On the Way to Solitary, Women in Massachusetts Jail Get Strip Searched and Videotaped
by Victoria Law
"When
women are moved to the Segregation Unit for mental health or
disciplinary reasons, they are strip searched. With four or more
officers present, the inmate must: take off all her clothes, lift her
breasts and, if large, her stomach, turn around, bend over, spread her
buttocks with her hands and cough, and stand up and face the wall. If
the woman is menstruating, she must remove her tampon or pad and hand it
to a guard. An officer with a video camera stands a few feet away and
records the entire strip search. This officer is almost always male."
This is a description of what has happened when women are taken to solitary confinement at
the Western Massachusetts Regional Women's Correctional Center (WCC) in
Chicopee. The procedure has been followed not only for women being sent
to isolation for violating jail rules but also women who are being
placed on suicide watch or who have requested protective custody. Since
September 15, 2008, on approximately 274 occasions, a male corrections
officer recorded the strip search with a handheld video camera; 178
women were affected by this practice.
In
2009, Debra Baggett wrote a letter to the law office of Howard Friedman
about this practice. The office, which has been involved in a number of
cases involving prisoner rights and strip searches, investigated
Baggett's complaints. "We found that the jail had a written policy
allowing male guards to videotape the strip searches," stated David
Milton, the attorney representing the women. When the jail refused to
change its policy, Baggett and a group of other women held at the jail
filed suit.
On April 22, 2014, a federal judge heard arguments in Baggett v. Ashe,
the class-action lawsuit which now represents 178 women. At the center
of the suit is the jail's practice of allowing male guards to videotape
the strip searches of women being moved to the jail's segregation unit.
The jail has argued that male officers do not watch the searches while
filming.
Jails
and prisons -- and especially women's facilities -- are notorious as
sites of sexual violence and abuse. Women make up just 7 percent of
state and federal prisoners in the United States, but they are the
victims in 33 percent of all sexual assaults by prison staff.
In addition to these physical assaults, women in jails and prisons have
reported incidents of sexual humiliation by male officers, from making
frequent sexual comments to watching them as they shower.
Even
against this backdrop of routine sexual abuse, the practice at Western
Massachusetts Regional WCC appears extreme. Attorney David Milton stated that the practice is very rare.
"No one knows of anywhere else that does this. It's so intuitively
wrong, it hasn't come up," he said. Advocates and formerly incarcerated
women elsewhere have confirmed that they have not heard or experienced
the practice in their states.
This
doesn't mean that videotaping strip searches has never happened. In the
1990s, New York State's Albion Correctional Facility came under fire
for allowing male guards to watch women being strip searched. Although
female guards were the ones holding the cameras, male guards were
allowed to watch the strip searches and the videotaping through a
partially open door. Albion began the practice of videotaping strip
searches in January 1994, claiming that the practice would prevent
abuse. Women at Albion, however, said that the videotaping — and
allowing male guards to watch the searches — were part of a system wide
pattern of sexual abuse within the prison, including sexual assault and
impregnation by staff.
After
a fight, Leonides Cruz was brought to Albion's Special Housing Unit
(where individuals are held in solitary confinement, or segregation).
Cruz described her experience to the New York Daily News:
When I got there, [officers] brought in a video camera and told me to strip completely.It was this really unsanitary room like a closet. There were two female officers taping, but the door was opened a crack and two male officers were looking in. They had me first touch my body and then my mouth. This is not the way it's supposed to be you have to touch the mouth first, because you could get an infection if you touch certain parts of your body and then put your fingers in your mouth. I had to bend over . . . in front of the camera it was so embarrassing and humiliating. I wouldn't fight it because I knew that things would get worse for me. When they finished video-taping and I came out they were all laughing."
At Albion, videotaping and other forms of sexual humiliation occurred not just to women sent to solitary. Another woman described being strip searched, videotaped and humiliated upon her arrival at Albion:
The sergeant escorted me in there and I saw they had turned on the cameras. In the room there were two female officers standing in this dirty room, with a filthy floor . . . Two male officers were standing outside, and I could see them looking in. They started filming and asked me to strip one piece of clothing at a time, like a striptease. This is a medium-security facility, I couldn't believe what was happening to me. I told them that they weren't supposed to do this since I was stripped in the other facility and handed off. They're only supposed to do this if there is probable cause. After my clothes came off, they asked me to lift my breasts. Then they told me to turn around . . . I was so humiliated that I started to cry, and the officer laughed and said, "Tears don't cut it here you're in a real jail now."
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