"I'm sure there are places where this happens regularly," Sheppard said. "I just didn't think the United States was one of them."
And in Philadelphia, former schoolteacher George L. Byrd was arrested when he was on his way home from a party for his niece and charged with drunken driving. Unable to post the $2,500 bail, he was taken to a Philadelphia prison and stripped.
Afterward, he said, he went to an empty prison cell, and "I stayed there and cried."
Sheppard, Byrd and Flythe are among thousands of people arrested on minor charges and strip-searched in Pennsylvania, though federal courts across the country have repeatedly ruled that such practices are unconstitutional.
New Jersey's attorney general restricts strip searches by local police. New York long ago did the same for county jails. But Pennsylvania sets no such rules.
The state's silence has produced wild disparities from town to town and county to county. Citizens who aren't accused of any serious crimes are being forced to remove their clothing and submit to invasive searches courts have described as "demeaning," "dehumanizing" and "repulsive."
"In a nutshell, blanket strip searches are prohibited," said Robert Herbst, a former federal prosecutor in Philadelphia who now works as a civil-rights lawyer in New York.
In Pennsylvania, no rules
Strip searches are strictly controlled in numerous other states, but not in Pennsylvania.
An investigation by The Inquirer has found that questionable strip searches have taken place routinely in some Pennsylvania police lockups and county jails, using policies that appear to fall short of long-established federal court standards.
Courts permit strip searches to keep jails safe from drugs and weapons - so long as they meet legal guidelines.
