Strip Searches of Arrestees at the Jail

Jeff wrote earlier this week about roadside strip searches. Today’s post is about strip searches of arrestees as they are booked into the jail. The longstanding rule regarding searches of arrestees as they are processed into the jail is that they may not be strip searched without reasonable suspicion that they are concealing a weapon or some other contraband. In many cases from across the country, including the Fourth Circuit, policies of strip searching all arrestees are held unconstitutional, sometimes leading to personal liability for the sheriff and jailer. See Logan v. Shealy, 660 F.2d 1007 (4th Cir. 1981) (strip search of a DWI arrestee had no “discernible relationship to security needs at the Detention Center that, when balanced against the ultimate invasion of person rights involved, it could reasonably be thought justified”). The Supreme Court set out the general test for evaluating the Fourth Amendment reasonableness of inmate searches in Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520 (1979). In that case, a group of inmates (including some pretrial detainees) at a federal facility in New York argued that the facility’s strip search policy violated their Fourth Amendment rights. The policy required all inmates, regardless of the reason for their detention and without any individualized suspicion, to “expose their body cavities for visual inspection as a part of a strip search conducted after every contact visit with a person from outside the institution.” Id. at 558. The policy required males to “lift their genitals and bend over to spread [their] buttocks for [...]