As if U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation wasn't enough, the Tribune is now reporting that a federal judge has ruled as unconstitutional the practice of strip-searching male detainees ordered released from Cook County Jail. A decade earlier, similar strip-searches of female detainees were outlawed. It's not hard to see why:
Quentin Bullock, 53, a former county jail detainee who is a party to the lawsuit, said he was taken back to the jail and strip-searched after he was found not guilty of armed robbery in 2003. He said officers ordered between 50 and 70 detainees to line up in a jail hallway and told them to take off their clothes and squat down.
"It's very degrading," Bullock said.
The Cook County Sheriff's office defended the practice on the grounds that men are more violent than females and more likely to smuggle weapons and contraband back into the jail from court. Yet the sheriff's own statistics indicated that female detainees are proportionally responsible for more acts of violence than male detainees.
WBEZ has more.
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