"It was almost like being raped," she said.

In Harrisburg, Devon Sheppard, a biophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, was arrested for attending an outdoor party that didn't have a city permit. She was jailed and given a body-cavity search when she couldn't come up with bail money, $1,051 in cash.

"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

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.

Until October, though, Philadelphia's prisons were strip-searching all new inmates, more than 30,000 every year - even people arrested on charges as minor as disorderly conduct. After a civil-rights lawsuit, the city adopted stricter regulations.

The Delaware County jail, now run by a private firm, strip-searches thousands of inmates annually, regardless of charge, according to three current and former guards. County officials would not talk about the strip searches; neither would executives from the company, the Geo Group of Boca Raton, Fla.

The Inquirer found similar practices in some police departments. Darby, Chester and Erie police routinely strip-searched people detained in their lockups on minor offenses such as disorderly conduct or public drunkenness, records and interviews show. And the Pottstown police chief, Mark Flanders, said blanket strip searches were still the rule in his jail.

To be sure, there are model towns in Southeastern Pennsylvania.

Swarthmore's nine-member department recently adopted a written policy forbidding strip-searching "unless there is probable cause to believe the individual is concealing a weapon," drugs or other contraband. It also requires officers to report any strip search.

Police Chief Brian H. Craig said there had never been a strip search in his jail, as far as he knew.

It's difficult to determine the full extent of the problematic strip searches. In many Pennsylvania towns, police have no written policies on strip searches and keep no records on them, according to a national Justice Department survey.