"What I hope the Commission will understand at the end of my testimony is that the type of strip search that I and thousands of women experienced was about humiliation and control, not about safety — just as rape is about violence and not about sex. I also hope that the Commission will understand that the people most likely to be subjected to this unconstitutional and unlawful abuse are very rarely privileged to seek a remedy. Finally, this practice is not limited to a county in South Florida but happens across the country.

"…During the process of the suit, we identified a potential class size of ten- to twenty-thousand women who were subjected to these dehumanizing searches over a four year time period. Yet we know that the practice lasted seven years. That means that it is likely that over 20,000 women were subjected to these searches. These women may be elderly, physically or mentally disabled, menstruating, or pregnant… The other thing that my attorneys discovered that I think it's important that the Commission know, is that prior to filing the complaint, no one knew about this practice. My attorneys, the Florida Justice Institute, a firm that deals specifically in prisoner's rights, had not known about the practice, and public defenders in Miami-Dade didn’t know about the practice. If we hadn't filed the lawsuit, this practice would most likely be continuing today.

"Miami-Dade has stopped strip searching pre-arraignment misdemeanants, as has Sacramento, San Francisco, and New York City. But it took class action lawsuits to make that happen. These searches happen on the door step of the prison system, not deep inside. If this level of humiliation is happening to pre-arraignment misdemeanants, what’s happening to the women who are deeper inside the system?"

Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission