SAN FRANCISCO JAILS: Handling prisoners
Stripped of dignity
Lawsuits mount over jail's practices regarding strip searches, safety cells
Elizabeth Fernandez, Stephanie Salter, Chronicle Staff Writers
Sunday, November 16, 2003

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.