How Prisons, Jails, and Courts Coerce ‘Consent’ While Violating Visitors

As an adolescent, I learned what it’s like to have a stranger touch intimate areas of my body. A pair of groping, invasive hands granted me the privilege to see my incarcerated brother. I felt powerless. I had to choose between my sibling and my dignity. 

Over the years, I grew accustomed to shaking out my bra in front of correctional officers and getting pat down before every visit. I then went from visiting my brother to working in immigration court several times a week. For people entering prisons, jails, or courts, consent is coerced at every visit. Throughout the time that I traveled to these institutions, I felt caught in an inescapable loop, always forced to let someone touch my already overly sexualized large chest under the guise of “security.” 

After spending time and money traveling to carceral facilities that are usually far from urban centers, visitors are not likely to challenge demeaning searching practices. The fear of canceled visits, retaliation against imprisoned loved ones, or being late to court appearances makes people comply. Routine harassment during searches demonstrates how carceral institutions impose coercion on thousands of people who lose their autonomy while passing through these institutions to support others. 

Visit regulations at one Nevada prison, for example, mandate that officers are to “pull the brassier away from the body and gently shake the brassier to ensure no contraband[…]under the breast also needs to be searched.” Rules further stipulate that guards should avoid offending visitors by “overtly touching or fondling the breast.” 

This vague language gives officers a vast amount of discretion in practice. Body searches exist on a continuum. Some instances extend beyond what the institution considers appropriate. However, even the mundane, routine search (such as the type described above) is an uncomfortable and intimate violation. At every point, we are reminded that visiting is a privilege, not a right. Questioning the search process can end the visit.

Looking back, most visitors were Black and non-Black Latinx women like me. As historian Anne Gray Fischer has written, women’s bodies are an important and overlooked site of police power. Not only have we been criminalized and surveilled in our neighborhoods—the process continues and intensifies inside prison walls. We are forced to jiggle our breasts in front of officers for the chance to see our loved ones. 

The searches I endured did not feel less violating because female guards conducted them. For survivors of sexual violence in particular, the ritual violations during visits can trigger painful memories of unwanted touch. 

Carceral institutions are sites where sexual violence is routine and protected by law. Political prisoners such as Assata Shakur, Albert Woodfox, and Martin Sostre noted long ago that the searches they were subject to were a form of state-sanctioned sexual violence. This continues today. In 2019, New York settled a class action lawsuit for conducting unlawful, invasive examinations on jail visitors. This year, California paid a $5 million settlement to Christina Cardenas, a woman whom correctional officers strip-searched before a doctor sexually violated her. Prison officials had sent her to a hospital to test for contraband. They found none.​​ But these settlements are the exception, not the rule.

Most people who are violated during prison or court searches will receive neither compensation nor acknowledgment they were wronged. Even though correctional officers consistently bring contraband inside, it is visitors who are subject to demeaning searches.

When I visited San Francisco’s immigration court for my college job, my bra set off the metal detector every time. One day, a security guard tried to run his hand right across the fullest part of my bust—across my nipples. I knew this search was not routine. Previous searches consisted of a hand run across my bra underwire. 

When I refused, I was not allowed to leave. Security threatened to call federal police. Eventually, the guard agreed to perform only the usual search. 

I thought about the immigrant women who likely would not have been able to avoid this trespass on their bodies. My ability to speak English, open schedule, and knowledge of the search protocols spared me from this attempted sexual violation. In San Francisco’s immigration court, many Indigenous women from Latin America who spoke native languages faced additional communication barriers, even with translators available. How could they refuse a search like this?

ICYMI—From The Appeal

President Joe Biden has less than 40 days to grant clemency to the 40 people on federal death row. Donald Trump will likely oversee a spate of federal executions.