September 17, 2003
Strip-search saga must finally end
Orange County should forget the appeals and obey the law at its jail.
For some reason, Orange County Attorney Catherine Bartlett thinks that the county jail should be able to conduct blanket strip searches of all inmates, even though the courts have ruled several times that such a policy is an unconstitutional violation of the federal rights of people who have been accused, but not convicted, of minor, nonviolent crimes.
Scratch that. Bartlett actually has millions of reasons, as county attorney, to argue that the courts are "out of touch" and that rulings forbidding blanket strip searches at the jail are "nonsense." The rulings, if they stand up, could allow up to 22,000 recent former inmates at the jail to sue the county for damages. That could add up to millions of dollars.
Bartlett, of course, says the primary issue is the safety of the men and women who work in the jail. We do not minimize the need to protect corrections officers, but federal judges are not unaware of the security needs of jails. The fact is, the county hasn't convinced the courts that the jail would be an unacceptably unsafe place to work without doing strip searches of every inmate, regardless of the nature of their alleged crime.
In fact, Orange County has company in that. Nassau County was ordered by a federal appeals court two years ago to stop blanket strip searches at its jail. And the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of that ruling.
Yet Bartlett persists in her stated resolve to appeal the latest ruling against Orange County. That would seem to be fruitless as well as wrongheaded. The law does not forbid strip searches, but requires that the inmates be charged with violent crimes involving drugs or weapons. In other words, they must represent some reasonable suspicion of risk.
Most inmates at the county jail do not fit this category and some are actually found not guilty of the charges. In a presumed-innocent justice system, a driving-under-the-influence or petty larceny charge should not necessitate a demeaning strip search.
There's another issue involved here. The county jail was operated under court-ordered federal oversight for 25 years because of improper treatment of inmates. That court order was recently vacated with a new agreement on living conditions. In recent years, there have been questions raised about the treatment of mentally ill inmates. Those issues are also being addressed. Mandatory strip searches are part and parcel of those outdated, rejected approaches to operating a county jail. They need to go.
Bartlett says the people of Orange County deserve a chance to appeal the latest court ruling against the jail. No, they deserve to have this issue – and the potential lawsuits – settled once and for all. They deserve to have a county jail that lives up to the law of the land.
