Andrew Krosch examines a prison strip search, the humiliation, control, and the lasting cost to human dignity.

Looks like I’m on my way to a prison strip search. Again.

It’s 11:30 a.m. here in Oak Park Heights prison. Security count has cleared. The “Squad” is here to “haul” me (take me to segregation). Again. Not sure what it is this time. Maybe that smart-assed comment to a unit guard that came off as a veiled threat. Maybe something shifty me and the fellas were doing that morning or the day before. They like to review the cameras and see what we’ve been up to.

I don’t get high or drunk any more. Not really. My body can’t handle the toxic effect any more after years of ingesting anything and everything that’ll get a guy high. Even a little.

I don’t bother asking the squad what the charges are. The answer was, is, and always will be some version of “they don’t tell us nothing.”

Right. And if I was being hauled on suspicion of having a paper mâché bazooka or homemade samurai sword under my bed, they wouldn’t get a heads-up? Really?

They have me reach both hands out through the food slot to the left of my cell door and hook me up in a pair of cuffs with a waist chain. First, they use the loose chain wrapped around the food slot door as an anchor, then open my door, come in, and pat me down, before having me slowly turn in a circle, drawing the chain rattling through the slot, a dinner-bell-like notice to the whole unit that someone is getting hauled off.

Then a leisurely walk to complex five, the seg. unit, and through the sally port, no metal detector—waist chained, remember—and down to the cell to be stripped.

Wave to the fellas if any are awake.

Nope. It was just lunch a few hours ago. They’re sleeping with full bellies. Up all night hungry. Sleep when you can, when you got food in you.

I’ve been in the Minnesota corrections system for a quarter century now. I couldn’t tell you how many strip searches I’ve had in that time. The first one or two hundred are probably the worst.

Near as I can tell, the cops don’t much like the strip searches any more than we do. There’s an element of security involved, of course. There will always be the story of Prisoner X doing this or that with something hidden on their person. And we’ve all seen enough TV to know that there are places where people hide things that will pass the strip search process and don’t smell so great afterwards.

Especially when you’re sharing a smoke with friends and nobody bothered to warn you.

(Yuck)

“Good shit” it was not.

Trips to segregation aren’t the only strips you’ll go through. Not by a long shot. Most of mine over the years were for workplace security. To make sure we weren’t hiding weapons or other contraband? Ha!

When I was over in neighboring Stillwater prison years ago, when we still had full-scale metal and wood manufacturing shops with every possible tool and material at hand—stripped, never. Possibly once, when they thought a package had come in on one of the trucks. If you can’t figure out what kind of package I’m referring to, I ain’t gonna spell it out for you.

No, the work strip searches, hundreds, maybe thousands, were when we still had centralized canteen warehouse, shipping and packing here. A third of the crew would be “randomly” stripped each time we left work and returned to the unit. Theoretically, you could get stripped 10 times in a five-day work week with lunch and end-of-day switchdowns from the warehouse located directly above the living unit.

Fun strips too. A group event.

Line up outside the employee bathroom, an L shape, the urinals at the heel of the L, the toilets at the toe, two each, the doorless doorway at the top of the L. Enough room in there for the four fixtures, two inmates, two guards, and the kind of communal sink with foot pedal I’ll always associate with grade school.

Sometimes they’d have us pull our underwear to our knees. Other times just shake the waistband real good.

On a completely unrelated note, when you work somewhere long enough, you hear and overhear things. Like how a certain warehouse gets to write off “damaged” goods. Like how said damaged goods regularly grew uniformed legs that occasionally strolled right past inmates, including yours truly, but more often waited until we were down for the day. Like the write-off numbers were in the thousands of dollars a month, if not more.

A kickback? Nah. The state would never do that. Not Minnesota. Not like this state wasn’t blasted all over the news about various scams over the last few years. (I’m about 99.9999% sure it ain’t just Minnesota. We were just the ones stupid enough to piss off the wrong dictator.)

Pull your underwear back up, put on your pants, shoes, and shirt, and go on about the rest of your day.

A strip search in seg or the Administrative Control Unit (the doubleplus ungood version of segregation) is never a one-on-one event. There will be multiple guards. Up to six or seven, even more if there’s a lot of tension.

You’re not only naked in front of people who have absolute control over your life. You’re standing there as they watch you take off every last stitch of clothing one by one before turning in a slow circle, apparently just in case that thing or things you may or may not have shoved where the sun don’t shine is hanging out your behind.

Everything, and I do mean everything, in prison is about control. Who wields the power and who has none. Obey or be punished.

What happens if you refuse to strip?

Failure to comply with a strip search, and there is no negotiation process or come back in a little while after everyone has cooled off, you will be wrestled down by a minimum of five or six large men, strapped to some kind of restraining device that looks like something out of an S&M dungeon in a bad horror movie, and have all your clothes cut off with big, nasty-looking shears, the kind you can cut seatbelts and heavy canvas with like snipping paper.

Naked, surrounded by state-sanctioned enforcers wearing uniforms and utility belts and radios that project power, legitimacy, who and what you become is now less than.

Ultimately, the question is: Is this archaic display of dominance, total control of another human, worth it? The short-term reward, a semblance of security, worth the long-term risk to our already badly frayed social fabric?

Most prison inmates will get out some day. Incarceration does enough to strip a person of dignity, a sense of self-worth, having some sort of agency, a way in your own life; what comes to feel like ritual humiliation helps no one.

With the advent of 21st century security measures, including fully clothed, full-body scans, the price of equipment should only be one part of the equation. There’s more than one way to measure cost, especially when human dignity is at stake and all that is lost—and yes, threatened, when a person’s very soul is worn down over time.

The kind of support that makes the healing process possible has always been a two-way street. The cost of replacing the humiliation of stripping naked time after time, with the ability to walk fully clothed through a full-body scanner to ensure everyone’s safety, is a small price to pay, and the rare investment that brings real returns, benefitting all of society in the long run as hundreds of Minnesota inmates are released to the streets each year with a little more dignity still intact post-incarceration.