Court Opinion

ID: 9488651
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:51:24.660845+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:00.784656
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Chief Judge,
concurring and dissenting.
I agree with the district judge and my colleagues that Johnson’s equal protection claim has no possible merit, that there is no possible basis for imputing liability to the president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, and that the claims against the defendants in their official capacities must be dismissed as unauthorized suits against the State of Illinois. That is where my agreement ends.
The cruel and unusual punishments clause of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, like so much in the Bill of Rights, is a Rorschach test. What the judge sees in it is the reflection of his or her own values, values shaped by personal experience and temperament as well as by historical reflection, public opinion, and other sources of moral judgment. No other theory of constitutional interpretation can explain the elaborate edifice of death-penalty jurisprudence that the Supreme Court has erected in the name of the Eighth Amendment. Or the interpretation of the amendment as a charter, however limited, of the rights of prisoners. The limitations imposed by the amendment might be thought, indeed were thought for more than 150 years after the amendment was adopted, to end with the sentence, leaving the management of prisons, the informal “punishment” meted out by brutal guards, constitutionally unregulated.
The critical values, in giving content to the Eighth Amendment, are those of the Justices of the Supreme Court. My colleagues believe that the Justices have spoken to the issue presented by this case. I think that they have not, and I shall try to show this. But I want first to lay out the essential background of facts and values on which I believe the judgment in this case must ultimately turn.
There are different ways to look upon the inmates of prisons and jails in the United States in 1995. One way is to look upon them as members of a different species, indeed as a type of vermin, devoid of human dignity and entitled to no respect; and then no issue concerning the degrading or brutalizing treatment of prisoners would arise. In particular there would be no inhibitions about using prisoners as the subject of experiments, including social experiments such as the experiment of seeing whether the sexes can be made interchangeable. The parading of naked male inmates in front of female guards, or of naked female inmates in front of male guards, would be no more problematic than “cross-sex surveillance” in a kennel.
I do not myself consider the 1.5 million inmates of American prisons and jails in that light. This is a non-negligible fraction of the American population. And it is only the current inmate population. The fraction of the total population that has spent time in a prison or jail is larger, although I do not know how large. A substantial number of these prison and jail inmates, including the plaintiff in this case, have not been convicted of a crime. They are merely charged with crime, and awaiting trial. Some of them may actually be innocent. Of the guilty, many are guilty of sumptuary offenses, or of other victimless crimes uncannily similar to lawful activity (gambling offenses are an example), or of esoteric financial and regulatory offenses (such as violation of the migratory game laws) some of which do not even require a guilty intent. It is wrong to break even foolish laws, or wise laws that should carry only civil penalties. It is wrongful to break the law even when the lawbreaker is flawed, weak, retarded, unstable, ignorant, *152brutalized, or profoundly disadvantaged, rather than violent, vicious, or evil to the core. But we should have a realistic conception of the composition of the prison and jail population before deciding that they are a scum entitled to nothing better than what a vengeful populace and a resource-starved penal system choose to give them. We must not exaggerate the distance between “us,” the lawful ones, the respectable ones, and the prison and jail population; for such exaggeration will make it too easy for us to deny that population the rudiments of humane consideration.
The nudity taboo retains great strength in the United States. It should not be confused with prudery. It is a taboo against being seen in the nude by strangers, not by one’s intimates. Ours is a morally diverse populace and the nudity taboo is not of uniform strength across it. It is strongest among professing Christians, because of the historical antipathy of the Church to nudity; and as it happens the plaintiff alleges that his right “to practice Ch[r]istian modesty is being violated.” The taboo is particularly strong when the stranger belongs to the opposite sex. There are radical feminists who regard “sex” as a social construction and the very concept of “the opposite sex,” implying as it does the dichotomization of the “sexes” (the “genders,” as we are being taught to say), as a sign of patriarchy. For these feminists the surveillance of naked male prisoners by female guards and naked female prisoners by male guards are way stations on the road to sexual equality. If prisoners have no rights, the reconceptualization of the prison as a site of progressive social engineering should give us no qualms. Animals have no right to wear clothing. Why prisoners, if they are no better than animals? There is no answer, if the premise is accepted. But it should be rejected, and if it is rejected, and the duty of a society that would like to think of itself as civilized to treat its prisoners humanely therefore acknowledged, then I think that the interest of a prisoner in being free from unnecessary cross-sex surveillance has priority over the unisex-bathroom movement and requires us to reverse the judgment of the district court throwing out this lawsuit.
I have been painting in broad strokes, and it is time to consider the particulars of this ease and the state of the precedents. Albert Johnson, a pretrial detainee in the Cook County Jail, complains that female guards were allowed to watch his naked body while he showered and used the toilet. All we have is the complaint, which my colleagues want to dismiss without giving Johnson a chance to develop the facts. The main issue raised by the appeal is whether a prisoner has an interest that the Constitution protects in hiding his naked body from guards of the opposite sex. A subordinate issue is whether, if so, the complaint — which Johnson drafted without assistance of counsel — sufficiently alleges deliberate as distinct from merely accidental exposure to survive dismissal.
The parties have confused the first issue by describing it as the extent of a prisoner’s “right of privacy.” They cannot be criticized too harshly for this. Countless eases, including our own Canedy v. Boardman, 16 F.3d 183 (7th Cir.1994), have done the same thing. E.g., Cornwell v. Dahlberg, 963 F.2d 912, 916-17 (6th Cir.1992); Cookish v. Powell, 945 F.2d 441, 446 (1st Cir.1991) (per curiam); Cumbey v. Meachum, 684 F.2d 712 (10th Cir.1982) (per curiam). The problem is that the term “right of privacy” bears meanings in law that are remote from its primary ordinary-language meaning, which happens to be the meaning that a suit of this sort invokes. One thing it means in law is the right to reproductive autonomy; another is a congeries of tort rights only one of which relates to the naked body; still another is the right to maintain the confidentiality of certain documents and conversations. Another and overlapping meaning is the set of interests protected by the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. That amendment has been held to be inapplicable to searches and seizures within prisons, Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U.S. 517, 526, 104 S.Ct. 3194, 3200, 82 L.Ed.2d 393 (1984), and if applicable to jails housing pretrial detainees as distinct from convicted defendants — an unsettled question — is only tenuously so, Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 556-57, 99 S.Ct. 1861, 1883-84, 60 L.Ed.2d 447 (1979); Brothers v. Klevenhagen, 28 F.3d 452, 457 and n. 6 (5th Cir.1994); Valencia v. *153Wiggins, 981 F.2d 1440 (5th Cir.1993); United States v. Willoughby, 860 F.2d 15, 21 (2d Cir.1988), though this may depend on the precise invasion complained of. A unanimous Supreme Court held in Winston v. Lee, 470 U.S. 753, 105 S.Ct. 1611, 84 L.Ed.2d 662 (1985), that forcing a pretrial detainee to undergo surgery violates the Fourth Amendment. Cf. Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 395 n. 10, 109 S.Ct. 1865, 1871 n. 10, 104 L.Ed.2d 443 (1989); Hammer v. Gross, 932 F.2d 842, 845 n. 1 (9th Cir.1991) (en banc).
One part of the tort right of privacy is the right to prevent the publicizing of intimate facts, including the sight of the naked body. Haynes v. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 8 F.3d 1222, 1229-30 (7th Cir.1993). Even this right is not the basis of Johnson’s suit. This is not a common law tort suit, and anyway the sight of his naked body was not “publicized” in the sense that this term bears in the law of torts. United States v. Dorfman, 690 F.2d 1230, 1234 (7th Cir.1982); Beverly v. Reinert, 239 Ill.App.3d 91, 179 Ill.Dec. 789, 794, 606 N.E.2d 621, 626 (1992); Restatement (Second) of Torts, § 652D, comment a (1977).
Whalen v. Roe, 429 U.S. 589, 97 S.Ct. 869, 51 L.Ed.2d 64 (1977), whüe holding that a statute which required keeping a record of the names of people for whom physicians prescribed certain dangerous though lawful drugs did not invade any constitutional right of privacy, can be read to imply that the disclosure by or under the compulsion of the government of a person’s medical records might invade a constitutional right of privacy, presumably a “substantive due process” right. “Disclosure” of the person’s naked body might be argued to violate a cognate right to the concealment of the body. In this way a right to “privacy” in the rather literal sense in which it is invoked here might laboriously be extracted from constitutional precedent.
I consider this too tortuous and uncertain a route to follow in the quest for constitutional limitations on the infliction of humiliation on prison inmates. The Eighth Amendment forbids the federal government (and by an interpretation of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment the states as well) to inflict cruel and unusual punishments. The due process clause has been interpreted to lay a similar prohibition on the infliction of cruel and unusual punishments on pretrial detainees who, like Johnson, not having been convicted, are not formally being “punished.” Bell v. Wolfish, supra, 441 U.S. at 534-35, 99 S.Ct. at 1871-72; City of Revere v. Massachusetts General Hospital, 463 U.S. 239, 244, 103 S.Ct. 2979, 2983, 77 L.Ed.2d 605 (1983). I take it that purely psychological punishments can sometimes be deemed cruel and unusual. Thomas v. Farley, 31 F.3d 557, 559 (7th Cir.1994); Williams v. Boles, 841 F.2d 181, 183 (7th Cir.1988); Northington v. Jackson, 973 F.2d 1518, 1523 (10th Cir.1992); Jordan v. Gardner, 986 F.2d 1521, 1530-31 (9th Cir.1993) (en banc); cf. McDonald v. Haskins, 966 F.2d 292 (7th Cir.1992); but see Wisniewski v. Kennard, 901 F.2d 1276 (5th Cir.1990) (per curiam). The question is then whether exposing naked prisoners to guards of the opposite sex can ever be deemed one of these cruel and unusual psychological punishments. The Sixth Circuit held in Kent v. Johnson, 821 F.2d 1220, 1227 (6th Cir.1987), that it can be, and did not retract the holding in its order on rehearing, although it did retract any suggestion that cross-sex surveillance was unconstitutional per se. See Id. at 1229. My colleagues do not suggest that recasting Johnson’s right of privacy claim as a claim under the Eighth Amendment can prejudice the state. The substance of the analysis is unchanged, and the parties in their briefs cite Eighth Amendment cases interchangeably with right of privacy cases.
I have no patience with the suggestion that Title VII of the Civil Right Act of 1964 forbids a prison or jail to impede, however slightly, the career opportunities of female guards by shielding naked male prisoners from their eyes. It is true that since the male prison population is vastly greater than the female, female guards would gain no corresponding advantage from being allowed to monopolize the surveillance of naked female prisoners. But Title VII cannot override the Constitution. There cannot be a right to inflict cruel and unusual punishments in order to secure a merely statutory entitlement to equal opportunities for women in the *154field of corrections. Although the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been held to protect women against sex discrimination by a state, Trigg v. Fort Wayne Community Schools, 766 F.2d 299, 302 (7th Cir.1985); Gray v. Locke, 885 F.2d 399, 414 (7th Cir.1989); Day v. Wayne County Board of Auditors, 749 F.2d 1199, 1205 (6th Cir.1984), and the Cook County jail is an arm of the State of Illinois, the clause is not plausibly interpreted to license the infliction of cruel and unusual punishments. Just as it would not be a defense to a charge that the rack and thumbscrew are forms of cruel and unusual punishment to demonstrate that they are cheaper than imprisonment, so it is not a defense to the infliction of cruel and unusual psychological punishments that they advance women’s career opportunities. And this is assuming that the interests of women would be advanced by a rule, implicit in my colleagues’ decision, that gave no legal protection to female prisoners from the prying eyes of male guards; for Title VII and the equal protection clause are considered to protect men as well as women from sex discrimination.
This is not to say that exposing the naked male body to women’s eyes constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in all circumstances. A male prisoner has no constitutional right to be treated by a male doctor. Cf. Dothard v. Rawlinson, 433 U.S. 321, 346 n. 5, 97 S.Ct. 2720, 2735 n. 5, 53 L.Ed.2d 786 (1977) (separate opinion); Gargiul v. Tompkins, 704 F.2d 661 (2d Cir.1983), vacated on other grounds, 465 U.S. 1016, 104 S.Ct. 1263, 79 L.Ed.2d 670 (1984). Men have long been attended in hospitals by female nurses, and latterly by female doctors as well. Even the “right of privacy” cases reject the suggestion that any time a female guard glimpses a naked male prisoner his rights have been invaded. See, e.g., Michenfelder v. Sumner, 860 F.2d 328, 335 (9th Cir.1988); Grummett v. Rushen, 779 F.2d 491, 494-95 (9th Cir.1985). Not only is the injury from an occasional glimpse slight; but in addition, as we can see when the “right of privacy” cases are reclassified under the proper constitutional rubrics, neither the "Eighth Amendment nor the counterpart protections of pretrial detainees under the due process clauses extend to unintentional wrongs. Farmer v. Brennan, — U.S. —, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994); Wilson v. Seiter, 501 U.S. 294, 300, 111 S.Ct. 2321, 2325, 115 L.Ed.2d 271 (1991); Murphy v. Walker, 51 F.3d 714, 719 (7th Cir.1995) (per curiam); Ivey v. Harney, 47 F.3d 181, 182 (7th Cir.1995); Duckworth v. Franzen, 780 F.2d 645, 652 (7th Cir.1985). Deliberately to place male prisoners under continuous visual surveillance by female guards, however, so that whenever the prisoner dresses or undresses, takes a shower, or uses the toilet, a woman is watching him, gives even my colleagues pause.
Ours is the intermediate case, where the prison or jail makes no effort, or a patently inadequate effort, to shield the male prisoners from the gaze of female guards when the prisoners are nude. No case holds that the surveillance of naked inmates by guards of the opposite ease is lawful per se — not Timm v. Gunter, 917 F.2d 1093, 1101-02 (8th Cir.1990), and not Hudson v. Palmer, supra, which held only that the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment does not extend to prisoners, and not, as I shall show, Bell v. Wolfish. I infer from their discussion of Torres v. Wisconsin Dept. of Health & Social Services, 859 F.2d 1523 (7th Cir.1988) (en banc), that my colleagues believe that female inmates have no constitutionally protected interest in not being seen in the nude by male guards. This surprises me. Jordan v. Gardner, supra, is against this view, and no case supports it.
I have stated the interest at issue in this case as not being seen nude by a guard of the opposite sex, not only because most people are more embarrassed in that situation but also because the right of prisons and jails to maintain visual surveillance of potentially dangerous prisoners even when naked cannot be doubted in light of the serious security problems in many American prisons and jails today. What is in question is the right of prison officials to entrust the surveillance of naked prisoners to guards of the opposite sex from the prisoners. Bell v. Wolfish, supra, holds that pretrial detainees may be subjected to digital and visual inspection of the rectum for concealed weapons or other contraband. It does not follow that no constitu*155tional issue is raised if the search is performed by a male guard on a female prisoner, or a female guard on a male prisoner; or if the search is visual rather than digital (it was both in Bell v. Wolfish); or if what is being watched is the prisoner’s genitalia rather than the interior of his rectum. Jordan v. Gardner, supra, 986 F.2d at 1622, holds that “a policy that requires male guards to conduct random, non-emergency, suspicionless clothed body searches on female prisoners,” violates the Eighth Amendment. What Johnson alleges is worse, albeit with the sexes reversed.
The Eighth Amendment requires in my view that reasonable efforts be made to prevent frequent, deliberate, gratuitous exposure of nude prisoners of one sex to guards of the other sex. I doubt that any more precise statement of the proper constitutional test is feasible. It is precise enough to show that my colleagues indulge in hyperbole when they say that a decision for Johnson would mean that “female guards are shuffled off to back office jobs.” They would not be, but that is not the most important point. The most important point is that sexual equality may not be pursued with no regard to competing interests, and with an eye blind to reality. The reality is that crime is gendered, and the gender is male. Stephen J. Schulhofer, “The Feminist Challenge in Criminal Law,” 143 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 2151 (1995). The vast majority of criminals are male. The vast majority of their victims are male. The vast majority of police and correctional officers are male. These are inescapable realities in the design of penal institutions and the validation of penal practices.
My colleagues toy with the idea that unless the intentions of the prison officials are in some sense punitive, there can be no liability under the cruel and unusual punishments clause, whatever the psychological impact of the prison’s actions. There is support for this suggestion in language of some lower-court cases quoted in Wilson v. Seiter, supra, 501 U.S. at 300, 111 S.Ct. at 2325. But I do not think that that language was intended to override the distinction between motive and intent. The cruel and unusual punishments clause is not limited to sadistic inflictions, or, as my colleagues put it, to cases in which “the state has created risk or inflicted pain pointlessly ” (my emphasis). The motives of prison officials and guards are in fact irrelevant. The relevant deliberateness is the deliberate adoption of a measure that constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. If prison officials use the thumbscrew and rack to discipline unruly prisoners, it is immaterial that their motive is not to punish but merely to maintain good order in the prison, or to save money. Id. at 301-02, 111 S.Ct. at 2325-26. The public beheadings of murderers by Saudi Arabia are, I imagine, motivated not by sadism but rather (to the extent that they have any secular motivation) by a belief that the public infliction of cruel punishments minimizes the crime rate. If prison officials deliberately expose male prisoners to the gaze of female guards, or female prisoners to the gaze of male guards, it should be irrelevant that the motive of the officials may have been merely to avoid sorting custodial tasks by gender.
The distinction between motive and intent runs all through the law. If someone plants a bomb in an airplane, his intent in the eyes of the law is to kill, though his motive might be to intimidate political opponents, obtain publicity, demonstrate skill with explosives, collect life insurance on a passenger, or distract the police from his other criminal activities. United States v. McAnally, 666 F.2d 1116, 1119 (7th Cir.1981). More to the point, the distinction that I am emphasizing between motive and intent is implicit in the standard of “deliberate indifference” which the courts use to determine whether the state of mind required by the Eighth Amendment is present. See, e.g., Wilson v. Seiter, supra, 501 U.S. at 303, 111 S.Ct. at 2326; Ivey v. Harney, supra, 47 F.3d at 182. That standard is satisfied by proof of “actual knowledge of impending harm easily preventable,” Duckworth v. Franzen, supra, 780 F.2d at 653—a formulation that dispenses entirely with any investigation of motive. If prison officials know that they are subjecting male prisoners to gratuitous humiliation, the infliction is deliberate, even if the officials are not actuated by any punitive purpose and are not even certain that humiliation will result. “[A]n eighth amendment complainant need *156not show that a prison official acted or failed to act believing that harm actually would befall an inmate; it is enough that the official acted or failed to act despite his knowledge of a substantial risk of serious harm.” Farmer v. Brennan, supra, — U.S. at —, 114 S.Ct. at 1981. The principal application of the standard of deliberate indifference is to cases of medical care. If prison officials, knowing that an inmate is seriously ill, refuse to provide him with any treatment, the fact that their motive is not to punish him but merely to save time and money is not a defense to his Eighth Amendment claim. Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97, 97 S.Ct. 285, 50 L.Ed.2d 251 (1976); see also Wilson v. Seiter, supra, 501 U.S. at 302, 111 S.Ct. at 2326.
I turn now to the question whether the complaint states a claim for the infringement of the right that I have sketched. The defendants appeal to the principle repeated in a number of recent cases that although the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require only a short and plain statement of the plaintiffs claim, a plaintiff who decides to write a prolix complaint risks pleading himself out of court by alleging facts (which bind him as judicial admissions) that negate an element of his claim. E.g., Warzon v. Drew, 60 F.3d 1234, 1239-40 (7th Cir.1995); Esmail v. Macrane, 53 F.3d 176, 179 (7th Cir.1995). The defendants fasten on the allegation in the complaint that there was a “sheet” between the bathroom (containing both showers and toilets) used by Johnson and other male inmates and the area in which the guards are stationed. In fact what Johnson alleged was that
when a female correctional officer is assigned to work a dorm it is her duty and responsibility to make counts, also to constantly supervise all inmates in the dorms, making periodic, unannounced spot checks of inmates in their living area, and surveying in the remainder of the area such as the general toilet, and shower facilities, which is in an open unobstructed area, except by a thin sheet that can be seen through.
This can fairly be read to allege that female guards assigned to Johnson’s dorm are responsible for maintaining visual surveillance of the bathroom, which they are able to do because it is separated from the part of the dorm in which the guards are stationed by a transparent “sheet,” perhaps a kind of shower curtain. So read, the complaint is consistent with a form of cross-sex surveillance sufficiently frequent, gratuitous, and deliberate to withstand dismissal on the pleadings. A further factual inquiry is necessary to determine whether Johnson’s constitutional rights have been violated.
My colleagues say that we must respect “the hard choices made by prison administrators.” I agree. There is no basis in the record, however, for supposing that such a choice was made here, or for believing that an effort to limit cross-sex surveillance would involve an inefficient use of staff — “featherbedding,” as my colleagues put it. There is no record. The case was dismissed on the complaint. We do not know whether the Cook County Jail cannot afford a thicker sheet or, more to the point, cannot feasibly confine the surveillance of naked male prisoners to male guards and naked female prisoners to female guards. We do not even know what crime Johnson is charged with. My colleagues urge deference to prison administrators, but at the same time speak confidently about the costs of redeploying staff to protect Johnson’s rights. It would be nice to know a little more about the facts before making a judgment that condones barbarism.