E. Your Right to Privacy and to Be Free from Unreasonable Searches and Seizures

LibraryThe Jailhouse Lawyer's Handbook (CCR) (2021 Ed.)

E. Your Right to Privacy and to be Free from Unreasonable Searches and Seizures

√ The Rule: Strip searches must be reasonably related to a legitimate penological interest and not done in a humiliating manner.

What this means in practice is that prison officials can search your cell whenever they want but there are some limits on when and how they can strip search you.

1. Your Fourth Amendment Rights related to Searches

The Fourth Amendment forbids the government from conducting "unreasonable searches and seizures." Outside of prison, this means that a police officer or F.B.I. agent cannot come into your home or search your body without your consent or a search warrant, unless it is an emergency. However, the Fourth Amendment only protects places or things in which you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." In the outside world, this means that if you have your window shades wide open, you can't expect somebody not to look in, so a cop can too.

In Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U.S. 517 (1984), the Supreme Court held that people in prison don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cells, so prison officials can search cells as a routine matter without any particular justification, and without having to produce anything like a search warrant.

This doesn't mean that all cell searches are OK. If a prison official searches your cell just to harass you or for some other reason that is not justified by a penological need, this may be a Fourth Amendment violation. However, to get a court to believe that the "purpose" of a search was harassment, you will need some truly shocking facts. For example, in Scher v. Engelke, 943 F.2d 921 (8th Cir. 1991), a prison guard searched a prisoner's...

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