Deborah Flick, next to her attorney Andrew Schwartz, discusses being strip-searched after her arrest for alleged public intoxication. Chronicle photo by Lacy Atkins As you can see, Deborah is still traumatized. 

2002

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SAN FRANCISCO JAILS: Handling prisoners
Stripped of dignity
Lawsuits mount over jail's practices regarding strip searches, safety cells

The San Francisco Sheriff's Department for years has conducted inappropriate, abusive and sometimes illegal strip searches on people brought to its jails, a Chronicle investigation found.

After weeks of questioning by Chronicle reporters and facing multiple lawsuits that could result in multimillion-dollar judgments, Sheriff Michael Hennessey says he is changing the way the jail treats prisoners who are now being strip searched and placed in isolation cells.

In accounts going back to the mid-1990s, 14 men and women said they were wrongly subjected to humiliating strip searches. Many told the newspaper that they were dispatched to "safety cells'' designed for suicidal, self-mutilating or otherwise destructive prisoners. While in what jailers call "the hole,'' the former inmates said, they were denied clothing, blankets, sometimes even water - in violation of both state law and the jail's policies.

A confidential report from a branch of Hennessey's own department bolsters many of the people's accounts. The report, requested by Hennessey, warned more than a year ago that "we are out of compliance with state law'' in some policies and practices, and, "in some instances, Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment" of prisoners.

The sheriff's Prisoner Legal Services office, which issued the September 2002 report, told Hennessey in a follow-up in June that some of its key recommendations for change had not been implemented.

Since April, at least four lawsuits, including a potential class action case, have been filed against San Francisco over its strip search or safety cell practices. If successful, the lawsuits could result in a huge cost to taxpayers because San Francisco is self-insured for this kind of litigation - any settlements or judgments would come from the city's general fund.

Two years ago, New York City agreed to pay as much as $50 million for illegally strip searching prisoners in its Queens and Manhattan jails. Last year, Boston settled a strip search case for $10.million filed on behalf of 5, 400 women.

The Chronicle first reported on San Francisco's strip search controversy Sept. 4 in an article about two women - Mary Bull and Deborah Flick - who sued after being stripped naked and placed in isolation cells following their arrests on minor charges.

Confronted with the lawsuits and queries by The Chronicle, Hennessey made an abrupt about-face.

After insisting in September that "our policies conform to state law,'' Hennessey said this month that he is making changes that would dramatically reduce the number of strip searches. "Final wording is being worked on," he said.

In the future, the jail would "authorize strip searches only for new detainees who are charged with drugs, weapons and violent offenses, or where there is a reasonable, documented justification for believing contraband is being hidden,'' said Eileen Hirst, the sheriff's spokeswoman.

"I'm glad that the Sheriff's Department has decided to follow the law,'' said Kirk Boyd, a San Francisco attorney who filed one of the civil rights suits on behalf of 38-year-old San Francisco resident George Lazaneo. "They wrongly strip searched my client and humiliated him, and they are going to have to pay him something for that.''

Like Lazaneo, many of the people interviewed by The Chronicle had little or no criminal history and were arrested on misdemeanors or nonviolent offenses, typically public intoxication. Most of their cases, if charges were formally filed, were dismissed. Nonetheless, they were subjected to visual body cavity searches described as deeply degrading and traumatic, and most were confined for long periods in safety cells.

"I felt like I was in a Third World country," said Miki Mangosing, who said she was arrested for alleged public disturbance last December, strip searched and kept for more than 10 hours in one of the jail system's 24 safety cells. Like many, the cell had no bed or sink; the toilet was a grated hole in the floor. For much of the time, she said, she was naked.

"Safety cells are supposed to protect us, but I didn't feel safe at all. I felt violated and afraid," said Mangosing, a personal chef who lives in Oakland. No charges were filed against her, she said.

"They dehumanized and belittled me. I didn't think this happened in a democratic, free society. This was uncivilized treatment."

Others told The Chronicle they underwent similar ordeals, enduring strip searches and often safety cell confinement for complaining, for noncooperation,

for merely speaking up. Their ranks include artists, activists, students, a security guard, a supervisor in a branch of the federal government and a 70- year-old Roman Catholic nun. Some asked that their names not be used, citing fear of embarrassment or reprisal.

Although The Chronicle provided the names of the people interviewed, sheriff's spokeswoman Hirst said the department could not comment on specific cases without written legal waivers from each person.

Hennessey said he believed that the prisoners' jail medical records would "show that they were a danger to themselves or a danger to others, and that's why they were placed there.''

"People don't always tell the truth about (such) circumstances, particularly when they're not very favorable," he said. "I'm not saying they're bad people, I'm saying that's human nature … to minimize the conduct that got you into trouble."

Volatile environment

Hennessey, a former prisoner rights attorney who created the Prisoner Legal Services Office before he first won the sheriff's post in 1979, was re-elected Nov. 4 and is the longest-serving sheriff in San Francisco history.

His administration has been publicly perceived as largely progressive and compassionate in its approach to law enforcement and has received attention for innovative programs involving domestic violence prevention, victim- criminal reconciliation and increased protection for prisoners.

As the overseer of a nine-jail system, Hennessey said, he must balance the legal rights of an often volatile jail population with the security concerns of his facilities.

As to safety cell placements, he said: "You're dealing with situations that the public can't imagine happen. It's a very extreme end of human conduct that we see, and it's mishmashed in with regular people. That's one of the very difficult parts of running the jail. ..... Frankly, we do try to err on the side of caution and security.''

Describing an incident in another system's jail in which an inmate hanged himself, Hennessey said: "You don't want one of those things to happen. Yes, we may search someone, in retrospect, unnecessarily because we've had these things happen to other people, where there have been tragedies.''

One of the Prisoner Legal Services report's most pronounced criticisms focused on the department's policy of automatically stripping and searching every prisoner placed in a safety cell "and depriving every prisoner of clothing while placed, without first determining if such action is justified. '' By doing so, the report said, the jail "is out of compliance with recommended procedure.''

The practice has state and federal legal implications as well.

Generally, California law prohibits pre-arraignment strip searches of people arrested for misdemeanors or minor crimes not involving weapons, drugs or violence unless there is a "reasonable suspicion'' they are smuggling a weapon or contraband.

In San Francisco, not everyone who is strip searched goes into a safety cell, but all prisoners placed in safety cells are strip searched. Civil rights lawyers believe that policy violates the law. The jail's internal report also raised red flags about the legality of the practice. It recommended a strip search before safety cell placement "only when prisoner is determined to be a threat to self."

Spokeswoman Hirst said the Sheriff's Department is considering changing its blanket policy of strip searching every prisoner placed in a safety cell. Those deemed "a danger to themselves'' would still be strip searched, but prisoners considered only "a danger to others'' might not be, she said.

Official condemnation

Prisoner Legal Services researchers analyzed jail records for the 112 prisoners who were placed in safety cells in four of the nine San Francisco jails during September 2001, and directly observed prisoners for two weeks in March 2002.

The report called jailers to task for unnecessarily depriving safety cell prisoners of substitute clothing and blankets. Twelve people who have sued or talked to The Chronicle said they were placed naked in the cells.

Although Hennessey claimed in a recent interview that "everyone always has a safety cell garment," the internal report noted that some prisoners in safety cells were inappropriately deprived of clothing or blankets, a violation of state regulations and jail policy.

In one case, a prisoner placed in the cell in the late afternoon and approved for clothing and a blanket "was observed naked in the safety cell the following day," the report said.

"Given the severity of the safety cell environment, approval for and provision of items that maintain personal privacy and physical warmth are critical issues in jail conditions,'' the report said.

Reasons for putting people in the cells in the first place were also faulted by the Prisoner Legal Services analysis. Some prisoners were placed in safety cells without initial approval by a doctor, watch commander or jail manager - a violation of state requirements and jail rules, the report found.

Additionally, the jail consigned prisoners to safety cells for outmoded, inappropriate, "inconsistent" or "vague" reasons. For instance, the jail allowed prisoners to be put in the cells for displaying "bizarre behavior," but that classification was disallowed by the state in 1998, the report said. "Bizarre behavior'' accounted for a quarter of all safety cell placements in the report's sample.

Despite 38 recommendations in the document, a follow-up review in June reported that a number of issues raised in the initial report "remain areas of concern.'' These included the duration of safety cell placements, inappropriate explanations for placements, incomplete and sloppy documentation and the continued use of "bizarre behavior'' and "gravely disabled'' language.

Within days of the second report, the jail's chief deputy, Jan Dempsey, issued written orders to all staff to discontinue using "gravely disabled'' in assessing safety cell placements.

Jail spokeswoman Hirst said last month that "bizarre behavior" is also "no longer authorized" as a criterion for safety cell placement.

Hennessey insisted in an interview that the safety cells are used for "extremely violent, extremely self-destructive prisoners," but the people interviewed by the Chronicle said their behavior didn't come close to meeting that criteria.

"They probably thought I was a nuisance," said a 46-year-old San Francisco mother of two arrested last October for her role in a minor disturbance and held nearly 10 hours in a safety cell. "They left me there with nothing on. I was not yelling, I was not out of control. I was a woman who was crying. I kept telling them I'm a third-generation San Franciscan."

"The jail uses the safety cell to retaliate against or to punish people who object to being mistreated," said Sacramento attorney Mark Merin, who lodged the pending class action suit against the jail. "If they object to being strip searched, if they object to illegal treatment, if they repeatedly ask to make a phone call, if they request rights guaranteed to them, the knee-jerk response of the guards is to put them in a safety cell.''

Curtis Hill, sheriff of San Benito County and chairman of the California State Sheriff's Association jail and corrections committee, said: "You can't throw somebody in there just because they're a jerk."

Cold truths

Once known in corrections jargon as "rubber rooms" or "cold rooms," safety cells in California have had an uneven legal history.

In 1988, following an ACLU lawsuit, a federal judge lambasted Orange County cells as "far below the standards of human decency." According to the suit, the cells lacked beds and toilet facilities; inmates were left naked, forced to eat with their hands and to urinate and defecate without towels or toilet paper.

In a separate case involving Kern County, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled such cells constitutional in 1995. Five inmates had sued the county contending its isolation cell - bare except for a pit toilet covered by a grate - was damaging to emotionally troubled and suicidal inmates.

"The safety cell is admittedly a very severe environment, but it is employed in response to very severe safety concerns," said the court.

The California Penal Code provides only four paragraphs about safety cells, but state regulations are detailed. The cells are for "only those inmates who display behavior which results in the destruction of property or reveals an intent to cause physical harm to self or others," according to state Board of Corrections regulations for county jails. They are never to be used as punishment for insulting or uncooperative behavior, the regulations say.

So serious is safety cell placement, state law requires guards to make two documented visual checks within each half-hour of confinement; a medical evaluation must be done within 12 hours of placement.

Law enforcement officials say the cells are necessary for short-term incarceration of psychotic or destructive inmates.

San Benito County Sheriff Hill said a safety cell prisoner at his facility once "popped his own eyeballs out" between mandated safety checks.

Sheriff Hennessey said San Francisco safety cell occupants have eaten their feces, gouged out their eyes or ripped out their hair. Last August, he said, a woman in a safety cell tried to asphyxiate herself with a tampon.

"If someone is thrashing around, crazed and angry, that's why we put them in safety cells,'' Hennessey said. "They are being extremely violent, extremely self-destructive, fighting everybody basically.

"We work in a really complex environment, and we have very few tragic incidences, very few deaths, very few sexual assaults, very few inmate-on- inmate fights because of the way we classify and separate people and get them treatment," he said.

Extreme circumstances

Bill Crout, deputy director of the California Board of Corrections, said safety cells are intended for a "small, special population. … You can only use a safety cell when a person is suicidal or tearing their cell apart and only with approval of the facility manager."

But critics say the cells are used not to protect prisoners, but to dehumanize and punish them.

Former San Francisco jail inmate Sandra Lakins, 48, who was incarcerated many times for a variety of felonies, said she served as a jail trusty (a cooperative prisoner who assists jailers) who helped bag and label inmates' clothing after they were strip searched. She said she witnessed "about 20" incidents in which women were put nude into safety cells. Perhaps five of them were high on drugs or rebellious, but the rest "were thrown in there just because they wouldn't shut up," she said.

"Most of these women I'm talking about aren't street women like me; they're these kind of 'Leave It to Beaver' moms," Lakins said.

Carolyn Ritchie, a longtime San Francisco social worker with clients who have served jail time, considers the cells "a perversity."

"Many people in the jail are crying and upset,'' she said. "If that's the jail's criteria for mental illness, then they could throw in most of the city. They rationalize putting people in cold cells to sober them up, but it is really torture. This is no way to treat someone who is coming off a drunk or someone who is mentally ill. If you are trying to calm people down - a de- escalation - it doesn't make sense to take off their clothes and throw them in a room. That is punishment."

Jo Robinson, director of Hennessey's Jail Psychiatric Services, said San Francisco jails serve as the largest "outpatient mental health clinic" in the city. About 13 percent of the 2,000-prisoner jail population here is "actively psychotic," she said.

Teresa Nelson, an attorney who heads Prisoner Legal Services and co- authored the safety cell reports, said it is a difficult task for jail custodial staff to accurately define and identify behavior that reveals an intention to harm oneself or others.

"They are subjective assessments, and people can take issue with those assessments," she said. "Do I think that people are put in (safety cells) because they're being noisy or difficult? Yes."

But sometimes, she said, separating a screaming or sobbing prisoner from other inmates is an effective way to defuse a situation, and decrease the potential for harm.

Need for change

While he declined to provide specific statistics on strip searches and safety cell detainments, Hennessey - citing his jail's annual arrest rate of more than 50,000 - said there are "thousands of people we don't strip search.''

In a September op-ed column in The Chronicle, he wrote that prisoners are placed in safety cells under limited circumstances and removed from the barren rooms as swiftly as possible.

Last month, Hennessey conceded in an interview, "I think this area of the law is changing, and we're trying to adjust with it. I think there are things we can and will do better in the future."

According to Merin, the attorney who represents Bull and Flick along with Walnut Creek lawyer Andrew Schwartz, Hennessey's adjusted stance includes "an admission that they've been out of compliance with state and federal law" and an attempt "to limit their liability."

Based on past awards for similar cases, Merin estimates that San Francisco could be forced to spend at least $60 million for possibly 15,000 claimants if his class action suit succeeds.

Earlier this year, Los Angeles County altered its policy after paying $2.7. million to settle a lawsuit by 71 male and female bicycle activists who were strip searched after being arrested at a protest. Two dozen of the women, who had not yet been brought before a judge, were ordered to strip by sheriff's deputies.

In February, a Sacramento County Superior Court judge ruled that the jail's strip search practices were illegal, holding the county and its sheriff liable for damages. The pending class action awards could cover more than 90,000 people.

"These cases are coming up with some regularity all over the country,'' said David Harris, a professor of law and values at the University of Toledo College of Law. "The Supreme Court for many years has made it clear that there is to be little judicial interference when it comes to local control of jails. They don't want judges second-guessing local authority.

"On the other hand, courts have fairly uniformly said that for minor crimes,

you don't strip search. There has to be a degree of suspicion that the person had concealed weapons or drugs. You cannot do it as a routine matter. Local officials don't always get the message."

San Francisco lawyer Kirk Boyd, who has filed one of the four civil rights suits challenging the jail policies, says it's a matter of basic freedom.

"This is about our dignity," said Boyd, who also is executive director of the University of California International Bill of Rights Project. "Our Bill of Rights protects our dignity."

CHART:

Safety-cell report

Some of the findings from a September 2002 report on safety cells in the SanFrancisco County Jails by Prisoner Legal Services, a branch of the Sheriff's Department.

-- Duration of placement

24 hours: 0.9%

1-5 hours: 15.2%

6-10 hours: 24.1%

11-15 hours: 25.9%

16-20 hours: 11.6%

21-24 hours: 22.3%

-- Age of those placed

50 years: 4.5%

18-25 years: 20.5%

26-30 years: 16.1%

31-35 years: 14.3%

36-40 years: 15.2%

41-45 years: 18.8%

46-50 years: 10.7%

-- Reason for placement

Ingestion: 0.9%

Bizzare behavior, destruction of property: 9.8%

Gravely disabled: 8.9%

Own request: 15.2%

Bizarre behavior, self-harm: 15.2%

Danger to self: 22.3%

Danger to others: 27.7%

-- Race of those placed

Other: 1.8%

Black: 58%

Latino: 9.8%

Asian/Pacific Islander: 2.7%

Caucasian: 27.7%.

Sources: Prisoner Legal Services, San Francisco Sheriff's Department, September, 2002

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