Strip Searches for Fun and Degradation

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
----Constitution of the United States of America, Fourth Amendment

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
----Supreme Court of the United States, Brown vs Board of Education


We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
----Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, et al



The Phantom is very eager to see the text, to be released tomorrow, of the questions posed by the justices of the Supreme Court, in the case (Florence vs Board of Chosen Freeholders) of man who was arrested, (in error, it turned out) in front of his family, taken to not one but two police stations, where he was strip searched, not once, but twice, made to squat and lift his genitals before police or jailhouse officials.

The Phantom eager to see the questions from the learned justices because the Phantom is not learned in the law, and in fact has only middle school Civics class as formal training in constitutional law, and so is eager to be educated by the highest authorities in the land on the constitutionality of strip searches in the land of the free, home of the brave, this beacon of freedom and individual liberty, this first citizen among nations, when it comes to protection of the individual against the heavy hand of the state.

Now, you are all wondering, why should a man not be strip searched? I know this is not obvious.

You may well wonder, as does The Phantom, who the Chosen Freeholders are and how they got that name, but some things are better left alone.

The Chosen Freeholders, aka the jailers in New Jersey and all forty nine other states, assert that they are strip searching prisoners (who have been convicted of nothing, simply taken into custody by the twenty year old cop in the car) to be sure they do not have hidden “contraband” which they might use to harm other prisoners being held in open pens at the jailhouses.

So let’s think about this: What, exactly, could you have hidden in what body cavity which would be revealed by squatting in front of the jailer and holding up your genitals?

The Phantom can only imagine.

Well, we can imagine. Let’s see, how about a switchblade knife secreted in your rectum, which will pop out when you squat. Has this ever happened? Is it possible for that switchblade to not pop out? If it pops out, will it pop out five of ten squats? Three of ten? What is the study? Where is the data?

For all those strip searches done in local jail houses, how many weapons of individual destruction have been actually found?

How many videos of naked prisoners have been surreptitiously made and brought home for the entertainment of the jailers?

And how much questioning does it take nine justices of the United States Supreme Court to see the obvious? If ever there was an unalienable right, is it not the right to keep your clothes on in public. (In fact, if you take your clothes off in public, those same police can arrest you and bring you back to the station house where they, what? Make you put your clothes back on.)

As any inveterate viewer of The Wire knows, there is no need to fear what a prisoner may bring into a jail, because there are already shivs and guns and drugs aplenty in the jail already, so at most these weapons of individual destruction will only add to the count, not begin it. Weapons can be fashioned from stuff already present, and looking for weapons in rectums, vagina's, buttocks cracks is like searching out cudgels in a furniture factory.

What is the real reason for these strip searches? Well, let’s not go there quite yet.

If ever there was something which is “inherently” apparent, is it not that strip searches of any kind, in almost any circumstance, is “inherently” unreasonable?

If those eighteenth century gentlemen in their wigs were not thinking of strip searches as a violation of being "secure in their persons" against unreasonable searches, it could only be because in the eighteenth century not even the British soldiers did strip searches on American colonists they had arrested. Some outrages hadn't even been invented when the Constitution was written, but they were prescient, those founding fathers. Apparently, these dead white males, when alive, were less docile than the Rush Limbaughs of present day--Rush can see the authorities as having a reasonable case for wanting to do strip searches. For someone like Rush, it may be the only socially acceptable way of seeing naked human beings, and he can talk himself into the notion these arrested citizens pose a threat to other prisoners, somehow, in someone's pathological imagination.

And, of course, the poor jailers will say they cannot afford those machines they use at airports. But what fun would that be? No opportunity to humiliate or titillate there.

If separate but equal is inherently unequal, then a strip search is inherently unreasonable. Ipso facto.

Next question. Next case.