Prisons: Only on Sunday

On the first and third Sunday of each month, inmates and their wives wend their way to small buildings scattered throughout the 21,000 acres sur rounding the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. There they relieve tensions and maintain a semblance of normality by taking advantage of the fact that Parchman is the only prison in the U.S. that allows conjugal visits —officially, at least.

Like a motel manager, a trusty dispenses keys and assigns check-out times for each building’s half a dozen 8-ft. by 10-ft. rooms furnished with beds, tables and mirrors. About one-quarter of Parchman’s 1,700 inmates have access to these rooms; the three-quarters who do not include disciplinary cases, condemned prisoners, unmarried men and all women (in order to avoid prison pregnancies).

Parchman has no record of when or how the practice started. But it was in existence as long ago as 1918, when Negro inmates (now 65% of the segregated prison population) were allowed to take wives or girl friends to their sleeping quarters. For privacy, they hung blankets around the beds. Later, the staff allowed prisoners to build separate units, and eventually girl friends were barred. The system was kept quiet for years, but now it is openly acknowledged, and no one in Mississippi seems greatly exercised about it.

Writing in the current issue of the Criminal Law Bulletin, University of Mississippi Sociologist Columbus B. Hopper reports that only 10% of Parchman’s 822 unmarried prisoners resent the husbands’ privilege. Having studied the system since 1959, Hopper claims that Parchman’s unique visits have kept marriages intact, bolstered prison morale and reduced homosexuality—all in sharp contrast to other prisons, where discontent and riots are often attributed to sexual tensions. Hopper adds that Parchman is hardly progressive in any other way; as a prison farm, it simply has more space for informality than conventional prisons with centralized cell blocks.

Conjugal visiting is fairly widespread in Latin America. But Hopper thinks that Parchman will probably remain the only prison in the U.S. to permit it. Even the experiment-minded U.S. Bureau of Prisons opposes the idea, contending that far less than half of the nation’s 19,500 federal prisoners have viable marriages that conjugal visits could save, and that such a privilege would only antagonize the havenots.