The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision Monday to allow jailers to stripsearch anyone in a general jail population highlights a number of deepening divides in American society.

Beyond the obvious political rift that pits five so-called conservative justices against four jurists tagged as liberals, the court’s ruling in “Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County of Burlington” sides with those who perceive the law to be a rigid code of conduct rather than a tool to achieve justice.

In dismissing the circumstances that placed “Florence” before the court — namely that New Jersey police jailed and strip-searched a man who had not committed a crime — Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, acted as a legal professional serving the legal system above society and dealing with the law in the abstract.

Kennedy, supported by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, dismissed arguments that exposing every person placed in jail to “invasive search procedures” violates Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment protections against illegal search and for due process.

A lower court agreed that “stripsearching nonindictable offenders without reasonable suspicion violates the Fourth Amendment,” according to the Supreme Court’s summary of the decision. A split Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling, sending it to the high court.

In making the majority’s case, Kennedy writes at length about the difficulties corrections officials encounter. He compiles a long list of contraband and potentially hazardous materials that could be smuggled behind bars, then speculates about the risks those materials could pose.

For Kennedy, “security imperatives” based on worst-case scenarios conjured by judges sitting in a private room now seem to trump long-established democratic principles that require offenders to be proved guilty and that penal policies align with the severity of crimes. Potential risks posed by contraband, which cannot be linked to the specific strip-search subject, take precedence over the need for probable cause — never mind guilt — to be established.

While basing much of their opinion on hypotheticals — “Even if people arrested for a minor offense do not themselves wish to introduce contraband into a jail, they may be coerced into doing so by others,” Kennedy wrote — the majority rejected suggestions that legally granting jailers’ unlimited strip-search authority might expose innocent detainees to abuse.

“It wrongly allows institutional security, without justification, to trump constitutional liberty,” Newport lawyer Dale Thistle told the Bangor Daily News. “I believe that the Supreme Court just gave carte blanche to prisons and jails throughout the country to mix everybody who is arrested in with the general population of the institution.”

In essence, the majority decision on “Florence” cedes complete authority to the system over the individual. It further separates the citizenry into a protected class and a class of fellow Americans from whom people of privilege should be protected, in the court’s eyes.

Citizens concerned about government intrusion into their everyday lives should demand legislative redress that buffers innocent Americans from the constitutional cavity opened by “Florence.”

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