EXCLUSIVE: Women Allegedly Filmed Nude By Guards While in Prison Speak Out
Women who were allegedly recorded during strip searches by prison guards' body cameras told Newsweek in exclusive interviews that the mental and emotional aftermath has led to fear, anger, and the feeling of being less than human.
Six women in a Michigan correctional facility spoke for the first time with Newsweek, detailing the impact that purported nude strip searches beginning in January had on their psyche.
They are among around 675 female inmates (as of June 3) of an approximate total prison population of 1,800 at Michigan's only women's prison, Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility (WHV) in Ypsilanti, suing Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) officials in a $500 million lawsuit alleging that prison guards recorded body camera footage of naked women at a detention facility.
Attorneys from Detroit-based Flood Law are representing the plaintiffs, claiming that guards' actions constitute a felony as a violation of a Michigan law (MCL 750.539j) in addition to violating other fundamental constitutional rights.
A policy directive was issued by MDOC on March 24 of this year, saying, "Employees issued a body-worn camera (BWC) as part of their job duties shall adhere to the guidelines set forth in this policy directive."
Michigan is currently the only state that has a policy to videotape strip searches.
Litigators point to language stated within the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which outlines MDOC's "zero-tolerance standard toward all forms of sexual abuse and sexual harassment involving prisoners."
A clause within PREA alludes directly to voyeurism, which states: "An invasion of privacy of a prisoner by an employee for reasons unrelated to official duties, such as peering at a prisoner who is using a toilet in their cell to perform bodily functions; requiring a prisoner to expose their buttocks, genitals, or breasts; or taking images of all or part of a prisoner's naked body or of a prisoner performing bodily functions."
The PREA policy also includes the following language, underlined within: "The Department has zero tolerance for sexual abuse and sexual harassment of prisoners."
Newsweek did not receive responses to multiple inquiries sent to Whitmer's office and the Michigan Department of Corrections. A spokesperson for Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told Newsweek that the department's involvement would only be to provide legal representation for the State of Michigan defendants named on the lawsuit, deferring comment to those individuals.
Lori Towle, 58, has been incarcerated for 22 years and never quite experienced anything like she did with the body cam recordings.
Towle, who is serving life for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, told Newsweek that the effect on her was "immediate." She reported asking guards, consisting of males and females, many questions and expressed her discomfort with the policy itself.
Guards purportedly told her it was the department's policy and that if she had an issue, she had to take it up with the captain.
"Oh, I grieved it," Towle said. "The first officer that stripped me on camera also told me that I was lucky that she wasn't making me spread my vagina apart and letting her look in there."
Tashiena Combs-Holbrook, 49, is in her 26th year of incarceration. She's serving life for first-degree murder. Her conviction has been in the Oakland County Prosecutor's Conviction Integrity Unit for more than three years.
Combs-Holbrook told Newsweek that she's done basically every job behind bars she could, from cleaning toilets to mentoring to working in the law library. She had heard rumors about strip searches being recorded but then experienced it herself in January.
"For me, it just escalated the already problematic procedure of strip searches in general," she said. "The strip searches here are extremely humiliating and demeaning and horrifying, and the fact that they started recording them just made it even worse.
"I think that actually the day that they told us that the cameras were actually going to be in use, I had a visit ,and I had it canceled because just the thought of having to be strip-searched is already horrific enough-and then to be recorded just took it over the top."
That was a sentiment shared by LaToya Joplin, who is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder.
The 47-year-old has been in prison for 18 years, 17 of which have been spent as a chaplain. She's also been working as an observation aide for 12 years, helping individuals with suicidal ideations.
"I felt degraded, I felt humiliated, and I felt embarrassed as a woman," Joplin told Newsweek of being recorded in the shower, the first such instance she's ever been recorded behind bars.
The mental and emotional anguish have contributed towards a more defensive posture, she said, that includes not even wanting to go to work anymore because she's "scared of the unknown" and whether recordings of her and other women will reach the wrong hands.
Recordings have made Paula Bennett, 35, wary of continuing to visit with family members-something she's taken advantage of to the fullest in her 17 years in prison.
After hearing rumors around the facility of body cam recordings, she thought it was just hearsay. Then, one day prior to a scheduled visit, she was strip-searched by a female lieutenant who allegedly told Bennett that it was just a "passive recording" and that only certain people could access the footage.
Bennett told Newsweek she began canceling visits due to not wanting to submit herself to the recorded searches. That included seeing her father, who has Alzheimer's and has visited her twice a week for the entire duration of her prison stint.
"It was really hard to choose between not wanting to be recorded naked and seeing my father. ... I just came to the conclusion that I couldn't be giving up time that my dad needed," Bennett said. "So, I did go on a visit and was super upset as soon as I walked into the visiting room. I was crying to [my family] because I knew at the end what was going to happen.
"And when I got to the end of the visit that day, the officer's body camera battery had died. So, I didn't get recorded. I remember feeling like I had just won the lottery."
Bennett is serving life for first-degree murder after she aided and abetted her boyfriend, resulting in a mandatory life sentence. But she will be resentenced due to being a juvenile when the crime was committed.
Another prisoner, 50, requested anonymity and will be referred to as Jane Doe.
She's been imprisoned 31 years, serving life for first-degree murder; however, the Michigan Supreme Court has ruled that her sentence is unconstitutional. She will be going back for resentencing in Wayne County.
Jane Doe initially asked guards if they could turn off their records, to which they declined due to policy. She wondered why inmates were even being recorded, who was going to observe the footage, and feared the footage being "hacked" and obtained by outside parties.
The dental technician who makes dentures for inmates statewide has the highest clearance of any prison job, she said, and it requires walking through a metal detector before the searches take place.
"I work four days a week, so we have to be strip-searched every day," she told Newsweek. "I would say [I've been recorded] about 75 to 90 times. You literally disassociate. That's the only way that I can be able to get through it because you end up breaking down in prison. One [search] is hard enough to take the abuse that we that we're subjected to."
The experience for 21-year-old inmate Natalie Larson was a different type of traumatic: On March 6, she gave birth to a son in front of multiple guards who recorded the event.
Larson has been in prison for about one year and is serving two to 15 years for creation/delivery of an analogue-controlled substance. She told Newsweek that she entered prison pregnant and understood it would be different than the births of her first two children.
She just didn't realize that the entire delivery would be etched in footage handled by MDOC officers, one male and one female.
"What was supposed to be one of the most sacred and happiest moments of my life was completely taken from me by a corrections officer and their body camera," Larson said. "I felt extremely humiliated and degraded. I was ashamed that I even had to experience that. ... It was just very inhumane to me. They had no decency or respect for the fact that I had just given birth to my child."
The male officer was a bit further away from her, while the female officer "was literally within arm's length" and sitting near her mother.
To add insult to injury, Larson said she received less than 48 hours with her new child. As someone who said she's experienced a lot of trauma in her life, she said this was arguably the worst incident to endure.
Due to her delivery, which was one of three births in prison that were recorded, Larson said she doesn't really like to leave the housing unit anymore. She's also declined to look into higher-paying job opportunities due to the high frequency of strip searches.
"I feel like they should take away the body cameras," she said. "There's cameras all over the prison that have audio, video. I don't really see the need for the body cameras. And it's not only like they're just recording strip searches; they're recording us in the bathroom, us in the shower.
"We have very little privacy in this prison as it is, and for them to be recording us in a state of undress like that is just absurd to me."
Of the women who spoke with Newsweek, the majority are victims of previous sexual violence.
All expressed their concerns, one way or another, to different officials within the facility, all the way up to the warden. Some guards were receptive to their concerns and iterated it's just a requirement of their jobs, while others have been claimed to be more power-hungry and use the cameras to intimidate.
"A lot of them were pretty cocky," Towle said. "They were like, 'Don't tell me about it, take it to the captain. Nothing I can do about it.' But I believe that everybody has a choice because there were some officers that turned to the side and the camera was not faced at us."
Bennett, who has also been recorded multiple times, said she tried raising concerns to a female officer with whom she's developed a positive rapport. But when she tried to explain, from one woman to another how she felt, the officer "had no empathy whatsoever."
"It deters us from even like having visits with our own families," she said. "It's something that affects us every single day. You're having non-confrontational regular encounters with staff and they're directing their bodies at you. ... It's like they're trying to create a hostile environment."
Colmes-Holbrook said that from 2000 to 2009, she followed procedure because she wanted to be a model inmate.
She said that in 2009, an MDOC officer asked her to scoot to the edge of a chair, put her legs in the air, and touch her heels together. She then had to place her hands around her buttocks and spread her labia for a search.
Now, with the recordings and her own track record of never being accused or in possession of contraband, she feels the prison is in a new era of violation-even though she knows the resilience of her fellow inmates.
"What it has done to my mental health, to the autonomy of my body, is something that I take very seriously," she said. "I've experienced not only sexual abuse; I've experienced various forms of domestic violence. I take it very seriously to be able to say 'yes' and 'no' when I mean 'yes' and when I mean 'no.'
Jane Doe, who was sexually assaulted by two male guards at a previous facility also in Michigan, said she and the other plaintiffs who've signed onto this litigation are doing so because they know it's a violation of the department's own policies.
"You can't commit voyeurism," she said. "If you're watching it and you're putting it on camera, that's the epitome of voyeurism. And so if you're violating your own policy, why would we not challenge it?"
"To protect us, that's what they're supposed to do," she added. "And they weren't protecting us. We're all trying to help as much as we can [with the lawsuit] because we're trying to help ourselves."
Towle felt oppressed and then depressed from her being recorded. She said it "triggered" her past history of being sexually abused.
"We're still human beings, whether we're in prison or not," Towle said. "It seems like a lot of people don't consider us to be human beings. If you become incarcerated, but once you walk out the door, then you're a human being again.
"It just doesn't make sense to me that we are not given the respect as other human beings, and what really gets me is that it was other females doing this to us. This was intentional. This is not professional. They planned this out and they did this to us."
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