Strip Searches For Minor Offenses
Unpaid parking tickets equal strip search? Maybe. Garrett Epps writes in The Atlantic of Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders, argued Wednesday before the Supreme Court:

The victim of the illegal detention and search, Albert Florence, was not a criminal mastermind at all, but an auto-dealership employee on his way to a family dinner. The strip search produced no contraband; a second strip search, when Florence was transferred to another county's jail after a week of illegal detention, was even more intrusive, requiring Florence to squat and cough under the eyes of jail staff. It also produced no contraband.

What sane person would have thought it would? The two counties that Florence has sued for subjecting him to this squalid ordeal now argue that there is no need for any sane suspicion --that any person, even one arrested for a non-criminal offense such as failure to pay a fine -- can be subjected to repeated strip searches on the off chance that he or she may be carrying contraband. Florence insists that the authorities need "reasonable suspicion" in this case.

The Fourth Amendment, which applies in jail as well as on the outside, forbids "unreasonable searches." Is a routine strip search reasonable? Failure to pay a fine is not a crime in New Jersey; neither is driving without a seat belt, or asking to exit a parking deck without paying when there's no available parking. But all of these offenses have subjected citizens to arrest, and the Supreme Court has approved that approach to law enforcement. Now such inadvertent brushes with the law may bring strip searches as well.

To be clear, this is not a matter of having to take off clothes for a shower or a medical inspection; it's a matter of one or more guards standing in arm's reach of the prisoner, with the option of requiring a male prisoner to move his genitals, and asking any prisoner to open bodily orifices.

Albert Florence had some criminal charges in his background, but he seems to me less like the Penguin than like Kafka's Joseph K., who "without have done anything truly wrong, ... was arrested" one morning. (The jail's own personnel wrote on his intake form, having his record in front of them, that they saw no grounds for suspicion.)

The important question, of course, is how the justices see him and those like him: law-abiding citizens snared by a clumsy system, or potential Cobblepots?

...I know and admire many honest correctional officers, without necessarily wanting to turn over the Constitution to them. We are caught in the logic of a society enamored of incarceration, which aims to turn any prisoner into an item who can be processed and controlled with minimal fuss about rights and privacy. Failure to pay a fine, murder, what's the difference to "our jailers"?

Whether such a rule is compatible with freedom and democracy is a question that seems likely to get only a brief look amid the quarrels about jailhouse order. I'm not making any predictions as to outcome. But 41 years ago this summer, I ran out of a jaywalking citation from the LAPD. I'm not planning any trips back there after next June.