A class action lawsuit against the Western Massachusetts Regional Women’s Correctional Center (WCC) in Chicopee, filed by women who claim their rights were routinely violated when they were videotaped by male guards while being strip searched, is headed for trial if court-ordered mediation is not successful.
Plaintiffs in the case of Debra Baggett versus Michael J. Ashe charge that male guards regularly videotaped two former inmates, April Marlborough and Debra Baggett, in addition to hundreds of other females housed at the jail, during routine strip searches.
“An officer with a video camera stands a few feet away and records the entire strip search,” reads the complaint filed in September by David Milton of the law firm of Howard Friedman, a Boston firm specializing in civil rights and police misconduct litigation. “This officer is almost always male, in violation of the federal Constitution, Massachusetts law, national correctional standards, and the basic human dignity that these authorities are supposed to protect.”
The plaintiffs “seek to represent a class of women inmates at WCC who, like them, were strip searched while a male guard watched and took video.” According to the complaint, “hundreds of women have been subjected to this humiliating and unconstitutional behavior.”
As Milton wrote in the initial complaint: “With four or more officers present, the inmate must take off all her clothes and perform a series of actions: she must lean forward, lift her arms, lift her breasts and, if large, her stomach, turn around, bend over, spread her buttocks with her hands and cough, and stand up and face the wall. …An officer with a video camera stands a few feet away and records the entire strip search. This officer is almost always male.”
At an initial conference held last week in Springfield, a court date was set for mid-March. Both sides are seeking a jury trial.
In an interview with the Valley Advocate, Milton said the jail violated his clients’ “privacy, as well as basic human dignity.”
The defendants, Hampden County Sheriff Michael J. Ashe, Jr. and Patricia Murphy, Assistant Superintendent at WCC, deny the charges.
In a rebuttal to the plaintiffs’ complaint, the defendants say that “strip searches of women inmates are conducted for security reasons in relative privacy by academy trained women officers only under specified conditions in accordance with written policy.” The defendants say the protocol meets “standards of the American Correctional Association, which has fully accredited the WCC and its written policies.”
Strip searches take place when an inmate is transferred to the Segregation Unit, which typically occurs for either disciplinary or mental health reasons. “The vast majority of inmate moves do not require strip searches,” the defendants contend.
“The sole goal of creating a video recording of the event of an inmate move to higher security from start to finish is to create optimum documentation of the conduct of correctional staff and inmate,” the defendants say. “All video recording of inmate moves are secured under lock and key with restricted access.”
The defendants’ rebuttal was filed in late November by Edward McDonough of Springfield’s Egan, Flanagan and Cohen. In a recent interview with the Advocate, McDonough defended the practice of videotaping the strip searches.
“It’s just the optimum documentation of the conduct of the officers and the conduct of the inmates,” McDonough said. “It has an enormous effect on bad behavior.”
McDonough rejected the idea that videotaping was intended for any other reason than security. “The complaint seems to suggest that the goal is to violate privacy,” he said. “A ceiling camera would capture much more than a handheld camera.”
Milton disagrees with the notion that the practice is necessary for security reasons. “The issue is males videotaping the strip search,” he said, “[with inmates] in an extremely compromised position.”
McDonough denied that the officers doing the videotaping are usually male. In the rebuttal he filed, the defendants contend that, in the rare circumstance when officers operating the video camera are male, they are outside the destination cell, facing away from the strip search, while pointing the camera at the cell.
“In those limited instances where the inmate is captured on video during the search,” the rebuttal states, “the response officer operating the video camera is directed by written policy to videotape unclothed inmates from the neck up…”
The plaintiffs counter that, since the task of videotaping without looking is inherently difficult if not impossible, the written protocol was rarely followed.
“This written procedure was illogical and unworkable,” says the complaint. “It would be impossible to record the inmate from the neck up without looking through the camera lens or viewfinder. This is particularly so since the inmate moves during the procedure, bending over twice, during the strip search.”
More than 200 inmates are regularly housed at the WCC. Many are serving time for nonviolent offenses. A high number of the inmates have been victims of sexual abuse or suffer from mental health problems, the plaintiffs say.
In a September Boston Globe interview, Debra Baggett said she and her co-plaintiff April Marlborough hope to put an end to WCC’s current strip search protocol.
“This isn’t about suing somebody,” Baggett told the Globe. “This is about trying to make change…There are people like me who are very depressed and have harmed themselves rather than go through this quasi-rape situation. …It’s very voyeuristic. … You feel very violated.”
