Court Opinion

ID: 9491097
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:03:34.670271+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:30.310954
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the judgment.
Like Johnson v. Phelan, 69 F.3d 144 (7th Cir.1995), this ease arises because a prisoner objects to visual inspections by guards. As in Johnson, the objection is based on the fourth amendment (applied to the states by the fourteenth). Johnson provides a short and sufficient reply, 69 F.3d at 147: “prisoners lack any reasonable expectation of privacy under the fourth amendment”. We explained:
[Bell v.] Wolfish[, 441 U.S. 520, 99 S.Ct. 1861, 60 L.Ed.2d 447 (1979) ], assumed without deciding that prisoners retain some right of privacy under the fourth amendment. Five years later the Court held that they do not. Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U.S. 517, 526-30 (1984), observes that privacy is the thing most surely extinguished by a judgment committing someone to prison. Guards take control of where and how prisoners live; they do not retain any right of seclusion or secrecy *698against their captors, who are entitled to watch and regulate every detail of daily life. After Wolfish and Hudson monitoring of naked prisoners is not only permissible—wardens are entitled to take precautions against drugs and weapons (which can be passed through the alimentary canal or hidden in the rectal cavity and collected from a toilet bowl)—but also sometimes mandatory. Inter-prisoner violence is endemic, so constant vigilance without regard to the state of the prisoners’ dress is essential. Vigilance over showers, vigilance over cells—vigilance everywhere, which means that guards gaze upon naked inmates.
Id. at 146. Johnson holds that the eighth rather than the fourth amendment supplies the framework by which to analyze claims that guards needlessly or maliciously examine prisoners’ bodies. Yet in this case, three years later, the plaintiff neither asks us to reexamine Johnson nor makes a claim under the eighth amendment.
Instead of rejecting plaintiffs claim with a citation to Johnson, my colleagues gainsay that ease. They "write: “does a prison inmate enjoy any protection at all under the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures? ... [W]e think the answer is ‘yes,’ but we hasten to add that given the considerable deference prison officials enjoy to run their institutions it is difficult to conjure up too many real-life scenarios where prison strip searches of inmates could be said to be unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.” 141 F.3d at 697 (footnote omitted). This passage is unnecessary, unreasoned, and self-contradictory.
The passage is unnecessary because the majority goes on to say that nothing the prison did violated Peckham’s rights “regardless of how one views the Fourth Amendment in this context” (141 F.3d at 697). The lack of need to contradict Johnson renders the passage dictum.
The passage is unreasoned because the majority does not say why the answer is “yes.” This court is always willing to reexamine its precedents in the light of new arguments, but my colleagues present none. Neither did the parties, who ignored Johnson, so the majority’s assertion is uninformed by an adversarial presentation. Nor is Johnson in tension with decisions of a superior tribunal. Never has the Supreme Court held or even intimated that persons convicted of crime retain any privacy rights against their captors. Lists of the rights that survive imprisonment, see Hudson, 468 U.S. at 523-24, 104 S.Ct. at 3198-99, and Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U.S. 539, 556, 94 S.Ct. 2963, 2974-75, 41 L.Ed.2d 935 (1974), conspicuously omit privacy, and for good reason. Rights of seclusion and secrecy vanish at the jailhouse door.
A right of privacy in traditional Fourth Amendment terms is fundamentally incompatible with the close and continual surveillance of inmates and their cells required to ensure institutional security and internal order. We are satisfied that society would insist that the prisoner’s expectation of privacy always yield to what must be considered the paramount interest in institutional security. We believe that it is accepted by our society that “[l]oss of freedom of choice and privacy are inherent incidents of confinement.”
Hudson, 468 U.S. at 527-28, 104 S.Ct. at 3201 (footnote and citation omitted; brackets in original). This is why Hudson and Johnson held that objections to visual inspections had to be analyzed under the cruel and unusual punishments clause of the eighth amendment. This is a topic on which the majority and dissent in Johnson were in accord; the judges disagreed about how the eighth amendment affects monitoring by guards of the opposite sex but agreed on the irrelevance of the fourth amendment.
Finally, the passage is self-contradictory because it asserts both that prison searches are governed by the fourth amendment and that prison officials retain “considerable deference” to determine the scope of searches. (My colleagues must mean “discretion” rather than “deference”, but the idea is clear.) Yet standards under the fourth amendment are objective, fixed by the judiciary without deference to law enforcement personnel. See, e.g., Ornelas v. United States, 517 U.S. 690, 116 S.Ct. 1657, 134 L.Ed.2d 911 (1996); *699Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 109 S.Ct. 1865, 104 L.Ed.2d 443 (1989). A principal reason why both Hudson and Johnson held that claims of this kind must be analyzed under the eighth amendment is that the cruel and unusual punishments clause builds in deference to prison administrators through a combination of objective and subjective elements. See also Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994). If the only way to use the fourth amendment in strip-search cases is to make it functionally identical to the cruel and unusual punishments clause, then what’s the point? Far better to leave the fourth amendment out of the analysis and avoid watering down the role of courts in specifying objective standards.
Maybe my colleagues have been led to include this unfortunate passage because they think it evident that the fourth amendment governs throughout the United States. That’s undeniable, so of course the fourth amendment “applies” inside the nation’s prisons. Sparks v. Stutter, 71 F.3d 259 (7th Cir.1995), so holds when concluding that the fourth amendment interest in bodily integrity recognized by Winston v. Lee, 470 U.S. 753, 105 S.Ct. 1611, 84 L.Ed.2d 662 (1985)—which means that surgical invasions of a person’s body in search of evidence must be objectively reasonable—does not vanish with conviction and imprisonment. What Hudson and Johnson hold is that convicts lack any reasonable expectation of privacy that may be asserted against their custodians and that searches of cells and other places where contraband may be hidden, including the space under one’s clothing, need not be justified by any particular quantum of suspicion. That principle should not be impugned.