Opinion ID: 2807875
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Programs and Activities

Text: Programs and activities officers directly supervise inmate activities such as educational and religious classes, gym, crafts, and visitation hours. During these programs and activities, inmates are searched at random and if suspected of hiding contraband. Guards must collect urine samples from inmates and at times relieve housing unit officers, which requires “room checks” where they may “encounter female offenders in varying states of undress. . . .” These guards also supervise visitation hours, after which 50% of inmates are pat searched and 50% are strip searched. To fulfill these job functions, the state designated three programs and activities positions as female-only. The Union’s proposed alternative to designating these positions as female-only is a return to the system employed for the last two decades: dispatching female officers as rovers—or “response and movement” guards, in prison lingo—who could be paged when needed for searches.7 The Union offers no data, expert testimony, or other evidence to support the efficacy of this approach. Instead, undisputed evidence established that the rover system was rife with problems, to say the least. During this era, prison administrators “shuttle[d] women staff from location to location throughout the prisons to perform essential security 7 Union expert Gladwin says the female-only designation of programs and activities posts is “arbitrary,” because the programs and activities officer who supervises the bike program can be a male guard. That officer, however, is not required to perform searches. 28 TEAMSTERS LOCAL UNION NO. 117 V. WASH. DEP’T OF CORR. procedures, leaving other areas of the prison without appropriate staffing.” Wait times for searches lasted an hour or more. With female guards stretched thin, inmates went unsupervised showering, using the restroom, or dressing—raising security and safety risks. Superintendent Eldon Vail testified that, before the BFOQ positions were implemented, the prison functioned “in the broadest sense” but the shortage of female guards restricted the prison’s ability to deploy unannounced, random pat searches, an important tool in preventing the flow of contraband. In light of this checkered history, the Union’s conclusory assertion that the Department successfully “managed [privacy and search] issues for at least two decades” rings hollow. FTC v. Publ’g Clearing House, Inc., 104 F.3d 1168, 1171 (9th Cir. 1997) (“[C]onclusory, self-serving statements in appellate briefs . . . are insufficient to create a genuine issue of material fact.”). We will not displace prison administrators’ experience and expertise in favor of an alternative that boils down to the “same old, same old.” Cf. Torres, 859 F.2d at 1529 (“[P]rison administrators always have been expected to innovate and experiment.” (citing Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 107 (1987) (prison administrators must be allowed “to adopt innovative solutions to the intractable problems of prison administration”)).