Abusive Body Searches and Privacy Violations
Human Rights Watch found that male corrections employees inflicted cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment on women prisoners through abusive pat-frisks and strip searches. These body searches, when conducted by male guards on female prisoners, also constitute violations of prisoners' right to privacy. Prisoners in every state that we visited reported that, in conducting pat-frisks—out of respect for the prisoners' privacy rights, the officers are required to use the back of the hand, rather than the palm when searching the prisoner's chest and genital areas—male officers often use their hands or fingers to grope or grip the women's breasts, nipples, vaginas, buttocks, anus, and inner thighs. A prisoner in Michigan told us, "The male officers sit by the door to the kitchen and shake the women down [frisk] as they leave [the kitchen]. We watch the way they do it and who they pick. I watched one who felt a woman down in front of everyone as she left. It's always the male officers at the door who do the shakedowns."86
Moreover, we found that strip searches of female prisoners, while usually conducted by female officers in order to protect the women's privacy, at times took place in the presence of one or more male officers as well. New York's department of correctional services videotaped strip searches of women entering segregation from January or February 1994 until July 1994. According to Betsy Fuller, an attorney with Prisoners' Legal Services, approximately one hundred to 200 women were searched. Fuller reviewed between six to eight tapes, which she described to us as "images I will never forget." When asked to strip, according to Fuller, one woman was frightened by the camera and hysterical throughout the strip search.87 Allowing male officers to view, if not participate in, such searches and conducting strip searches in a degrading manner violates prisoners' rights to humane treatmentand to privacy, as defined by the U.N. Human Rights Committee. Nonetheless, corrections authorities consistently fail to sanction and have at times even condoned such conduct.
Prisoners also spoke consistently of discomfort caused by inappropriate visual surveillance by male officers, particularly in their living areas. They reported that officers watched them while they were dressing, showering, or using the toilet and that male officers frequently entered their housing units without first announcing their presence. In Michigan, male corrections officers have reportedly roamed the shower and toilet facilities and freely abused their authority to conduct searches. Officers have pulled back the shower curtain on inmates to comment or stare. It has reached a point, one prisoner said, where prisoners have learned to shower when certain corrections officers are not on duty.88 Prisoners in Central California Women's Facility also reported that male corrections officers walk into the showers and talk to them.89 Similarly, women incarcerated in Illinois's Logan Correctional Institute reported that officers did not announce themselves when coming onto the housing units and occasionally enter shower areas when women are undressed.90
86 Interview, Michigan, March 1994.
87 Interview, Betsy Fuller, Prisoners' Legal Services, October 4, 1994.
88 Interview, Michigan, March 1994.
89 Interviews, California, July 1994.
90 Interviews, Illinois, May 1994.
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