Opinion ID: 1164314
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Equal Employment Policy.

Text: A necessity to conduct searches of male prisoners by female officers obviously does not arise from anything intrinsic to the searches themselves, nor from a shortage of skilled personnel such as might override a patient's preference to be handled only by doctors or nurses of the patient's own sex. If necessity can be claimed here, it arises from the state's policy of providing equal occupational opportunities to women. During the pendency of these proceedings, this policy was expressly addressed by the Legislative Assembly. House Joint Resolution 29 (Or. Laws 1979, p. 1262) states: (1) The Corrections Division of the Department of Human Resources of the State of Oregon shall: (a) Continue to make every effort to hire and promote women in correctional classifications within the Corrections Division; and (b) Continue to make temporary reasonable accommodations in its policies with respect to affirmative action so as to assure the rights of all involved. Prisoners are among the persons involved in this accommodation. The intervening officers in fact do not insist that their employment claims override such constitutional rights as the prisoners may have. They make two other contentions. One is that prisoners have no constitutionally protected interest in avoiding intimate touching by guards of the opposite sex. The other is that the circuit court acted prematurely without first giving corrections officials an opportunity to resolve the problem by administrative rules or requiring the prisoners to show why administrative remedies were inadequate. Although, as stated above, we hold that prisoners do retain relevant constitutional rights, their relation to the officers' rights deserve additional comment. It should be understood that, despite the diverging objectives of the two groups, the law does not pit the rights of prisoners against those of corrections officers. The prisoners' rights, like all constitutional rights, run against the state. Similarly, the officers' rights to equal employment opportunities are claims upon the state. They are not suing the prisoners or asserting a right to search prisoners for its own sake; their interest is in sharing the economic and noneconomic opportunities in an occupation in which government is effectively the only employer. This point is illustrated in two recent decisions involving the claims of female corrections officers to assignments in an Iowa men's reformatory. In the first case, the Supreme Court of Iowa held under a state civil rights law that respect for the rights of male prisoners was a permissible reason for prison officials not to use women officers in certain assignments and locations. The court reached that conclusion even without an express exception in the law for bona fide occupational qualifications by finding the prisoners' rights to be of constitutional magnitude. Iowa Dept. of Soc. Serv. v. Iowa Merit Emp. Dept., 261 N.W.2d 161, 165 (Iowa 1977). The complaining female officer asserted that her interest was in eligibility for the higher job classification involved, not in performing the disputed searches and related functions. However, the Iowa court concluded that the state's law tied the desired classification to these job functions and denied her claim. The complaining officer thereupon pursued a federal remedy under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e et seq. That act, in § 2000e-2(e), does make an exception from its general rules against employment discrimination when the employer can demonstrate that sex is a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise. In Gunther v. Iowa State Men's Reform., supra , the court of appeals reached the opposite conclusion from the Iowa court's. The federal court found that the prison officials must show that they could not reasonably rearrange job responsibilities in a way to minimize the clash between privacy interests of the inmates, and the nondiscrimination principle of Title VII (612 F.2d at 1086), and it also found that in fact female correction officers held the higher classification at the state's maximum security prison without performing the disputed functions, that Gunther herself performed some of the functions of the higher classification, and that some male officers were assigned to a single function rather than used generally for all jobs within that classification. The court concluded: If these job functions and procedures have not undermined the goals and functions of the reformatory at Anamosa, there is little reason to suggest that scheduling to avoid the invasion of inmate privacy rights by female officers would give rise to undue hardship on the prison administration. Administrative inconvenience cannot justify discrimination.... Given this evidence, we believe the district court properly concluded Anamosa failed to demonstrate that there are no reasonably available alternative practices with less discriminatory impact that would satisfy the legitimate needs of the institution.... 612 F.2d at 1076. [23] In the present case, the claim for relief before the trial court and this court is that of prisoners, not of corrections officers. As Gunther shows, the officers' employment rights are a separate issue. Such rights do not serve OSP as a reason why disregard of otherwise protected prisoner interests under article I, section 13, is necessary within the meaning of that section. [24] However, the trial court's order as written does touch on the officers' employment. This brings us to their second criticism, that the court should have required the prisoners first to seek an administrative remedy.