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Official Voyeurism: Open record exemptions leaves only voluntary disclosure of camera abuses

A Dallas area TV station last week reported:A Dallas County Sheriff's Lieutenant is out of a job after the department says he used jail cameras to watch female inmates in the shower.Lt. Steven Gentry, an 18-year veteran of the department, violated departmental policy, according to Sheriff's spokesman Kim Leach.An internal affairs investigation found his conduct unbecoming.Gentry was fired Monday.Back in May, he was an instructor for a class called "Ethics in a Correctional Setting" at the sheriff's training academy.The ubiquity of modern surveillance apparatus raise this question wherever anyone might get undressed, be it the changing room at the mall or the local swimming pool, but particularly in correctional environments. As Grits lamented recently, the Legislature after 9/11 eliminated all requirements for transparency and open records regarding all types of government camera surveillance, completely deregulating camera use and leaving the details to individual state and local agencies...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on July 26, 2010 (boomark / email).