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Cook County detainees detail strip search indignities in lawsuit
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On Jan. 13, 2005, Kim Young was arrested on an outstanding traffic warrant and taken to Cook County Jail. According to Young, a female guard made her stand behind a partition, take her clothes off, squat, and cough; she put her clothes back on, and the guard led her, along with 30 other women, to a hallway where they waited their turn to go into a small room and receive vaginal swabs.
On April 18, 2005, Ronald Johnson was arrested for possession of a controlled substance and taken to the county jail. He alleges that shortly after he was booked, guards ordered him and 100 other men to strip naked in a hallway, face a wall, bend over, and spread their buttocks with their hands for visual inspection by the guards.
On Dec. 30, 2005, William Jones was arrested on an outstanding traffic warrant. He also alleges that shortly after being booked at county jail, he was strip-searched in a hallway along with 100 other men; according to him, the procedure took about 40 minutes, during which he and the other men shivered because the hallway was unheated and felt like less than 50 degrees.
Young, Johnson and Jones are the lead plaintiffs in a massive lawsuit representing more than 300,000 individuals detained at Cook County Jail since Jan. 30, 2004. Former Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan is personally named as one of the defendants in the lawsuit, which represents detainees held in jail before trial, not convicts serving prison time. According to their attorney, Michael Kanovitz of Loevy & Loevy Attorneys at Law, this is the largest-ever class action suit of its kind.
Kanovitz submitted as evidence sworn declarations from more than 500 men who were subjected to strip searches. The men alleged that:
- The searches were so crowded that they often made physical contact with one another
- The hallways where they were strip-searched were poorly ventilated and beset by strong, foul odors
- Bodily fluids such as vomit, diarrhea, and blood were often present during the searches
- Entire groups were sometimes required to repeat the strip search, or parts of it, after one detainee made a mistake during the process
- Guards used insults or abusive language during strip searches, including insults about body odor, anatomy, sexual orientation, and race
- Dogs were used to threaten, frighten, and intimidate detainees during strip searches; at times the dogs were not leashed or muzzled
Some of the former detainees' statements are not for the squeamish. Case in point:
When we were told to bend over, one inmate about five people down from me complained that he could not bend over or he would throw up. The guards shoved him into the wall. I could hear the guards beating him . . . When we left the hallway we had to walk through his vomit and feces.
Some statements conjure memories of degradation at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, including:
Perhaps the scariest aspect of the entire process was the use of the dogs. The guards allowed the dogs to search us without muzzles or leashes. The guards told us that if we moved the dogs would bite of (sic) our genitals.
Female detainees had it a little better. They were searched with a body scanning machine after being booked, and after arriving at the cell block to which they were assigned, they were strip-searched in privacy dividers — open-faced cubicles similar to those found in physicians' offices. On the downside, they had to submit to vaginal swabs described by prison officials as screening for sexually transmitted diseases.
Conditions for the male prisoners improved in 2007 when they were provided a body scanning machine and privacy dividers, but Federal Judge Matthew F. Kennelly issued Monday a decision (pdf) that found some of the strip searches conducted prior to that were unconstitutional.
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