Monday, April 16, 2012 By Melissa Anders
The Michigan Department of Corrections has stopped a particular body cavity search on female prisoners that inmates and human rights groups have described as degrading and unhygienic.
Inmates at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti were subject to a strip search after each contact visit with family, friends, attorneys, religious workers and others. In addition to a standard strip search, the women were required to sit on a chair and use their hands to spread their genitals, allowing a guard to visually search for any hidden contraband.
The American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to the MDOC on Thursday, demanding for a “decisive end” to the practice. In addition to the ACLU, it was signed by 34 human rights, health, legal and religious organizations and individuals.
The ACLU said the searches are no more thorough than standard strip searches and that they exacerbate trauma and mental illnesses, especially among prisoners who have been sexually abused.
The MDOC asserts it ended the practice in December after a months-long investigation by Warden Millicent Warren that determined it was an “unnecessary irritation.” That particular search now must be authorized by the warden, and only if there’s suspicion of hidden contraband. Warren has not authorized any such searches since she changed the practice in December, MDOC spokesman Russ Marlan said.
The ACLU contends it continued receiving letters from prisoners about the search as recent as last week. The group on Thursday confirmed with the MDOC that the practice is no longer in use at Huron Valley, which is Michigan’s only female prison with 1,900 inmates.
“There is a standard format for strip searches. There’s nothing pleasant about the standard format, it is humiliating, but Michigan had really gone several steps further in terms of just gratuitous sexual humiliation of these women,” said Mie Lewis, senior staff attorney with the ACLU. “In addition to being humiliating, it was extremely unsanitary.”
Lewis said she doesn’t know of any other women’s prison that uses the additional female search in a routine fashion. A women’s prison in Denver used a similar search but changed its practice about a year ago, she said.
Standard strip searches involve removing all clothing and going through a series of movements intended to reveal if anything is being concealed. That includes bending and coughing, as well as spreading the buttocks cheeks for visual inspection. The additional spread-labia search was often performed on unclean chairs without allowing prisoners to wash their hands, exposing inmates to potential infections, Lewis said.
That search has been used at the facility ever since all female prisoners consolidated there in 2009. It was instituted to adhere to an MDOC strip search training video from 1998. The searches are performed after inmates have contact visits, finish shifts in prison jobs, receive medical care, and at other times, according to the ACLU.
“On one occasion, four kitchen workers were subjected to spread-labia vaginal searches in full view of one another because a guard believed that some chicken might have been stolen from the kitchen,” the ACLU wrote in its letter.
About a year and a half ago the prison’s warden decided to investigate the issue. She found that during a two-year period, one instance of contraband — a piece of toilet paper containing five earrings — had been found in a prisoner’s vagina during the “bend, spread and cough” portion of the standard strip search.
Most of the prison guards that handled the searches suggested that the extra genital inspection is unnecessary to maintain the safety and security of the prison, Warren wrote in her Dec. 14 memo.
The prison received 67 grievances in two years concerning the search.
During Warren’s investigation, prison mental health practitioners noted that a few inmates claimed the search exacerbated trauma from prior sexual abuse. Warren wrote that based on her discussions with the practitioners, the search could best be described as a stressor and minor irritation, but that it’s less than evident that it actually caused psychological harm of damage in and of itself.
Prisoner Lisa Wimbley, however, described the search as similar to acts she was forced to perform as a child.
Wimbley, 45, was sentenced in 2000 to a maximum of 30 years for second degree murder and felony firearms.
“I feel as though I am being raped every time I have a visit and this is done to me, yet I endure (it) to have a relationship with my daughters and grandchildren,” she told the ACLU. “I should not have to choose my dignity or a relationship with my family.”
The ACLU posted audio of Wimbley's story, along with an MDOC training video of a strip search. Warning: the video is graphic and contains nudity.
**This information is being shared by Citizens for Prison Reform for purely informational purposes.
Citizens for Prison Reform
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"
-Martin Luther King
Website: www.micpr.org
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