question / pregunta:
I was told, informally, that in 2005, the MOVE women who are incarcerated were at the center of a campaign to stop male guards from patting down female prisoners. How would I find media documentation or any further information about this campaign?
here are two pieces on prisoners.com that reference this
http://www.prisoners.com/africai.html
http://www.prisoners.com/lambert2.html
The first one also links to the author's e-mail, so that might be a starting place for finding contacts. I've yet to find any newspapers articles or "academic" reports.
Edit: Just to give you some background on my research strategies--I did several searches in ProQuest Newspapers database, EBSCO Newspaper Source database, in addition to extensive Google-searching and found no mainstream media mentions of this specific occurrence. I also did pretty extensive searching through: Google Books (to check for possible mentions, as there seem to be a number of academic books that deal with gender/race and prison), the Democracy Now! online archives, Prison Legal News archives (prisonlegalnews.org). Searched the Independent Media Center archives, specifically of the Philadelphia affiliate (Pittsburgh's Indymedia Affiliate, Rustbelt Radio, has a terrible search interface, but I couldn't find anything); the Philly site has an account (written by Mumia Abu-Jamal) of a harrassment 2007 incident involving Janet Africa (see: http://www.phillyimc.org/en/node/63583) and that indicates that there is a rule place to allow for the request of a female guard to conduct searches, but there appears to be no mention of an actual campaign to stop male guards from the practice in prisons across PA. Similarly, nothing stuck out at me when browsing through the Table of Contents for back issues of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisoners (http://www.jpp.org/), but it may be deserving of further perusing. Hope this helps...