Conjugal Visits to Prisoners Debated

L.A Times/Washington Post Service

HOUSTON Twice a month, Mrs. James Long visits her convict husband for several hours at the Mississippi State Penitentiary. They are permitted a few hours of privacy together.

The visit takes place in a small one-room apartment that is part of several complexes on the 21,000-acre penal farm.

Sometimes Mrs. Long brings her children. Jimmy Long's wife is one of about 500 married women and a few common-law wives who are permitted conjugal visits at the farm. Mississippi's policy in this area is probably the most liberal in the nation.

THE VERY IDEA OF CONJUGAL visits in American prisons invokes immediate debate among prison administrators. It is a sensitive problem, seldom brought into the open. There has been little research on the subject in the United States although conjugal visits have long been in effect in Mexico, Scandinavia and in the Soviet Union.

"Society has failed to recognize that the most stringent aspect of prison punishment is sexual deprivation, especially since 50% of the inmates in state prisons are under 25," says Dr. George Beto, director of corrections in Texas, which has a highly-rated state prison system.

Many penologists say that one reason prison conjugal visits remain largely an unexplored field in this country is because the U.S. public would never accept them. Most prison administrators frown on conjugal visits, seeing them merely as a method of sexual release without any rehabilitative value to the inmate.

DR. VERNON E. FOX, HEAD of the Department of Criminology and Corrections at

Florida State University, said, "Almost any prison administrator today who advocated a conjugal program would be tarred and feathered."

Dr. Fox said this nation's behavioral norms are tied to its culture and "we have a Puritan background.

But one widely known criminologist said that, unknown to the public, many prisons in this country have for years permitted some limited normal sex activities for favored prisoners. "They (officials) don't want to talk about it, and they don't do it as much as they used to, but it is still being done,” he said.

BUT NEITHER JIMMY LONG (a fictitious name) nor his wife give the practice a second thought, and Supt. Thomas D. Cook praises the Mississippi program, saying it keeps families together, and lessens tensions and reduces homosexuality on the farm near Parchman. "There is much more than sex ir and sometimes that isn't involved at cause it's a family gathering," Cook sa.... Three Deep South penal institution ave the only conjugal programs in the country. Besides Mississippi state, they are the Arkansas and Louisiana state prisons.

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The Louisiana state penitentiary furloughed 200 single and married men last Christmas for a week. Only one got into trouble he was arrested on a drunk charge in New Orleans. Two hundred were furloughed again for Easter.

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COOK SAID 500 MISSISSIPPI CONVICTS were furloughed for 10 days at Christmas, and only five failed to return on time. Arkansas also furloughs men but its program recently was temporarily suspended when a bank robber on furlough tried to hold up a bank. This gave

some state officials second thoughts about the program.

There is a good deal of disagreement between Cook and many other prison administrators about the merits of Mississippi's program. Most of the critics allege that conjugal visits at the farm often are offered merely as "fringe benefits' for favored inmates. They say also that the program has no real rehabilitative direction.

(The program is an outgrowth of the early 1900s when convicts virtually ran the Mississippi prison and permitted wives, girl friends and prostitutes to visit on Sunday.)

Columbus B. Hopper, a sociology professor at the University of Mississippi, who studied the Mississippi penal system of conjugal visits for 10 years, says the program is sound. Hopper said the program has kept marriages intact, improved prison morale and reduced homosexuality.

In contrast. he noted, there are prisons where riots or discontent are attributed to tensions brought on by sexual pressures.

PROBABLY THE BLUNTEST PUBLIC WORDS on the subject of sex in jail came recently from a Philadelphia common pleas judge. Raymond Pace Alexander. He is also Philadelphia's first Negro city councilmaa.

Alexander said conjugal visits in prisons "would make a convict's future life worth living. Otherwise a prisoner won't be worth a damn. We'ii still be sending monsters out into the community."

Alexander's statements were prompted by an investigation which revealed that at least 1,000 homosexual rapes occur annually in Philadelphia's jails.