Strip Search Research Articles

Correctional Transgender Policy in Canada's Federal Prison System.

Since December 2017, Canada's federal correctional system provides prisoners the opportunity to be assigned to living units according to their self-identified gender. Still organized around sex, conceptually and spatially, prison policies and procedures surrounding transgender prisoners require navigation to adhere to the rights of all prisoners. Based on interviews conducted between October 2019 and October 2021 with 74 correctional officers (COs) from the Canadian federal prison system, we discuss how correctional officers view and operationalize Canada's transgender policy to understand its unintended consequences for both prisoners and prison staff. Unintended consequences revolve around the potential risk for prisoner victimization, prisoner pregnancy, lack of adequate housing, strip search complications, officers' fear of being labeled transphobic, and uncertainty and discretion; all having effects on staff wellness. The policy, although well-intended, may potentially compromise prisoner safety, making correctional work even more stressful.

Violent Exposures, Exposing Violence: Gender, Anti-Blackness and the Strip-Searching of Black Women and Girls in Canada

In recent years, more media attention has been given to the routinisation of police strip-searches in Canada. As with many violent policing practices, the routine use of strip-searching disproportionately affects Black, Indigenous, and racialised women. This article investigates the legal archives of two cases of the strip-searching of Black women and girls in Canada – the case of S.B. who was violently strip-searched by four Ottawa police officers in 2008 and the case of three 12-year-old girls who were strip-searched in a Halifax public school in 1995. This article demonstrates that the exposure of Black women’s and girls’ bodies that occurs in the strip-search encounter is part of the matrix of gendered anti-Blackness. In tracing the moves that the state makes to erase the sexualised violence of the strip-search, this paper suggests that the strip search be understood as a form of gendered anti-Black terror – a technology of violence that functions to evict Black women and girls from personhood. The disciplinary technology of the strip-search is one way in which the state exercises its sovereign power and marks Black women’s and girls’ bodies as violable bodies. I argue that the weaponisation of bodily exposure has a long legacy, and as a highly visual and spectacular encounter, the strip-search cases point to a particular kind of persistent corporeal violence.

A Craft Essay on Trauma

A Craft Essay on Trauma

Modifying Hata-Davidson Propagation Model for Remote Sensing in Complex Environments Using a Multifactional Drone

The coupling of drones and IoT is a major topics in academia and industry since it significantly contributes towards making human life safer and smarter. Using drones is seen as a robust approach for mobile remote sensing operations, such as search-and-rescue missions, due to their speed and efficiency, which could seriously affect victims’ chances of survival. This paper aims to modify the Hata-Davidson empirical propagation model based on RF drone measurement to conduct searches for missing persons in complex environments with rugged areas after manmade or natural disasters. A drone was coupled with a thermal FLIR lepton camera, a microcontroller, GPS, and weather station sensors. The proposed modified model utilized the least squares tuning algorithm to fit the data measured from the drone communication system. This enhanced the RF connectivity between the drone and the local authority, as well as leading to increased coverage footprint and, thus, the performance of wider search-and-rescue operations in a timely fashion using strip search patterns. The development of the proposed model considered both software simulation and hardware implementations. Since empirical propagation models are the most adjustable models, this study concludes with a comparison between the modified Hata-Davidson algorithm against other well-known modified empirical models for validation using root mean square error (RMSE). The experimental results show that the modified Hata-Davidson model outperforms the other empirical models, which in turn helps to identify missing persons and their locations using thermal imaging and a GPS sensor.

Strip Searches, Police Power and the Infliction of Harm: An Analysis of the New South Wales Strip Search Regime

Police misuse of strip search powers at music festivals, at train stations, in police vehicles and at other locations has been subject to sustained public attention in recent years. This article traces the evolution of strip search practices in New South Wales, explores the legal and policy context in which they have developed, highlights the individual and social harms arising from them and discusses the need for fundamental law reform. We argue that recent controversies regarding police strip searches and drug detection dog operations in New South Wales show policing to be simultaneously a law-making and a law-abusing power. By examining concepts concerned with how police construct their own working rules, police data and testimony provided to the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC), we explain how police justify conducting strip searches that should otherwise be considered unlawful.

SEARCH AND REMOVAL OF PROHIBITED ITEMS FROM THE HUMAN BODY: MEDICAL– PROCEDURAL ASPECT

The aim: Based on the research, to develop a scientific concept of medical and procedural aspects of restricting a person’s right to physiological integrity related to the removal of prohibited items from his/her body and formulate recommendations for their implementation in law enforcement practice. Materials and methods: The empirical basis of the study were five decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, the results of a survey of prosecutors, investigators, and lawyers, processing of materials of criminal proceedings. The practical evidence of the authors, their advocacy, and service in the prosecutor’s office was also taken into account. To demonstrate the method of prohibited substances’ concealment in a human body, a photographic image was used based on the results of the examination of a person using a scanner conducted by customs officials. The methodological basis of the research is a complex combination of general-scientific and special methods, in particular, system-structural, comparative-legal; sociological; statistical; as well as the method of generalization. Conclusions: The removal of evidence from a person’s body is a strip search. The basis for this investigative action should be a court decision, and in urgent cases, the prosecutor. This investigative action must be carried out with the obligatory participation of a physician. To this end, it is necessary to develop an appropriate medical protocol.

The quadruple burden: Reproductive labor & prison visitation in Venezuela

Utilizing the Feminist-Marxist lens of reproductive labor, I examine how the caring work and bodies of women who visit prisons are central to an analysis of the relationship of incarceration and social reproduction under capitalism. My research is based on participant observation and interviews with women prison visitors in 2014–2015 in Venezuela. I analyze how women bring food, clean laundry and otherwise approved items; they take long journeys, wait in lines for hours and pass through an invasive strip search so that they can visit their loved ones in prisons. This work is even more burdensome because the prisons operating under carceral self-rule—run by armed organizations of inmates through a de-facto privatization that centers not just survival but profit —fail to provide even the most basic necessities. I argue that the work of caring for a loved one in this context creates an additional burden on top of a job, housework, and community activism. This fourth shift requires that women’s labor be incorporated into a neoliberal carceral apparatus and also demonstrates that while the carceral zone is porous, the bodies of poor racialized women are used to enforce the prison border.

Unity in Rupture

Unity in Rupture

Examining the preventable but predictable death of Ashley Smith.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the fusion of psy-correctional discourse with the dominant risk logic to consider the implication this nexus can have on how self-injurious behaviour committed by women in prison is interpreted and responded to by the Correctional Service Canada (CSC). The central focus of the study is an in-depth case analysis of the carceral death of Ashley Smith, a 19-year-old woman who committed suicide in her segregation cell in 2007 after enduring four years of excessively punitive treatment aimed at controlling her self-injurious behaviour. Findings illustrate how the fusion of these logics creates a kind of "therapeutic-risk cloak" that reframes the behaviour as "abnormal" and "risky", which masks the punitivity of strip search and segregation interventions in the name of safety, security and treatment. Given that correctional officials knowingly failed to intervene when Smith tied the fatal ligature around her neck, a federal inquiry judged her death to be a homicide. By attempting to unveil the "therapeutic-risk cloak" the authors hope to challenge the underlying logic of CSC's governance and management framework, which not only denies the oppressive gendered carceral reality that is linked to self-injurious behaviour amongst women prisoners, but is also used to justify intervention responses that exacerbate the very behaviour this framework aims to control. Until systemic transformation is achieved that eradicates CSC's contradictory governance framework, there is no doubt that the authors will continue to see similar preventable deaths take place in prison.

An Iranian License Plate Recognition System Based on Color Features

In this paper, an Iranian vehicle license plate recognition system based on a new localization approach, which is modified to reflect the local context, is proposed, along with a hybrid classifier that recognizes license plate characters. The method presented here is based on a modified template-matching technique by the analysis of target color pixels to detect the location of a vehicle’s license plate. A modified strip search enables localization of the standard color-geometric template utilized in Iran and several European countries. This approach uses periodic strip search to find the hue of each pixel on demand. In addition, when a group of target pixels is detected, it is analyzed to verify that its shape and aspect ratio match those of the standard license plate. In addition to being scale and rotation invariant, this method avoids time-consuming image algorithms and transformations for the whole image pixels, such as resizing and Hough, Fourier, and wavelet transforms, thereby cutting down the detection response time. License plate characters are recognized by a hybrid classifier that comprises a decision tree and a support vector machine with a homogeneous fifth-degree polynomial kernel. The performance detection rate and the overall system performance achieved are 96% and 94%, respectively.

“That Photo”: Journalism and Bearing Witness to History

On August 31, 1970, the Philadelphia Daily News published a photograph snapped by Elwood Smith of several Black Panthers being forced to strip by gun-wielding Philadelphia police officers. Within days, Smith's image became known as “that photo,” widely recognized throughout the city. Through a visual analysis of Smith's photograph alongside reader and editorial responses to the image, this essay interrogates the role of journalism in mediating the relationship between the past and present. I argue that the “history” witnessed by Daily News readers extended beyond the violence sanctioned by Philadelphia police against the Panthers in that frozen moment. Invoking discourses surrounding a past of racial violence perpetrated by Whites against Black bodies, Daily News readers discursively linked the strip search to historic rituals of bodily trauma. In calling readers to witness Smith's photograph, journalists summoned the visual's power to challenge structures of police authority within the city of Philadelphia and to complicate rituals of violence endemic throughout the United States. Sanctioning the interpretive contestation of Smith's photograph, the Daily News legitimated readers’ competing, albeit interconnected, positions regarding the appropriation of police power within Philadelphia. In so doing, the newspaper undercut the potentially catalyzing power of Smith's photograph, emphasizing instead the necessity of bearing witness while containing the photograph's meanings. This case study thus offers a site to consider the ways in which Northern newspapers limited visual discourse and its opportunities to engage structural issues of racial inequality and police authority during the so-called “long 1960s.”

Development of Mosaic Algorithm for Mosaic-video Creation using Modified Strip Search Algorithm

Creating Mosaic-video is still a relatively new pursuit. It is also useful inside virtual reality environments, computer game settings, movie special effects and region of interest tracking. Immersive teleconferencing is another application that is being developed using mosaic-video. Many mosaic-video creation techniques are proposed by the researchers but most of them are based on the multiple cameras. We developed it with the use of single moving camera by incorporating simple and efficient steps. Initially a strip search algorithm is modified for mosaic creation with high sensitivity and linearity followed by video background extraction and then mosaic-video frames are created with merging the required dynamic motions from all the frames to mosaic backgrounds. This method handles major problem of non-redundant information retrieval and visualization along large view with respective to the video of tracking camera.

'Turn Around', 'Bend Over', 'Squat', and 'Cough': The Supreme Court Strips the Fourth Amendment 'Naked' in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders

This case note criticizes the Supreme Court’s decision in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County. of Burlington, 132 U.S 1510 (2012), which held that under the Fourth Amendment, jail administrators can require all arrestees admitted to the general population of a jail to undergo a visual strip/cavity search, even for minor offenses and even without reasonable suspicion to believe the arrestee is in possession of a concealed weapon or contraband. Particularly, the case note follows a historical development of the Fourth Amendment and the complexity of defining reasonable searches by circuit courts. Additionally, it examines the “tug of war” among the circuits leading up to the Florence decision. Furthermore, it explores the inconsistent and mixed applications of Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520 (1979), to Fourth Amendment jail-strip-search cases by circuit courts. Bell considered for the first time the constitutionality of a search performed on a pre-trial detainee inside prison walls vis-a-vis a blanket strip-search jail policy. In addition to providing a detailed explanation of the facts, procedural history, and disposition of the Florence case, including all concurring and dissenting opinions, this note further analyzes and critiques Florence’s questionable holding and rationale. Specifically, it addresses three distinct issues: (1) the Supreme Court’s failure to address the manner of the strip searches, which could in turn transform arrestees into victims of sexual violence and abuse; (2) the Supreme Court’s failure to consider current state laws and federal policies requiring reasonable suspicion to strip search a prison detainee; and (3) the Supreme Court’s troublesome conclusion that blanket strip-search policies actually serve as an effective deterrent against weapon and contraband concealment by prison detainees.

Under Arrest and Overexposed: The Fourth Amendment Allows Visual Body Cavity Inspections for Misdemeanors

The Fourth Amendment allows the government or its agents to search or seize an individual if the search or seizure is reasonable. And, pursuant to the Fourth Amendment, reasonableness has many interpretations, which are designed to protect all of the general interests affected — the government’s interest in protecting its citizenry and the individual’s interest in privacy. Yet, in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of Burlington County, the Supreme Court permitted prisons to create policies entailing the strip search and visual body-cavity inspection of any individual, both felon and misdemeanant, to discover and deter contraband smuggling during the prison-intake process without requiring a prerequisite reasonable suspicion. The author disagrees with this Supreme Court holding because the individual’s rights were not afforded enough weight when the Supreme Court balanced them against the government’s interest in maintaining safety in jails. The author discusses the case history leading to this decision, explains why a reasonable suspicion should still be required to strip search and inspect the body cavities of misdemeanants, and illustrates how determining a reasonable suspicion is possible, if not practical. Accordingly, this issue should be reconsidered so the privacy rights and interests of future misdemeanants are not gravely affected.

Homophobia as the State of Reason

The stigmatization of Caribbean postcolonial nation-states in the Western imagination as exemplifying some of the most homophobic nationalisms masks a more-nuanced reading of the complexities of Caribbean modernity. As such, the hardening of homophobic nationalisms in settings such as Trinidad and Tobago forces us to question how and why compulsory homophobia is deployed as a form of moral discipline that is made to seem compatible with postcolonial modernity. This article explores the “problem space” of state-sanctioned homophobia as a regulative and generative (not simply repressive) force in postcolonial nationstates. It first briefly theorizes how compulsory homophobia has become a mandate of state-popular affinity in the postindependent era that conditions the possibility of pluralistic consensus in the postcolonial nation-state. Within this context, the author further explores a historic court case involving the “wrongful arrest” and alleged strip search of an out gay subject by state police officials. Some analytic insights into the strip search and subsequent court case testimonies are offered with a view to understanding the regulatory and generative potentials of institutionalized homophobia. The implications of this case for an incipient LGBT activist platform are also discussed as an expansion of the complex debates about sexual citizenship and political community within the postcolonial condition.

Stripping for the State

This article examines whole body imaging technologies in contemporary airport security contexts. Situating these technologies more broadly within histories of aviation and theories of mobility, we examine how discourses of technological efficiency and freedom of movement work to obscure the ever-expanding surveillance practices of the state. While whole body imaging technologies are marketed as objective and neutral, we investigate how they draw upon, and reinscribe, existing social inequalities. Using Angela Davis' theory of the strip search as a form of state-sponsored sexual assault, we assess contemporary uses of whole body scanners by the state and allied corporate interests not only as alleged privacy violations, but also as potential acts of violence by the state on marginalized subjects. By demonstrating the disproportionate impact of whole body imaging technologies on particular communities, including the intersections of transgendered travelers, travelers with disabilities, and racialized and religious communities, we show that whole body imaging technologies continue and expand upon the tradition of stratified mobilities that has always been a component of air travel. We also argue that the alleged non-invasiveness and efficiency of the “virtual strip search” marks a troubling trend in which the state consolidates power through increasingly concealed surveillance practices.

Student Strip Searches: The Legal and Ethical Implications of Safford Unified School District v. Redding for School Leaders

The legal freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures is guaranteed to all adult citizens under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. These same legal protections from unreasonable searches and seizures are not guaranteed to today's K-12 student population. School officials are not subject to the same warrant and probable cause requirements required of law enforcement officials to constitute a legally viable search. Instead, the legal constitutionality of searches involving U.S. students is guided by the reasonableness of the search toward maintaining appropriate school discipline. Given the mounting pressures to improve school safety, today's school leaders are facing conflicting legal and ethical challenges associated with balancing the competing goals of student safety with respecting students’ legal rights. Student strip searches are one such example of a legal and ethical dilemma facing today's school leaders. This article explores the legal and ethical implications of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent case Safford United School District v. Redding, involving the strip search of a middle school student for nonprescription drugs. A central inquiry of this article is whether student strip searches are in the best legal and ethical interests of student leaders.

The U.S. Supreme Court Raises the Bar for Strip Searches in Public Schools

Strip searches should be considered searches of last resort based on the intrusive nature of the search and the resulting impact it may have on a student. It is well established by the courts that as the intrusiveness of the search intensifies, the standard of the Fourth Amendment reasonably approaches probable cause which is a higher standard than the reasonable suspicion standard that applies to non-intrusive searches. This article discusses a recent case involving a strip search in which the U.S. Supreme Court applied a more stringent standard that school officials must meet to justify initiating a strip search. The importance of the High Court's decision is that it resulted in a national standard by which actions of school officials will be judged in conducting intrusive searches during their investigation of alleged violations of school policies.

Plucking Swans, and: The Way Forward Begins with Gratitude

138 Who looks into a marble and finds a code like Hammurabi’s? We do. So why can’t we pluck fast enough? Milky with fragrance, a stairway of swans. Each swan decanting the autumn, wet feathers rimmed by frost, a concussion of quills spraying into the fountain. And even here at the mirror a swan dangles, revenge on nature and art. You’re breathing in needle clouds. It’s sharper and sharper in your lungs. You will not make the past work. Everywhere you look is down. Why are you tearing at your own arms now? Watch it. Your head is in that one’s mouth. I think he’s choking with you. PLUCKING SWANS LEE UPTON 139 LEE UPTON THE WAY FORWARD BEGINS WITH GRATITUDE I can’t read the devil’s handwriting on this contract, can you? His penmanship, all forks. No thanks. No thanks to you and your whiskey. No thanks. The shark’s world or the saint’s? No thanks. Look. The Picts and the Huns arrived at last-thanks to you and your whiskey. Now your cow is in the corn. You can blow your horn, but she’ll shred the flags of a thousand countries. She thinks she’s Marcus Aurelius mowing barbarians down. She’s bloating, and she won’t budge. That’s the way I feel about libraries. Thanks. The rhinoceros thinks she’s a hippo equipped for war. No thanks. No thanks to you and your whiskey. They say the more you drink the thirstier your thinking. Half the time I love actors. Half the time I pretend to. I auditioned but landed in the crew. No thanks. No thanks to you and your whiskey. 140 Did you make your whiskey at home in a tank? Let’s make your throat raw with an incredible thirst. Everybody should have an education that doesn’t involve a strip search. ...

Restoring Equipoise to Child Welfare

Since the Supreme Court’s widely criticized decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dept. of Social Services, the principle that the Constitution affords no relief for a social worker’s failure to prevent harm to a child has been described as a “staple of our constitutional law.” There is considerably less certainty about the prospect of relief for children and parents harmed by a social worker’s affirmative acts - the warrantless strip search of a child to obtain evidence of sexual abuse, for example, or the unjustified removal of a child from her parents’ custody. The uncertainty derives not from substantive constitutional law, because these are the sorts of infringements proscribed by our Constitution’s charter of negative liberties, but from unresolved questions about the level of immunity to which social workers ought to be entitled when their conduct is challenged in federal court. This article is the first to argue that these questions should be resolved in a way that acknowledges the force of DeShaney’s mandate. In a world where social workers cannot be held liable in federal court for leaving an endangered child in the care of her parents, it presents an unacceptable inequity of incentives to allow social workers to be held liable for removing a child from a dangerous home. In this article I offer a reluctant defense of absolute immunity for social workers initiating child dependency proceedings, arguing that it can correct this perilous imbalance.