Therapists who work with women in the Allegheny County Jail say a new strip-search policy threatens to derail their work and retraumatize inmates.
Jail officials in January began strip searching inmates during every meeting with their attorneys in what appears to be an attempt to crack down on synthetic drugs smuggled into the jail in chemical-soaked papers.
Tomilyn Ward, executive director of MAYA Organization, a nonprofit that provides counseling to women who are survivors of childhood sexual assault, recently said the same strip-search policy has been applied to inmates who receive therapy from the nonprofit.
MAYA therapists meet one-on-one with inmates in the jail for an hour each week, Ms. Ward said in an interview Friday. Now, each woman is strip searched after each therapy session, she said.
Because the women who come for therapy have survived sexual abuse, enduring a strip search is particularly difficult and makes providing therapy harder, she said.
“It sets back the progress that has been made for the client and also for the therapeutic environment,” she said. “There is trust that is lost with the therapist if they’re coming to see us and then being strip searched. There will be a decrease in clients who come see us.”
During strip searches, inmates remove all of their clothing and a corrections officer checks under their feet and armpits, between their buttocks, and around their genitals. Men lift their testicles and women lift their breasts to allow officers to check underneath for contraband.
People who undergo strip searches generally feel that they’ve “lost some dignity,” said Robert Tanenbaum, a practicing clinical and forensic psychologist based near Philadelphia. But for people who have experienced earlier abuse or trauma, the experience can feel more like torture, he said.
“Prison detainees are considered an at-risk population,” he said. “The kind of psychological impacts of the search tends to be humiliation, degradation, feeling abused all over again, ill treatment and, in more extreme cases, torture.”
Allison Hall, executive director of Pittsburgh Action Against Rape, questioned whether a strip search is necessary if the therapist has been vetted and searched. She said linking the therapy with the strip searches is "counterproductive."
"If someone is receiving services and counseling for being victimized, going to see someone in a therapeutic session is now also going to be equated with something that is very triggering for them," she said.
Akita Donald, a therapist for MAYA Organization, said she currently sees 18 clients each week for hour-long, individual therapy sessions. She said her clients weren’t warned they would be strip searched and said she doesn’t feel she can discuss prior sexual abuse with clients when they must undergo a strip search immediately after the discussion.
“There are moral and ethical concerns related to that,” she said. “It’s retraumatizing, it’s revictimizing, it’s hard to process that they’re going to come out and see me and then go get strip searched.”
She said the organization plans to ask Warden Orlando Harper to make an exception to the new strip-search policy for therapy visits.
Allegheny County spokeswoman Amie Downs declined to answer questions about the strip searches Monday and said “the jail does not discuss security measures.”
Shelly Bradbury: 412-263-1999, sbradbury@post-gazette.com or follow @ShellyBradbury on Twitter.
First Published: February 5, 2018, 3:54 p.m.
