PRISONS, JAILS, AND REFORMATORIES: MEN'S

Sexual contact between inmates has been an inescapable feature of prison, jail, and reformatory life since the first such institution was constructed in the eighteenth century. Originally framed as a problem of moral corruption, sexual contact has since been viewed as a disciplinary, medical, treatment, sexual assault, and health problem. Yet two things have remained largely unchanged: much of what we know is gleaned from observers, not participants or victims, and regardless of their approach, most commentators frame sex as a problem and address the subject as something unique to the prison environment.

History of Sex in U.S. Prisons

Until the Jacksonian era, prisons were small-time affairs meant only as temporary holding places while inmates awaited trials. Punishment was swift. Criminals, including men charged with sodomy, were put to death, banished, whipped, put in stocks, or fined. It was not until the 1820s that incarceration emerged as a means of punishment in itself.

The first American penal institutions intended for their residents to live in complete and utter silence. Some kept inmates in cells at all times; others permitted them out only to labor. Initially, men and women, the sane and the insane, and adults as well as children were housed in the same institutions, although attempts were made to keep them apart.

Despite efforts to limit and control contact between inmates, in 1826, Louis Dwight, a prison reform advocate, released a printed broadside denouncing the conditions of most prisons. Included among his many complaints was sexual relations between inmates. "The Sin of Sodom is the Vice of Prisoners," he wrote, "and Boys are the Favorite Prostitutes. Sodomy is said to be practiced constantly among them. When a boy was sent to Prison, who was of a fair countenance, there many times seemed to be quite a strife…. No art was leftuntried, to get the boy into the same room and into the same bed…. Nature and humanity cry aloud forredemption from this dreadful degradation."

Although their activities were illegal according to both criminal law and prison conduct codes, inmates engaged in sexual contact, but not under conditions of their own choosing. As Dwight first described it almost two hundred years ago, sex between men and boys often occurred within the context of inmate (and sometimes staff) coercion and official complicity or indifference.

Publicly, little was said or done about the matter, but prisons across America gradually developed the practice of separating out "true" or "frank" homosexuals, men who displayed feminine characteristics and who often were "frank" and forthcoming about their preference for sex with men. This practice conformed to wider cultural views about sexuality and gender in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only those who did not conform to prevailing standards of masculine behavior were deemed "fairies," "pansies," "queens," and, later, third-sexers and homosexuals.

As medical experts entered the prison system, they offered scientific explanations that legitimized the differentiation of sexual types according to gender presentation. They also supported the practice of segregating fairies from the rest of the prison population. Segregation, it was said, prevented "homo-sexualists" from contaminating other inmates with their disease, but in practice it also served as an early form of protective custody.

Masculine men, known as wolves and jockers (and near the end of the twentieth century, booty bandits), may have been judged as immoral for seeking out sex with fairies, or younger men known as punks, but they were certainly not considered homosexual. Instead, it was widely maintained that their sexual acts were entirely "situational." According to the experts, the wolf was merely the product of a single-sex environment where men are denied a normal sexual outlet. It was a phenomenon that existed in all places where the sexes were aggregated, prison doctors argued, including the military, the navy, and concentration camps.

Emergence of Public Discussion of Sex in Prison

Not until more than one hundred years after Dwight's 1826 broadside did sex in prison become an acceptable topic for public discussion. In 1934 the newly elected mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia, organized an exposé of the previous administration's running of the local prison on Welfare Island. In the extensive media coverage that followed, prison fairies and queens came to symbolize prison immorality and lax supervision. Two leading prison insiders, one a psychiatrist and the other an inspector, published book-length studies of sex in male prisons within a few years. Shortly thereafter, sex among prisoners was for the first time publicly addressed as an aspect of the prison discipline problem at the annual meeting of the national organization of corrections specialists.

The 1950s and 1960s were characterized by the twin concerns of sexual activity as both a disciplinary and a medical problem. A variety of treatments were devised, ranging from segregation to insulin coma shock therapy to drug therapy. When these efforts failed, a new generation of experts suggested that if the problem was the environment, then more heterosexual elements should be introduced to "normalize" the prison setting. Under this scheme, some states introduced measures that allowed more "heterosexual stimulants," including lifting the ban on pinup posters of movie stars, eliminating or reducing physical barriers between inmates and their female visitors, and introducing conjugal visits, a practice that had long existed in Mexico and Russia. While from outside appearances it would seem that these liberalizing measures were a positive response to the growing national and international interest in the human rights of prisoners, from an internal point of view, each initiative was adopted as part of the ongoing effort to control the inmate population.

However coercive individual negotiations may have been, sexual relationships between men often became an important source of emotional sustenance and pleasure. Sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey was interested in sex adjustment in prison and managed to convince a number of wardens to supply him with sexually related contraband confiscated from prisoners. In addition to the smuggled and hand-made pornography were hundreds of letters exchanged between inmates. Many were filled with playful sexual overtures and promises, others with romantic and poetic promises of love and commitment. Among them were also certificates of marriage, as well as notices of divorce. Not until the 1970s, when inmates themselves were able to write about their experiences, would prison marriages become more widely known.

Emotional bonds formed between prisoners may in fact be one of the most difficult problems for those whose goal is to maintain prison order. According to an early study of inmates at an Alabama prison, it was well known that male couples forced to separate—whether by the parole or release of one or at the hands of the prison administration—often reacted violently. Researchers documented one case in which a prisoner's rage over a forced separation resulted in $400 worth of damage to the prison's wool mill. The destruction was sometimes turned inward. Social scientists in the last two decades of the twentieth century also documented cases of attempted and successful suicide. Ex-convicts sometimes committed a new offense for the express purpose of returning to a partner inside.

In a 1967 study on homosexuality in prison, the authors argued that sex was still a pariah topic in the field of criminology. Two major events changed this situation forever. First, Canadian playwright John Herbert wrote and staged a play based on his experience as an inmate in an Ontario reformatory. Fortune and Men's Eyes (1967) was an instant Off-Broadway hit, and MGM studios quickly bought the film rights and released it in American theaters in 1971. A now-classic drama, the story illustrates a variety of ways in which sexual consent is coerced. It also reveals how wolf-punk-fairy relationships extend well beyond sex and include the reproduction of traditional heterosexual domestic and economic roles.

One year after the play was first staged, a Philadelphia court investigated the allegations of a man who reported that he had been sexually assaulted moments after he arrived at the Philadelphia Detention Center for a pretrial evaluation. Perhaps as a reflection of the changing political values of the times, or perhaps because of a growing sensitivity to the threat of legal action, the chief assistant district attorney undertook a massive investigation into the Philadelphia prison system. Based on interviews with inmates, he described prison sexual assault as an epidemic and published his findings in a popular magazine.

Racial Dynamics of Sex in Prisons

The Philadelphia investigation interpreted sexual assault in prison as a problem of violence, not of a lack of normal sexual outlets. It also revealed that the problem had a significant racial dimension: the gradual desegregation of prisons since the 1950s added an additional element of conflict and tension to the existing sexual hierarchy. African American men, investigators claimed, were much more likely to be perpetrators of sexual violence against whites than the other way around. In a 1950s interview with a folklorist, one African American inmate in a midwestern prison suggested that this was in part the result of a lack of a cohesive group identity among whites that left white males more vulnerable. He also revealed, however, that whites benefited from this system, a point missed by the Philadelphia investigation. After a young white punk was gang-raped by African Americans, he explained, whites would move in to offer protection in exchange for regular sexual favors. Despite these complex intersections, media reports on the Philadelphia investigation tended to reinforce the long-standing image of African American men as violent rapists with insatiable sexual appetites.

These events marked the beginning of a new phase of social scientific research into sex in prison. Unlike their medical predecessors, these scholars were infused with the civil rights movement's concerns with the protection of the vulnerable and the rights of the individual. Sensational studies such as Carl Weiss and David James Friar's Terror in the Prisons (1974) was followed by Anthony Scacco Jr.'s 1975 edited collection Male Rape (which includes an essay by a prison "punk") and Daniel Lockwood's Prison Sexual Violence (1980). These studies provided more evidence to suggest that in addition to age, size, experience, and group or gang affiliation, race continued to function as an important category of difference that shaped the organization of prison sexual culture.

Movements to Make Prisons Safer

Few have done more to raise public and official awareness about sexual violence in America's prisons than Stephen Donaldson. An early gay activist and Quaker, Donaldson was jailed in 1973 for trespassing after he participated in a peaceful protest against the bombing of Cambodia. Once in prison he was gang-raped for two days and had to undergo reparative rectal surgery upon release. He immediately called a press conference, becoming the first victim of prison rape to speak publicly on the issue. He joined People Organized to Stop Rape of Imprisoned Persons, which later changed its name to Stop Prison Rape (SPR). In 1988, Donaldson became the organization's president and remained in that position until his death in 1996. SPR is currently a multipurpose organization. It leads public awareness and prevention campaigns, is a portal for up-to-date research on the issue, and actively lobbies federal and state officials to initiate policies that address the needs of vulnerable inmates.

In the 1980s and 1990s, much of the public focus shifted to the health crisis created by inmate sexual contact, particularly the high rates of AIDS transmission. Studies showed that inmates were infected with sexually transmitted diseases at higher rates than the general public and that rates of HIV infection were five times higher among the incarcerated than among the general public. However, subsequent campaigns to introduce condom distribution programs had little success.

Currently, male-to-female transsexuals encounter both health and safety problems. Before World War II, female-identified males would have been treated as fairies. But with the introduction of hormones and surgery, a new type of inmate, and a new type of cruelty, has emerged. Transsexuals frequently report being denied access to hormones and are placed in male institutions, often in the same cell as wolves.

Groups like the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NATC) actively champion the rights of trans women who have been victims of sexual violence in male prisons, including Alexandra Nicole Tucker of Newfoundland, Canada. She was raped in the Montana State Prison and launched an $18 million suit against the state and federal governments, alleging sexual harassment and assault by prisoners and guards while serving an eighteen-month sentence that began in 1999. Gender PAC, a national organization led by trans activist Riki Wilchins, also supports the landmark suit.

After decades of advocacy for better protection of inmates against sexual assault and harassment, groups such as SPR and NATC are increasingly turning to legal action. With all other avenues seemingly exhausted, it would appear that forcing federal and state legislatures to pay damages might finally result in real and meaningful efforts to address the problem of sexual assault in prison. The recent hiring of Lara Stemple as the executive director of SPR is indicative of this new direction. Stemple is a lawyer with a background of activism regarding human rights, sexual violence issues, immigrant and refugee rights, and women's rights. In 2003 the SPR was poised to oversee the successful passage of the federal Prison Rape Reduction bill under consideration by Congress.

Sexuality, Gender, and Prison Life

Compensation and protection are important elements in the struggle for justice, but the means for best understanding how sex operates as a primary way of organizing prison culture and communities is being reexamined by historians of sexuality. Scholars are paying less attention to the internal organization of prison life and are focusing more on the way sexuality and gender function as a means to organize relations of power. In "Situating Sex"(2002), historian Regina Kunzel casts a critical eye on how the concept of "situational homosexuality" obscures the way social scientists and medical experts construct the problem and argues that sexuality should be viewed not in terms of fixed identities but as fluid realities. Similarly, historian Elise Chenier in "Segregating Sexualities"(2003) examines how masculinity as a primary expression of relations of power has shaped inmate culture. Both of these scholars point to new ways of thinking about sex in prison, ways that see prison sex not simply as a prison issue, but as reflective of wider social and cultural expressions of unequal power relations.

Bibliography

Chenier, Elise. "Segregating Sexualities: The Prison 'Sex Problem' in Twentieth-Century Canada and the United States." In Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion. Edited by Carolyn Strange and Alison Bashford. New York: Rout-ledge, 2003.

Davis, Alan J. "Sexual Assaults in the Philadelphia Prison System and Sheriff's Vans." Trans-action (December 1968): 8–16.

Katz, Jonathan. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. New York: Crowell, 1976.

Kunzel, Regina. "Situating Sex: Prison Sexual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, no. 3 (May 2002).

Lockwood, Daniel. Prison Sexual Violence. New York: Elsevier North Holland, 1980.

Rothman, David J. "Perfecting the Prison: United States, 1789–1865." In Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. Edited by Norval Morris and David J. Rothman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Rotman, Edgardo. "The Failure of Reform: United States, 1865–1965." In Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. Edited by Norval Morris and David J. Rothman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Scacco, Anthony M., Jr. Rape in Prison. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1975.

Sykes, Gresham M. The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958.

Tewksbury Richard, and Angela West. "Research on Sex in Prison during the Late 1980s and Early 1990s." Prison Journal 80, no. 4 (December 2000): 368–378.

U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Philadelphia. Report on Sexual Assaults in the Philadelphia Prison System and in Sheriff's Vans. 1968.

Weiss, Carl, and David James Friar. Terror in the Prisons: Homosexual Rape and Why Society Condones It. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974.

Williams, Dalton Loyd. "Prison Sex at Age 16." In Gay Roots: Twenty Years of Gay Sunshine, An Anthology of Gay History, Sex, Politics, and Culture. Edited by Winston Leyland. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1991.

Elise Chenier

see alsoantiwar, pacifist, and peace movements; davis, katherine bement; kinsey, alfred c.; prisons, jails, and reformatories: women's; same-sex institutions; situational homosexuality; van waters, miriam.