What area have Fourth Amendment rights not been completely extinguished for inmates? Why is this an issue and how have the courts addressed it?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The one area in which Fourth Amendment rights have not been completely extinguished for inmates is that involving opposite-sex body searches. The courts have had to wrestle with conflicting claims on this issue. One is the equal employment claim of female corrections officers who want to work in male institutions where, because of their size and scope, promotion prospects are greater than they are in female prisons. Working in all-male prisons necessarily means that women officers will occasionally view inmates undressed or using toilet facilities, and sometimes they may be required to perform pat downs and visual body cavity searches. A frequent inmate claim is that cross-gender searches are “unreasonable” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The great majority of cross-gender search complaints are filed by males, which is not surprising since males constitute about 94% of all state prison inmates. On the other hand, it is surprising given the frequent complaints from female officers that some male inmates seem to take every opportunity to expose themselves and to behave in a sexual manner in their presence. Of course, this does not mean that many inmates are not genuinely embarrassed and offended by having to bear the indignity of female officers observing them using the toilet. In Turner v. Safley (1987), the Supreme Court enunciated what has come to be known as the balancing test, which means that the courts must balance the rights of inmates against the interests of penological concerns of security and order. In ruling that lower courts were wrong in applying the strict scrutiny standard of review to inmates’ constitutional complaints, the Court ruled that these cases require a lesser standard and involve the issue of whether a prison regulation that impinges on inmates’ constitutional rights is “reasonably related” to legitimate penological interests. This “reasonableness” revolves around a number of factors, including whether there is a valid and rational connection between the regulation and a legitimate government interest that is justified in the name of staff and inmate safety and security. According to the balancing test, then, the viewing of opposite-sex inmates is constitutionally valid “if it is reasonably related to legitimate penal interests.” Lower courts have interpreted “reasonableness” so that while female officers conducting or observing strip searches of male inmates are tolerated in emergency situations, similar observation and searches by male officers of female inmates are considered unreasonable. This double standard has been justified on two grounds: (1) Males do not experience loss of job opportunities if they are forbidden to frisk female inmates and (2) intimate touching of a female inmate by a male officer may cause psychological trauma because many female inmates have histories of sexual abuse.