Conjugal Visiting Called Key Need for Jail Harmony

By REV. LESTER KINSOLVING

A legislative bill that would allow Wisconsin prison inmates to have sexual relations with female visitors has been strongly denounced by the conservative Protestant magazine, Christianity Today.

REV. LESTER KINSOLVING

"Outrageous," editorialized the fortnightly magazine. "The criminal has forfeited rights and privileges that would normally be his.

"To what extent even a married inmate should be provided all the comforts of home is open to question."

But the magazine notes, "sexual relations under the proposed Wisconsin law would not be restricted to married couples."

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Such a stance by this periodical (which has been heavily subsidized by far right Presbyterian layman J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil Co.) is one example why Christianity Today is widely known as Christianity Yesterday. And it is just this sort of attitude that has kept the American penal system a collection of sodomy factories.

CLINTON T. DUFFY, whose enlightened administration of San Quentin prison has been world renowned, has noted "one of the worst tragedies of prison life is the not-infrequent transformation from heterosexual to homosexual preferences. Many of these men become so used to male sex partner that they can't resume a normal relationship when the time comes."

The warden also points out the present system of denying any normal sexual outlet for the years of prison sentences frequently wrecks inmates' marriages, results in numerous children born out of wedlock to lonely wives and incites not only frequent escape attempts but "nine tenths of the nation's prison unrest.'

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He points out that by comparison these things are virtually unknown and the cost of custody (fewer guards) much less in those systems such as Mississippi and Mexico where conjugal visits are allowed.

Moreover there is no "penalizing a man for being single," as Duffy puts it, since bachelor inmates “have the same drives as married men." Single inmates are allowed to court and marry while in Mexican prisons they can even advertize for a wife, often successfully, in a Mexico magazine.

THE MEXICAN PENAL SYSTEM also allows inmates to have mistresses as visitors but not more than one such registered visitor during any period of time, unless the inmate certifies his desire to end the relationship.

And if such a system is “outrageous" to Christianity Today, neither this magazine nor any of its like-minded adherents have taken much of a lead in demanding courts and police enforce the existing state laws against fornication and adultery.

Even if U.S. prison inmates typically were allowed conjugal visits, all convicts are still denied the basic freedom that a great many Americans have died on battlefields to protect. To deprive men of freedom as well as any normal sexual outlet results in what Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Raymond Pace Alexander calls "sending monsters out into the community."

THE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER named several inmates and a protesting prison psychiatrist as having said that certain prisoners were punished by being sent to “the jungle," a section of the prison where, according to the NCR, one young conscientious objector was sexually assaulted three times in one night.

“Homosexual rape is nothing new,” observes the NCR. "What is new is the prison authorities' use of the threat of homosexual attack veiled, to be sure, but nonetheless real — as a weapon in maintaining discipline."

Despite such concern about prison homosexuality, it may take a long time before the passage of conjugal visit laws that could substantially reduce the problem. And the irony of conservative church members and magazines opposing such a program is that these people are generally even more horrified by the homosexuality that inevitably results, due to what Duffy cites as the folly of “burying our heads in the sand and (failing to) acknowledge the facts of prison life."

Chronics Publishing Co., 1962