The humiliation and sexual abuse of men in Minnesota’s prisons
“As a sexual assault survivor, I feel retraumatized by strip searches each time I’m forced to undress. It’s a trigger for me.” —Oak Park Heights inmate Jamaine Williams
“It’s embarrassing, to say the least. I’ve been literally body-shamed by officers during strip searches on numerous occasions because I am fat and my stomach hangs over my private parts. A guard once said to me during a strip search,’ I bet you urinate on your stomach, don’t you?’”
—Oak Park Heights inmate Ronald Hill
These are only some of the responses I received from other men incarcerated here in Oak Park Heights to explain their lived experience with “strip searches.”
As recently as January 1, 2024, Minnesota lawmakers finally recognized the victimization and sexualized dynamics associated with strip searches conducted on incarcerated youth, significantly curtailing the decades-long practice of state-sanctioned sexual assault that humiliates and dehumanizes incarcerated children.
Relatedly, after a barrage of complaints by incarcerated women at Shakopee prison, Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell issued a directive requiring the use of body scanner technology in place of prison guard-involved strip searches before and after visiting and medical trips, effectively repudiating the sexual trauma women experience during such searches.
These actions by lawmakers and the commissioner are a testament to, at minimum, an awareness of the attack they pose to personal dignity and bodily integrity.
My question is: Why would incarcerated adult males be treated any differently? Just as the sexual assault of women and children by prison guards is wrong, so is the sexual assault of men by prison guards. Am I wrong?
Indeed, the homoeroticism, phallocentric voyeurism, humiliation, and degradation experienced by those subjected to strip searches by male prison guards at adult male facilities remain invisible.
As a Black man, I cannot help but think of the rituals of degradation and emasculation my ancestors survived in slave auctions. Scholars of war note the “normal” sexual violence of “enforced nudity” to humiliate the vanquished, putting defeated bodies on display.
When I raised concerns with Oak Park Heights Warden Halverson, her professional response was essentially that it was department policy. “Policy” gives male prison guards carte blanche to commit acts that, if committed outside of working hours, would be considered a sex crime.
Under Minnesota law, “sexual contact” includes coerced or forced removal of clothing covering a person’s intimate parts or undergarments. For clarity, when an incarcerated person is told by a guard to remove his clothing, the word “no” comes with violent consequences. As you’ll learn, all strip searches are achieved by force, coercion, or threatened force.
What occurs during a strip search?
Incarcerated persons are told to become fully naked by one or several guards, who may be standing in front of you or may have intimidatingly encircled you. The removal of your clothing must be one piece at a time until you become nude.
You then stand in the nude, in the presence of however many prison guards; open your mouth, lift your tongue, take out false teeth if any, flicker your ears, stretch your arms, lift your feet, fondle your testicles and penis by separating them from one another; turn so your buttocks is facing the guard, bend over and spread your buttocks cheeks exposing your anus.
These forms of searches are conducted whenever we go to and return from a visit or the hospital, to and coming from solitary confinement, “randomly” selected by a prison guard, at the end of your workday, and at the discretionary whim of any prison guard—because he can.
What occurs if an incarcerated person says “no” to strip search?
You will find yourself surrounded by a host of participants and spectators who violently render your body physically helpless by force, gassings or macings, muscle you to the ground, ripping or knifing off the clothing from your body, now using their own hands to spread your anus and fondle your genitals.
It cannot be overstated that a prisoner’s refusal or objection to a strip search is automatically viewed as motivated by having something to hide or conceal instead of legitimate concerns about one’s personhood, fear, humiliation, or religious or cultural beliefs.
I don’t profess to be a psychologist. Still, I know from personal experience that these daily sexual and violent group assaults, experienced and witnessed, often cause a range of physiological and psychological harms.
How does inflicting this form of traumatic anti-human violence for years or decades contribute to rehabilitation and an individual’s successful reintegration into society?
Is it any wonder why many institutional-based establishments, prisons, nursing homes, and mental wards are hubs for abuse by employees? Emboldened by “policies” allowing repeated abusive behavior on already vulnerable and defenseless humans who will hardly be believed, where power imbalances can be exploited at any time by any employee to “strip search” as a vehicle of sexual domination, harassment, or retaliation?
Perhaps you reading this find it so shocking or unbelievable that you disregard it or feel no sympathy is warranted because this is just what happens to “those criminals,” existing beneath humanity’s normative paradigm.
My last question is: Does a sexual assault disguised as a “security procedure” make the sexual assault acceptable?
Shavelle Oscar Chavez-Nelson currently resides in Oak Park Heights Prison and can be reached on jpay.com with his ID number: #204140.
This commentary was made possible through a partnership with the Twin Cities Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, a union working to transform the justice system in MN.