Several inmates recently filed a $500 million lawsuit alleging corrections officers in Michigan prisons recorded them while they were naked.
The lawsuit targets Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) Director Heidi Washington, and over 40 MDOC officials and officers. The complaint argues that their actions are felonies under state law and violations of their constitutional rights, referring to it as “state-sponsored voyeurism.”
The plaintiffs allege that between January and March 2025, corrections officers at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility (WHV) recorded them and other inmates while they were fully nude during strip searches, showers, and when they were on the toilet.
“This conduct constitutes a felony under Michigan law (MCL 750.539) and represents a brazen and calculated violation of fundamental constitutional rights to privacy, bodily integrity, and human dignity,” the lawsuit reads.
Women were forced to bend at the waist, spread their buttocks, and expose their vaginal and anal cavities to live cameras worn by corrections officers, inflicting severe psychological damage and deliberately retraumatizing women with known histories of sexual trauma.
The officers “blamed the women themselves for the implementation of body cameras and conducted particularly harsh strip searches as ‘payback,’” the plaintiffs alleged.
Several officers made lewd and disparaging comments about the women while recording them naked. One said, “Have you seen some of y’all? No one is going back to stare.” Another told an inmate, “I didn’t lose m right to my body, you did,” according to the complaint.
MDOC officials continued filming the nude inmates despite “multiple warnings about the policy’s illegality.”
The agency officially revised its bodycam policy on March 24, 2025, to prohibit using the devices to record inmates during strip searches, showers, or while using the toilet. However, the lawsuit contends that “corrections officers continued to record women in states of undress, demonstrating ongoing institutional disregard for women’s dignity and legal rights.”
The plaintiffs noted that the policy “does not explicitly prohibit reviewing, accessing, or misusing footage before it is deleted…there is nothing preventing officers from watching, sharing, or even extracting the footage for unauthorized purposes.”
These revelations are just the latest in a long history of abusive practices at WHV, according to the documents. “In 2009…women were forced to strip fully naked and sit at the front edge of plastic chairs…raise their legs…spread their legs…deliberately exposing their vaginas and anuses,” the complaint reads.
The inmates were ignored despite filing multiple complaints about the corrections officers’ behavior. In some cases, they faced retaliation, the complaint explains. A sergeant told one of the plaintiffs that visits from friends and family members “are going to be held up due to the body cam lawsuit.”
Even further, “Legal mail sent to clients has been inexplicably delayed, and attorney visitation has been severely restricted…despite policy allowing more flexible attorney access.”
Several inmates, referred to as “Jane Does” in the complaint, told stories of disturbing abuse. A 33-year-old mother who had been incarcerated for over a decade stated she was strip searched over 100 times—mostly after visits with her daughter. The officers never found any contraband.
After the body cam policy took effect she was forced to expose herself to a camera-wearing officer who gave her instructions such as “lift your boobs,” “hand me your panties,” “turn around and bend over,” and “spread your cheeks.”
She recalled feeling “like there was an audience watching everything over the camera.”
Another inmate, a 43-year-old legal writer and group facilitator, faced strip searches three times in one day. These occurred before and after a visit from her lawyer, which disrupted her right to counsel. “Officers no longer knock, they just bust in,” she explained.
A 59-year-old grandmother argued that the officers’ conduct deflected attention from internal corruption, blaming the inmates for contraband. She further stated that “This body cam situation/policy is just another way for MDOC to blame prisoners for contraband … staff are bringing phones, drugs and other contraband into prison.”
Attorney Todd Flood, managing partner of Flood Law, which is representing the inmates, told The Metro Times that “What these women continue to endure is nothing short of horrific” and that the case “exposes a grotesque abuse of power that directly retraumatizes survivors of sexual assault.”
The firm is representing 20 plaintiffs at the moment, but it is expected that there will be more.
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