State corrections says lack of male officers meant fewer searches
By Frank Green
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Richmond, Va. — Female officers may now frisk male prisoners as the number of women working for the Virginia Department of Corrections grows.
The move was prompted by cell phones and other contraband getting into the hands of inmates at the Lawrenceville Correctional Center, the state’s only private prison, where two-thirds of the staff are women and all 1,500 inmates are men.
An independent study last year found that the relative shortage of male officers there meant an inadequate number of searches were being conducted.
The change in the Virginia Department of Corrections’ long-standing policy took effect Jan. 1. At least four other states, Texas, Oklahoma, Michigan and Colorado and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons also allow such searches.
But at least one expert believes it is a change in the wrong direction.
Larry Traylor, the department spokesman, says only staff of the same sex are still allowed to conduct -- or be present during -- strip searches of inmates unless there is an emergency situation.
Also, he said, male staff are still barred from searching female inmates. “We deem it inappropriate and not within professional boundaries,” said Traylor.
Traylor said the department made the change, “in order to ensure good facility security and adjust our operations to meet the changing gender makeup of our employees.”
Statewide, more than 38 percent of Virginia’s 6,473 corrections officers are women and 92.5 percent of the inmates are men. Ten years earlier the staff was 35 percent female.
According to federal figures, women now constitute roughly a third of prison and jail staff across the country. The phenomenon is leading to new rules and sometimes difficult situations -- if not trouble -- for staff and inmates.
The United States is one of only a handful of countries where staff of the opposite gender is permitted to supervise inmates while they are nude, said Brenda V. Smith, a law professor at American University and an expert on sexual issues in prisons.
There is nothing inherently wrong with women working in prisons, Smith said. But in most countries, searches and supervision during showers, toileting and medical procedures are staffed by officers of the same gender as the inmates, she said.
Smith said Virginia’s change is on sound legal footing, but there are good reasons to justify a different policy on cross-sex supervision, she said.
Smith believes that prison officials elsewhere in the country are moving in a different direction than Virginia and re-evaluating the extent of contact between staff and inmates of the opposite sex in light of a recent study by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The 2006 study found that roughly half of all sexual impropriety reported in U.S. prisons and jails in 2005 was perpetrated by correctional staff and that female staff were the offenders in two-thirds of the prison cases.
The disproportionate incidence was due to the much larger number of male inmates in prisons than female inmates.
Traylor said that before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars employment discrimination based on sex, Virginia had exclusively male staff in male prisons and female staff at its then only female prison.
Now he said the department must balance employment rights with inmate privacy rights so there are some gender-specific posts and jobs in state prisons to protect inmate privacy.
He said that in general the privacy rights are limited to not being touched in certain places by a member of the opposite sex and not having certain parts of their bodies viewed by members of the opposite sex in the normal course of operations.
Privacy screens are provided in shower and restroom areas for a reasonable degree of privacy while still maintaining security supervision and observation, said Traylor, who added, “inmates also violate policy by deliberately exposing themselves to security staff.”
Some inmates and inmate advocates claim the staff sometimes violate rules, too.
Alex Michael Marshall, 38, of Roanoke was released from the Botetourt Correctional center in 2006. He had been in several other prisons and not had a privacy problem with staff of the opposite sex, he said.
But at Botetourt, Marshall said female staff could easily see into a bathroom and shower area used by the male inmates -- and some made it a point to look, he claims. “We found it offensive,” Marshall said.
Marshall, sentenced to more than a year for driving under the influence and other traffic offenses, also said that female staff were sometimes present at strip searches.
Copyright 2008 Richmond Times-Dispatch