By OcJim

If you have ever been physically abused or arrested and taken into custody, you might imagine the humiliation of a strip search. Otherwise, you probably can’t relate.

On April 2^nd, the conservative members of the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that officials can strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails, even if the officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband. Since no distinction was made between arrests for a felony or a misdemeanor, technically a jaywalker could be taken back to the station and strip-searched.

To document how radically right-wing that decision is, the procedure endorsed by the neocon five on the Supreme Court is forbidden by statute in at least 10 states, is at odds with the policies of federal authorities, and does violate international human rights treaties.

Their ruling involved Albert W. Florence who was strip-searched after being wrongly detained over a traffic fine. In fact, the fine was already paid and he displayed an official receipt to officers who stopped him. Nevertheless, he was strip-searched not once but twice while being held seven days in two New Jersey jails. Mr. Florence is black.

But such arbitrary searches have played out in major cities throughout the country, somewhat assuring that any innocent citizen or activist could be subjected to that humiliation. Visual strip searches have been conducted after being arrested for driving with a noisy muffler, failing to use a turn signal, and riding a bicycle without an audible bell. Even a nun was strip-searched after an arrest for trespassing during an antiwar demonstration.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, ruling with the majority, used a panoply of examples describing contraband discovered in successful strip-searches, seeming to categorize all arrestees as possibly armed and dangerous, in this way engendering fear and hoping to justify the majority ruling. As with most subterfuge, he fails to mention how small that percentage is overall and how even less likely misdemeanor arrestees would be to carry hidden contraband. The display was meant to justify the practice of blanket strip-searches that are done without suspicion, even though such searches are not justified throughout the civilized world.

Kennedy’s aides had put together a brief, depicting jails as places of deceit and depraved violence where jailers must thwart human cunning minute by minute. Presented was a specter fit for an autopsy of the living:  rectums holding contraband of daggers, jackknives, scissors, folds of fat hiding weapons, cut folds of skin concealing knives, vaginas with caches of weapons and drugs, even razor blades.

Twenty bags of heroin were found in one rectum (with a suspect attached, of course), and two condoms of methadone in a vagina, using electrical tape to secure them. The prize went to one man in a county jail with a cigarette lighter, rolling papers, a golf-ball-sized bag of tobacco, a bottle of tattoo ink, eight tattoo needles, an inch-long smoking pipe, and a bag of marijuana in just his rectum. And all these examples are only part of the assembled litany.

After listening to this cornucopia of concealed caves of contraband, are you nauseous, disgusted, or fearful – or all three?

What would you say the odds are that you might be subjected to a strip search in your lifetime? It’s probably high enough that you should make sure you are wearing clean underwear every time you go out, perhaps even while sitting at home.

Do you suppose the five conservatives on the Supreme Court wear clean underwear or is it a violation of their privacy to pose that question?

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