Strip search from a how-to-do-it manual
In my last post I described witnessing police assaults on citizens. Of course the cruelty doesn’t stop on the streets. I was arrested during Women’s Liberation actions in 1970. The police treated us quite gently, since all of us were white, and they considered feminists more of a joke than a threat. Still, the routine nastiness enraged me. I’ll be reading the whole story at St. Johns Booksellers tonight. Here’s an excerpt:
We were nine feminists who’d been thrown into the dimly lit holding cell, along with perhaps six other women who’d been arrested for prostitution. It might have been early evening, might have been after dark. I didn’t have a watch and the cell had no window. Except for the occasional clang of steel doors, the place was surprisingly quiet. It smelled of vomit and ammoniated mop water.
I was 26. I’d never been arrested before.
The police busted us in late morning. Then they drove us from one precinct to another, no doubt to prevent our attorney from locating us. Eventually we were fingerprinted, booked, and put in that holding cell. By then it was too late to go to court, and we’d have to spend the night in jail.
We sat facing each other on two hard benches and exchanged wisecracks with the prostitutes, who were obviously used to being rounded up and kept here until their pimps bailed them out. A young black woman from that group wasn’t in a humorous mood, though. She was going cold turkey, shivering and retching, but she wouldn’t ask for a medic. If she admitted using heroin, they’d send her up for thirty days. If she toughed it out, they’d have to release her on bail. Ti-Grace Atkinson, one of our colleagues held the young woman in her lap and tried to soothe her.
Another feminist, whose name I don’t remember, suffered from stress diabetes and was afraid she’d lose consciousness if she didn’t get something to eat. We asked the cops for some food for her and they declined. Since the next step was to strip-search us, we had a quick confab and agreed, collectively, that we would only cooperate with the search if they brought our friend something to eat. A young officer went out and returned with a candy bar, which sufficed.
Then a sour-faced matron took each of us, one by one, to the separate cells where we’d spend the night, and conducted the search. The only woman who refused to cooperate was Ti-Grace. Afterward, I learned that the police had shackled her to the cell bars and stripped her forcibly. We were all annoyed with Ti-Grace for not agreeing to the collective decision. Many years later, however, I began to suspect that she was molested as a child, and that being strip-searched was a re-enactment of her rape. Being shackled must have made it infinitely worse.
The search was intended to be humiliating. The matron watched me take my clothes off, made me squat, and insisted on confiscating my tampon. She also confiscated my glasses. After ascertaining that I had no drugs or weapons, she allowed me to dress and bed down—the bed being another hard wooden bench with no pillow or blankets. I spent the night half blind, bleeding into my clothes, feeling helpless. Which is exactly what the cops wanted. They returned my glasses in the morning, and put the nine of us together in another holding cell.
Breakfast was stale bologna on stale white bread, and a cup of coffee the color of water you’d just used to mop the floor. There was no place to wash up. We arrived in court in our sweaty, rumpled clothes, smelling of dried blood.
These practices continue. Just recently I read an article in The Guardian about the scarcity of menstrual supplies in women’s prisons. Imagine being forced to soil your clothes month after month, year after year—not just overnight. Small potatoes, perhaps, compared to rapes by guards, denial of medical care, prolonged solitary confinement, etc., but it’s still gratuitous cruelty. And it still enrages me.