting and nobody will post your $500 bond, you get processed into the jail: a process which includes a strip-search and a jumpsuit.
I agree completely. I also doubt many people are under constant supervision prior to being strip-searched, so it could go from “not detected in a pat down” to “nature’s pocket” (which is incidentally a great term I’ve not heard before).
Yes. Pretty much the same procedure only we do it to him rather than him doing it himself. Which meant it was a pretty rare event. A prisoner might refuse because he thinks we won’t push the issue. But when he realizes we’re serious, he usually decides he’d rather pull his butt cheeks apart himself than have a guard do it to him.
My experience was in prisons not county jails. But the percentage of prisoners who had contraband during a strip was definitely higher than that. I’d ballpark it at around one out of every hundred.
