the gathering was so repulsed by this enactment of a practice that occurs routinely in women’s prisons everywhere that many of the participants felt compelled to disassociate themselves from such practices, insisting that this was not what they did. Some of the guards, George said, simply cried upon watching representations of their own actions outside the prison context. What they must have realized is that “without the uniform, without the power of the state, [the strip search] would be sexual assault.”
