how do prison conjugal visits work

How Do Conjugal Visits Work?

Maintaining close ties with loved ones while doing time can increase the chances of a successful reentry program. Although several studies back this conclusion, it’s widely logical.

While the conjugal visits concept sounds commendable, there’s an increasing call to scrap the scheme, particularly across US states. This campaign has frustrated many states out of the program, leaving only a handful. Back in 1993, 17 US states recognized conjugal visits. Today, in 2020, only four do.

The conjugal visit was first practiced in Mississippi. The state, then, brought in prostitutes for inmates. The program continued until 2014. The scrap provoked massive protests from different right groups and prisoners’ families. The protesters sought a continuance of the program, which they said had so far helped sustain family bonds and inmate’s general attitude to life-after-jail.

New Mexico, the last to scrap the concept, did so after a convicted murderer impregnated four different women in prison. If these visits look as cool as many theories postulate, why the anti-conjugal-visit campaigns in countries like the US?

This article provides an in-depth guide on how conjugal visits work, states that allow conjugal visits, its historical background, arguments for and against the scheme, and what a conjugal visit entails in reality.

What Is a Conjugal Visit?

A conjugal visit is a popular practice that allows inmates to spend time alone with their loved one(s), particularly a significant other, while incarcerated. By implication, and candidly, conjugal visits afford prisoners an opportunity to, among other things, engage their significant other sexually.

However, in actual content, such visits go beyond just sex. Most eligible prisoners do not even consider intimacy during such visits. In many cases, it’s all about ‘hosting’ family members and sustaining family bonds while they serve time. In fact, in some jurisdictions, New York, for example, spouses are not involved in more than half of such visits. But how did it all start?

History of Conjugal Visits

Conjugal visits origin dates back to the early 20 th century, in the then Parchman Farm – presently, Mississippi State Penitentiary. Back then, ‘qualified’ male prisoners were allowed to enjoy intimacy with prostitutes, primarily as a reward for hard work.

While underperforming prisoners were beaten, the well-behaved were rewarded in different forms, including a sex worker’s company. On their off-days, Sunday, a vehicle-load of women were brought into the facility and offered to the best behaved. The policy was soon reviewed, substituting prostitutes for inmates’ wives or girlfriends, as they wished.

The handwork-for-sex concept recorded tremendous success, and over time, about a quarter of the entire US states had introduced the practice. In no time, many other countries copied the initiative for their prisons.

Although the United States is gradually phasing out conjugal visits, the practice still holds in many countries. In Canada, for instance, “extended family visits” – a newly branded phrase for conjugal visits – permits prisoners up to 72 hours alone with their loved ones, once in few months. Close family ties and, in a few cases, friends are allowed to time alone with a prisoner. Items, like foods, used during the visit are provided by the visitors or the host – the inmate.

Over to Asia, Saudi Arabia is, arguably, one of the most generous countries when it comes to conjugal visits. Over there, inmates are allowed intimacy once monthly. Convicts with multiple wives get access to all their wives – one wife, monthly. Even more, the government foots traveling experiences for the visitors.

Conjugal visits do not exist in Great Britain. However, in some instances, prisoners incarcerated for a long period may qualify to embark on a ‘family leave’ for a short duration. This is applicable mainly for inmates whose records suggest a low risk of committing crimes outside the facility.

This practice is designed to reconnect the inmates to the real world outside the prison walls before their release . Inmates leverage on this privilege not just to reconnect with friends and family, but to also search for jobs , accommodation, and more, setting the pace for their reintegration.

Back to US history, the family visit initiative soon began to decline from around the ’80s. Now, conjugal visits only exist in California, New York, Connecticut, and Washington.

Is the Increasing Cancellation Justifiable?

The conjugal visit initiative cancellation, despite promising results, was reportedly tied around public opinion. Around the ’90s, increasing pressure mounted against the practice.

One of the arguments was that convicts are sent to jail as a punishment, not for pleasure. They fail to understand that certain convictions – such as convictions for violent crimes – do not qualify for conjugal visit programs.

The anti-conjugal visit campaigners claim the practice encouraged an increase in babies fathered by inmates. There are, however, no data to substantiate such claims. Besides, inmates are usually given free contraceptives during the family visits.

Another widely touted justification, which seems the strongest, is the high running cost. Until New Mexico recently scraped the conjugal visit scheme, they had spent an average of approximately $120,000 annually. While this may sound like a lot, what then can we say of the approximately $35,540 spent annually on each inmate in federal facilities?

If the total cost of running the state’s conjugal visit program was but equivalent to the cost of keeping three inmates behind bars, then, perhaps, the scrap had some political undertones, not entirely running cost, as purported.

Besides, an old study on the population of New York’s inmates postulates that prisoners who kept ties with loved ones were about 70 percent less likely – compared to their counterparts who had no such privilege – to become repeat offenders within three years after release.

Conjugal Visit State-by-State Rules

The activities surrounding conjugal visits are widely similar across jurisdictions. That said, the different states have individual requirements for family visitation:

California: If you’re visiting a loved one in a correctional facility in California, among other rules , be ready for a once-in-four-hours search.

Connecticut : To qualify, prisoners must not be below level 4 in close custody. Close custody levels – usually on a 1-to-5 scale – measures the extent to which correctional officers monitor inmates’ day-to-day activities.

Also, inmates should not be on restriction, must not be a gang member, and must have no records of disciplinary offenses in Classes A or B in the past year. Besides, spouse-only visits are prohibited; an eligible member of the family must be involved.

New York : Unlike Connecticut and Washington, New York’s conjugal visit rules – as with California’s – allow same-sex partners, however, not without marriage proof.

Washington : Washington is comparatively strict about her conjugal visit requirements . It enlists several crimes as basis for disqualifying inmates from enjoying such privileges. Besides, inmates must proof active involvement in a reintegration/rehabilitation scheme and must have served a minimum time, among others, to qualify.

However, the rule allows joint visits, where two relatives are in the same facility. Visit duration varies widely – between six hours to three days. The prison supervisor calls the shots on a case-to-case basis.

As with inmates, their visitors also have their share of eligibility requirements to satisfy for an extended family visit. For instance, visitors with pending criminal records may not qualify.

As complicated as the requirements seem, it can even get a bit more complex. For instance, there is usually a great deal of paperwork, background checks, and close supervision. Understandably, these are but to guide against anything implicating. Touchingly, the prisoners’ quests are simple. They only want to reconnect with those who give them happiness, love, and, importantly, hope for a good life outside the bars.

Conjugal Visits: A Typical Experience

Perhaps you’ve watched pretty similar practices in movies. But it’s entirely a different ball game in the real world. Besides that movies make the romantic visits seem like a trend presently, those in-prison sex scenes are not exactly what it is in reality.

How, then, does it work there? As mentioned, jurisdictions that still allow “extended family visits” may not grant the same to the following:

Persons with questionable “prison behavior”
Sex crime-related convicts
Domestic violence convicts
Convicts with a life sentence

Depending on the state, the visit duration lasts from one hour to up to 72 hours. Such visits can happen as frequently as once monthly, once a couple of months, or once in a year. The ‘meetings’ happen in small apartments, trailers, and related facilities designed specifically for the program.

In Connecticut, for example, the MacDougall-Walker correctional facility features structures designed to mimic typical home designs. For instance, the apartments each feature a living room with games, television, and DVD player. Over at Washington, only G-rated videos, that’s one considered suitable for general viewers, are allowed for family view in the conjugal facilities.

The kitchens are usually in good shape, and they permit both fresh and pre-cooked items. During an extended family visit in California, prisoners and their visitors are inspected at four-hour intervals, both night and day, till the visit ends.

Before the program was scrapped in New Mexico, correctional institutions filed-in inmates, and their visitors went through a thorough search. Following a stripped search, inmates were compelled to take a urine drug/alcohol test.

Better Understanding Conjugal Visits

Conjugal visits are designed to keep family ties.

New York’s term for the scheme – Family Reunion Program (FRP) – seems to explain its purpose better. For emphasis, the “R” means reunion, not reproduction, as the movies make it seem.

While sexual activities may be partly allowed, it’s primarily meant to bring a semblance of a typical family setting to inmates. Besides reunion, such schemes are designed to act as incentives to encourage inmates to be on their best behavior and comply with prison regulations.

Don’t Expect So Much Comf ort

As mentioned, an extended family visit happens in specially constructed cabins, trailers, or apartments. Too often, these spaces are half-occupied with supplies like soap, linens, condoms, etc. Such accommodations usually feature two bedrooms and a living room with basic games. While these provisions try to mimic a typical home, you shouldn’t expect so much comfort, and of course, remember your cell room is just across your entrance door.

Inmates Are Strip-Searched

Typically, prisoners are stripped in and out and often tested for drugs . In New York, for example, inmates who come out dirty on alcohol and drug tests get banned from the conjugal visit scheme for a year. While visitors are not stripped, they go through a metal detector.

Inmates Do Not Have All-time Privacy

The prison personnel carries out routine checks, during which everyone in the room comes out for count and search. Again, the officer may obstruct the visit when they need to administer medications as necessary.

Conjugal Visits FAQ

Are conjugal visits allowed in the federal prison system?

No, currently, extended family visits are recognized in only four states across the United States – Washington, New York, Connecticut, and California.

What are the eligibility criteria?

First, conjugal visits are only allowed in a medium or lesser-security correctional facility. While each state has unique rules, commonly, inmates apply for such visits. Prisoners with recent records of reoccurring infractions like swearing and fighting may be ineligible.

To qualify, inmates must undergo and pass screenings, as deemed appropriate by the prison authority. Again, for instance, California rules say only legally married prisoners’ requests are granted.

Are gay partners allowed for conjugal visits?

Yes, but it varies across states. California and New York allow same-sex partners on conjugal visits. However, couples must have proof of legal marriage.

Are conjugal visits only done in the US?

No, although the practice began in the US, Mississippi precisely, other countries have adopted similar practices. Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, and Canada, for example, are more lenient about extended family visits.

Brazil and Venezuela’s prison facilities, for example, allow weekly ‘rendezvous.’ In Columbia, such ‘visits’ are a routine, where as many as 3,500 women troop in weekly for intimacy with their spouses. However, Northern Ireland and Britain are entirely against any form of conjugal programs. Although Germany allows extended family visits, the protocols became unbearably tight after an inmate killed his supposed spouse during one of such visits in 2010.

Benefits of Conjugal Visits

Once a normal aspect of the prison system, conjugal visits and the moments that prisoners have with their families are now an indulgence to only a few prisoners in the system. Many prison officials cite huge costs and no indications of reduced recidivism rates among reasons for its prohibition.

Documentations , on the other hand, say conjugal visits dramatically curb recidivism and sexual assaults in prisons. As mentioned earlier, only four states allow conjugal visits. However, research shows that these social calls could prove beneficial to correctional services.

A review by social scientists at the Florida International University in 2012 concludes that conjugal visits have several advantages. One of such reveals that prisons that allowed conjugal visits had lower rape cases and sexual assaults than those where conjugal visits were proscribed. They deduced that sex crime in the prison system is a means of sexual gratification and not a crime of power. To reduce these offenses, they advocated for conjugal visitation across state systems.

Secondly, they determined that these visits serve as a means of continuity for couples with a spouse is in prison. Conjugal visits can strengthen family ties and improve marriage functionality since it helps to maintain the intimacy between husband and wife.

Also, it helps to induce positive attitudes in the inmates, aid the rehabilitation process, and enable the prisoner to function appropriately when reintroduced back to society. Similarly, they add that since it encourages the one-person-one partner practice, it’ll help decrease the spread of HIV. These FIU researchers recommend that more states should allow conjugal visits.

Another study by Yale students in 2012 corroborated the findings of the FIU researchers, and the research suggests that conjugal visits decrease sexual violence in prisons and induces ethical conduct in inmates who desire to spend time with their families.

Expectedly, those allowed to enjoy extended family visits are a lot happier. Besides, they tend to maintain the best behaviors within the facility so that they don’t ruin their chances of the next meeting.

Also, according to experts, visitations can drop the rate of repeat prisoners, thus making the prison system cost-effective for state administrators. An academic with the UCLA explained that if prisoners continue to keep in touch with their families, they live daily with the knowledge that life exists outside the prison walls, and they can look forward to it. Therefore, these family ties keep them in line with society’s laws. It can be viewed as a law-breaking deterrence initiative.

For emphasis, conjugal visits, better termed extended family visits, are more than for sex, as it seems. It’s about maintaining family ties, primarily. The fact is, away from the movies, spouse-alone visits are surprisingly low, if at all allowed by most states’ regulations. Extended family visits create healthy relationships between prisoners and the world outside the bars. It builds a healthy start-point for an effective reentry process, helping inmates feel hope for a good life outside jail .

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Conjugal Visits

Why they’re disappearing, which states still use them, and what really happens during those overnight visits..

Although conjugal, or “extended,” visits play a huge role in prison lore, in reality, very few inmates have access to them. Twenty years ago, 17 states offered these programs. Today, just four do: California, Connecticut, New York, and Washington. No federal prison offers extended, private visitation.

Last April, New Mexico became the latest state to cancel conjugal visits for prisoners after a local television station revealed that a convicted killer, Michael Guzman, had fathered four children with several different wives while in prison. Mississippi had made a similar decision in January 2014.

A Stay at the “Boneyard”

In every state that offers extended visits, good prison behavior is a prerequisite, and inmates convicted of sex crimes or domestic violence, or who have life sentences, are typically excluded.

The visits range from one hour to three days, and happen as often as once per month. They take place in trailers, small apartments, or “family cottages” built just for this purpose, and are sometimes referred to as “ boneyards .” At the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Connecticut, units are set up to imitate homes. Each apartment has two bedrooms, a dining room, and a living room with a TV, DVD player, playing cards, a Jenga game, and dominoes. In Washington, any DVD a family watches must be G-rated. Kitchens are typically fully functional, and visitors can bring in fresh ingredients or cooked food from the outside.

In California, inmates and their visitors must line up for inspection every four hours throughout the weekend visit, even in the middle of the night. Many prisons provide condoms for free. In New Mexico, before the extended visitation program was canceled, the prisoner’s spouse could be informed if the inmate had tested positive for a sexually transmitted infection. After the visit, both inmates and visitors are searched, and inmates typically have their urine tested to check for drugs or alcohol, which are strictly prohibited.

What Everyone Gets Wrong

Conjugal visits are not just about sex. In fact, they are officially called “family visits,” and kids are allowed to stay overnight, too. In Connecticut, a spouse or partner can’t come alone: the child of the inmate must be present. In Washington, two related inmates at the same facility, such as siblings or a father and son, are allowed to arrange a joint visit with family members from the outside. Only about a third of extended visits in the state take place between spouses alone.

The Insider’s Perspective

Serena L. was an inmate at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York from 1999 to 2002. During that time, she qualified for just one overnight trailer visit. Her 15-year-old sister, who lived on Long Island, persuaded a friend to drive her to the prison. “I remember her coming through the gate, carrying two big bags of food, and she said, ‘I got your favorite: Oreos!’ ” Serena says. “It was like a little slumber party for us. When I was first incarcerated, we had tried to write to each other and talk to each other by phone, but there was lots we weren’t really emotionally able to come to terms with until we had that private space, without a CO watching, to do it.”

The (Checkered) History

Conjugal visits began around 1918 at Parchman Farm, a labor camp in Mississippi. At first, the visits were for black prisoners only, and the visitors were local prostitutes, who arrived on Sundays and were paid to service both married and single inmates. According to historian David Oshinsky, Jim Crow-era prison officials believed African-American men had stronger sex drives than whites, and would not work as hard in the cotton fields if they were not sexually sated. The program expanded in the 1940s to include white, male inmates and their wives, and in the 1970s to include female inmates.

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Controversy and Conjugal Visits

Conjugal visits were first allowed as incentives for the forced labor of incarcerated Black men, the practice expanding from there. Is human touch a right?

An illustration of a bedroom with a prison guard tower through the window

“The words ‘conjugal visit’ seem to have a dirty ring to them for a lot of people,” a man named John Stefanisko wrote for The Bridge, a quarterly at the Connecticut Correctional Institution at Somers, in December 1963 . This observation marked the beginning of a long campaign—far longer, perhaps, than the men at Somers could have anticipated—for conjugal visits in the state of Connecticut, a policy that would grant many incarcerated men the privilege of having sex with their wives. Conjugal visits, the editors of The Bridge wrote, are “a controversial issue, now quite in the spotlight,” thanks to their implementation at Parchman Farm in Mississippi in 1965. But the urgency of the mens’ plea, as chronicled in The Bridge and the Somers Weekly Scene , gives voice to the depth of their deprivation. “Perhaps we’re whistling in the wind,” they wrote, “but if the truth hits home to only a few, we’ll be satisfied.”

The men at Somers wrote of conjugal visits as something new, but in fact, Parchman had adopted some version of the practice as early as 1918. Parchman, then a lucrative penal plantation , sought to incentivize Black prisoners, who picked and hoed cotton under the surveillance of armed white guards, by allowing them to bring women into their camp. The visits were unofficial, and stories from the decades that followed are varied, ranging from trysts between married couples to tales of sex workers, bussed in on weekends. The men built structures for these visits out of scrap lumber painted red, and the term “ red houses ” remained in use long after the original structures were gone. The policy was mostly limited to Black prisoners because white administrators believed that Black men had stronger sexual urges then white men, and could be made more pliable when those urges were satisfied.

This history set a precedent for conjugal visits as a policy of social control, shaped by prevailing ideas about race, sexual orientation, and gender. Prisoners embraced conjugal visits, and sometimes, the political reasonings behind them, but the writings of the men at Somers suggest a greater longing. Their desire for intimacy, privacy and, most basic of all, touch, reveals the profound lack of human contact in prison, including but also greater than sex itself.

Scholar Elizabeth Harvey paraphrases Aristotle, who described the flesh as the “medium of the tangible,” establishing one’s “sentient border with the world.” Touch is unique among the senses in that it is “dispersed throughout the body” and allows us to experience many sensations at once. Through touch we understand that we are alive. To touch an object is to know that we are separate from that object, but in touching another person, we are able to “form and express bonds” with one another. In this context, Harvey cites the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who described all touch as an exchange. “To touch is also always to be touched,” she writes.

An illustration from Volume 3, Issue 4 of The Bridge, 1963

When Parchman officially sanctioned conjugal visits in 1965 after the policy was unofficially in place for years, administrators saw it as an incentive for obedience, but also a solution to what was sometimes called the “ Sex Problem ,” a euphemism for prison rape . Criminologists of the era viewed rape in prison as a symptom of the larger “ problem of homosexuality ,” arguing that the physical deprivations of prison turned men into sexual deviants—i.e., men who wanted to have sex with other men. In this context, conjugal visits were meant to remind men of their natural roles, not merely as practitioners of “ normal sexuality ,” but as husbands. (Framing prison rape as a problem of ‘homosexuals’ was commonplace until Wilbert Rideau’s Angolite exposé Prison: The Sexual Jungle revealed the predation for what it was in 1979.)

Officials at Parchman, the sociologist Columbus B. Hopper wrote in 1962 , “consistently praise the conjugal visit as a highly important factor in reducing homosexuality, boosting inmate morale, and… comprising an important factor in preserving marriages.” Thus making the visits, by definition, conjugal, a word so widely associated with sex and prison that one can forget it simply refers to marriage. Men—and at the time, conjugal visits were only available to men—had to be legally married to be eligible for the program.

But for the men at Somers, the best argument for conjugal visitation was obvious—with one telling detail. The privacy afforded by the red houses at Parchman, Richard Brisson wrote “preserve some dignity to the affair,” creating “a feeling of being a part of a regular community rather than … participating in something that could be made to appear unclean.” For lovers secluded in bedrooms, “[t]here is no one about to mock them or to embarrass them,” he wrote. This observation suggests the ubiquity of surveillance in prison, as well as its character.

Carceral institutions are intended to operate at a bureaucratic remove; prisoners are referred to by number and were counted as “ bodies .” Guards must act as ambivalent custodians of these bodies, even when the nature of their job can be quite intimate. Prisoners are routinely strip-searched and frisked; they must ask permission to exercise any movement, to perform any bodily function. This is as true today as it was in Somers, where men frequently complained that they were treated like children. “You are constantly supervised, just as if you were a one-year-old child,” Ray Bosworth wrote in 1970 .

But guards are not parents, and the tension between dutiful ambivalence and intimate supervision often manifests as disgust. On a recent visit to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum-security women’s prison in upstate New York, prisoners complained of being ridiculed during strip searches, and hearing guards discussing their bodies in the corridors.

Sad young woman and her husband sitting in prison visiting room.

This attitude extends to rules regulating touch between prisoners and visitors. Writing about San Quentin State Prison in California in the early 2000s, the ethnographer Megan L. Comfort described a common hierarchy of visits , each with its own allowable “degree of bodily contact.” Death Row cage visits allowed for hugs in greeting and parting, while a contact visit allowed for a hug and a kiss. The nature of the kiss, however, was subject to the discretion of individual guards. “We are allowed to kiss members of our families, hello and goodbye, but the amount of affection we may show is limited by the guard,” James Abney wrote for the Somers Weekly Scene in 1971. “If he feels, for instance that a man is kissing his wife too much or too passionately, then he may be reprimanded for it or the visit may be ended on the spot.”

When Somers held its first “ Operation Dialogue ,” a “mediated discussion” among prisoners and staff in May 1971, conjugal visits were a primary concern. By then, California (under Governor Ronald Reagan) had embraced the policy—why hadn’t Connecticut? Administrators argued that furloughs, the practice of allowing prisoners to go home for up to several days, were a preferable alternative. This certainly would seem to be the case. In August 1971, the Scene quoted Connecticut Correction Commissioner John R. Manson, who criticized the skeezy, “tar-paper shacks” at Parchman, concluding that furloughs were “ a less artificial way for inmates to maintain ties with their families .” But to be eligible for furloughs, men were required to be within three or four months of completing their sentence. In the wake of George H.W. Bush’s infamous “ Willie Horton ” campaign ad in 1988, a racially-charged ad meant to stoke fear and anti-Black prejudice in which a violent attack was blamed on Liberal soft-on-crime policies (specifically scapegoating Michael Dukakis for a crime committed on a prison furlough that predated his tenure as governor), prison furloughs were mostly abolished. They remain rare today, still looming in the shadow of the Horton ad.

Conjugal visits are considered a rehabilitative program because, as Abney wrote, it is in “society’s best interest to make sure that [a prisoner’s] family remains intact for him to return to.” Unspoken is the disregard for people serving long sentences, or life, making conjugal visits unavailable to those who might need them the most.

The campaign for conjugal visits continued throughout the 1970s. Then, in 1980, in a sudden and “major policy reversal ,” the state of Connecticut announced that it would instate a “conjugal and family visit” program at several prisons, including Somers. Subsequent issues of the Scene outline the myriad rules for application, noting that applicants could be denied for a variety of reasons at the discretion of prison administrators.

The earliest conjugal visits at Somers lasted overnight but were less than 24 hours in total. Men could have multiple visitors, as long as they were members of his immediate family. This change signaled a new emphasis on domesticity over sex. Visits took place in trailers equipped with kitchens, where families cooked their own meals. Describing a similar set-up at San Quentin more than two decades later, Comfort wrote that the trailers were meant to encourage “people to simulate an ordinary living situation rather than fixate on a hurried physical congress.”

By the early 1990s, conjugal visitation, in some form, was official policy in 17 states. But a massive ideological shift in the way society viewed incarcerated people was already underway. In a seminal 1974 study called “What Works?”, sociologist Robert Martinson concluded that rehabilitation programs in prison “ had no appreciable effect on recidivism .” Thinkers on the left saw this as an argument for decarceration—perhaps these programs were ineffective because of the nature of prison itself. Thinkers on the right, and society more broadly, took a different view. As (ironically) the Washington Post observed, the findings were presented in “lengthy stories appearing in major newspapers, news magazines and journals, often under the headline, ‘ Nothing Works! ’”

Martinson’s work gave an air of scientific legitimacy to the growing “tough-on-crime” movement, but the former Freedom Rider, who once spent 40 days at Parchman, spawned punitive policies he couldn’t have predicted. In 1979, Martinson officially recanted his position. He died by suicide the following year.

In Mistretta v. United States (1989), the court ruled that a person’s demonstrated capacity for rehabilitation should not be a factor in federal sentencing guidelines because, they wrote, studies had proved that rehabilitation was “an unattainable goal for most cases.” It effectively enshrined “nothing works” into law.

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“Nothing works” gave rise to harsher sentencing, and more punitive policies in prisons themselves. In 1996, the state of California drastically reduced its conjugal visitation program . At San Quentin, this meant conjugal visits would no longer be available for people serving life sentences. To have benefitted from the program, and then have it taken away, was a particular blow to prisoners and partners alike. One woman told Comfort that she was in “mourning,” saying: “To me, I felt that it was like a death. ”

We don’t know how the men at Somers might have felt about this new era, or the heyday of conjugal visits that came before it. There are no issues of the Weekly Scene available after 1981 in the American Prison Newspapers collection, which is just after the visits began. But their writing, particularly their poetry, offers some insight into the deprivation that spurred their request. In 1968, James N. Teel writes, “Tell me please, do you ever cry, / have you ever tried to live while your insides die? ” While Frank Guiso , in 1970, said his existence was only an “illusion.” “I love and I don’t, / I hate and I don’t / I sing and I don’t / I live and I don’t,” he writes. But for others, disillusionment and loneliness take a specific shape.

“I wish you could always be close to me,” Luis A. Perez wrote in a poem called “ The Wait ” 1974:

I will hold your strong hand in my hand, As I stare in your eyes across the table. Trying to think of the best things to say, I then notice how I will not be able. I will long for your tender embraces, For your long and most desirable kiss. As I sleep cold for warmth of your body, You my love, are the one I will miss…

Today, only four states—California, Connecticut, Washington and New York—allow conjugal visits. (Mississippi, where Parchman is located, ended conjugal visitation in 2014 .) Some argue that Connecticut’s Extended Family Visit (EFV) program, as it is now called, doesn’t actually count , because it requires a prisoner’s child to be there along with another adult . There is also some suggestion that Connecticut’s program, while still officially on the books, has not been operational for some time.

The COVID-19 pandemic gave further cause to limit contact between prisoners and visitors, engendering changes that don’t appear to be going away anytime soon.

Somers was reorganized as a medium-security facility and renamed the Osborn Correctional Institution in 1994. A recent notice on the facility’s visitation website reads: “Masks must be worn at all times. A brief embrace will be permitted at the end of the visit .”

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Justice Requires the Full Story

Prisons control incarcerated people’s relationships and their access to intimacy

“It’s hard to know who you can turn to for support”

Much of American culture promotes the idea that love conquers all, but the reality is far more complicated for those whose lives are shaped by incarceration. Many romantic relationships experience complicated periods of separation, but how prison environments affect the emotional ties between loved ones are unique.

In a 2019 study, Dr. Bonnie McCracken Nickels explored the experiences of women who are in relationships with an incarcerated partner. The study focused on uncovering the primary ways these women maintain connection with their partners and the ongoing barriers that thwart their efforts.

Some of their methods may be familiar: using physical items such as pictures or gifts to feel a sense of closeness to their partner, engaging in positive thinking, offering assurances such as reiterating one’s commitment to the relationship, discussing future plans, and integrating the incarcerated partner into their everyday life either by sharing the goings on of each person’s day or timing phone calls so that they coincide with special events like family dinners or a child’s school recital.

Other ways of staying connected were more nuanced and reflected specific barriers stemming from incarceration. For instance, Nickels notes that when it comes to planning for the future, “the un-incarcerated women saw discussion of future plans as dependent upon prison sentence length. When an incarcerated partner had an extended or life sentence, the un-incarcerated women tended to focus their discussions on current behavioral efforts of their incarcerated partners so that they could earn more visitation privileges and/or release from segregation in the future.”

Families who have incarcerated loved ones live with a lot of stigma and shame and they generally don’t tell anybody that they have someone in that circumstance. Soffiyah Elijah

Similarly, participants in the study noted that purposefully concealing or avoiding certain topics was something that they had to be more mindful of doing at times.

“If it is something he can help with I tell him,” one respondent wrote. “If it’s a financial struggle or something he cannot help with and would lead him to further depression and disappointment, I keep it to myself.”

Similarly, while couples in other types of long-distance relationships, like military deployment, often rely upon their social network to vent or seek comfort, that option was less common for people with an incarcerated significant other because of the stigma attached to incarceration.

“People judge,” one respondent wrote. “It’s hard to know who you can turn to for support.”

In addition to stigma, these women also discussed having to wrestle with loneliness, a lack of communication due to the cost of phone calls, and the inability to engage in small talk throughout the day–small privileges that can easily be taken for granted by those whose lives are unencumbered by the carceral system. Similarly, women cited emotional disconnect on both ends as a blockage that was difficult to overcome. On their side, there can be a pressure to always be positive during phone calls and in letters, feeling as if their problems are incomparable to the stressors of prison life.

Elijah sees firsthand how the stigma of incarceration can silence people who have a loved one inside.

“Families who have incarcerated loved ones live with a lot of stigma and shame and they generally don’t tell anybody that they have someone in that circumstance,” Elijah said in an interview with Prism.

Founded in 2016, AFJ’s mission is to support, empower, and mobilize families who have an incarcerated loved one or have been impacted by the criminal legal system, focusing on those detained in New York State. The organization has three arms of work: free legal support for families, advocacy and organizing, and family support, which includes weekly empowerment circles and community organizing meetings. These empowerment circles can be spaces where members feel safe to share their thoughts, stories, and struggles.

“You don’t have to hide if you’re having a bad hair day because the visit didn’t go well or because you weren’t able to make the visit, or if you’re [deciding] can I afford to take this visit [because] my kid needs new sneakers?” Elijah said. “It’s a place where you can talk about some of those stressors that you might not be able to talk about with your loved one because you don’t want them to know how hard it is on the outside for you.”

Elijah says that people from outside New York sometimes call into these weekly meetings because they don’t have similar spaces in their state. When there is a space to release and discuss stress, there is also an opportunity to brainstorm with the group to identify solutions to the most pressing problems plaguing these family members and their loved ones inside.

Using access to intimacy as a means of control

While initially called “conjugal visits,” a name which simply denotes that it is “related to marriage,” the term has garnered a sexualized and salacious connotation that continues to tightly link the concept to its anti-Black origins.

Conjugal visitation dates back to the early 1900s on Parchman Farm, now known as the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Parchman was and continues to be among the prisons that most clearly preserve the enduring ties between chattel slavery and the carceral system. Convict leasing, made possible by a clause within the 13th amendment that preserved slavery through imprisonment, meant that prisons like Parcham could be used to target Black Americans and utilize incarcerated workers to yield profit for the state while also preserving the racist hierarchy that existed during the antebellum era.

At Parchman, corrections officers authorized the first documented conjugal visits, arranging for local sex workers to enter the prison to incentivize incarcerated men to work harder in the prison cotton fields. Rooted in stereotypes about race and hypersexuality, these visits were initially only offered to Black Parchman prisoners.

By the 1940s, conjugal visits were extended to white male prisoners. In the 1970s, female prisoners were permitted visits from their spouses as well. Conjugal visitation spread to other state corrections systems across the country, with some programs only available to spouses and others allowing additional family members. Some programs were a few hours long, while others offered visits that spanned an entire weekend. For the latter, incarcerated people and their visiting loved ones could stay in trailers located outside the prison but within the facilities’ gates, outfitted to look like small one or two-bedroom apartments in an attempt to replicate a more domestic and comfortable feeling.

Restrictions around who can access this treasured alone time are another form of control where the system—not incarcerated people and their loved ones—determines which relationships are worth maintaining.

There are still elements of extended visitation programs that harken back to the history of conjugal visits and their original use as a tool for control and discipline. For instance, the carceral system still employs tight restrictions on displays of affection during in-person visits. Earlier in the pandemic, when officials paused New York’s Family Reunion Program but in-person visits were still allowed, incarcerated loved ones could be written up for disciplinary tickets if caught kissing a visiting loved one.

In other states, corrections officials have crafted policies dictating how long an embrace or a kiss can last or the height of tables at visiting rooms, purposefully choosing short tables that would prevent couples from touching or holding hands outside of a corrections officer’s line of sight. Further, restrictions around who can access this treasured alone time are another form of control where the system—not incarcerated people and their loved ones—determines which relationships are worth maintaining. Before Connecticut’s extended visitation program was halted, only incarcerated parents were eligible and children had to be present alongside other family members. This was beneficial for parent-child relationships but also inherently undervalued the need for intimate time amongst romantic partners.

Additionally, incarcerated people must exercise “good behavior” being sure not to incur any disciplinary infractions to maintain eligibility in the program. In New York, incarcerated people wishing to take part in the extended visit programs must exhibit a “pattern of good institutional adjustment” and not incur any major, chronic, severe, or excessive disciplinary infractions that would lead to the loss of certain privileges over the time that their visit is scheduled to take place. Disciplinary conduct that could revoke access to extended visitation could range from fighting and bribing to refusing to obey the orders of DOCCS personnel “promptly and without argument.”

But research shows that visitation yields long-term positive outcomes beyond what a system rooted in racist stereotypes views as “good behavior.” Incarcerated people who are visited more frequently have fewer symptoms of depression. For married people inside, increased frequency of visits from their spouses can reduce the possibility of recidivism by 30% according to research conducted in 2008.

Despite such benefits, recent challenges continue to undermine the success of this programming and threaten the future of extended visitation altogether. In New York State, families and loved ones of incarcerated people and advocates from groups such as AFJ waged a campaign to reinstate the Family Reunion Program after it was halted at the onset of the pandemic in 2020, along with the processing of all marriage licenses in the state’s prisons.

“We pushed, we cajoled, we embarrassed, we took out ads in the local newspaper, we went on the radio, we sent postcards to then Governor Cuomo about it and basically annoyed the heck out of everybody we could get to pay attention until we got both of those things restored,” said Elijah.

In 2021, the program resumed, though not without a vaccination requirement for families who wish to take part—a double standard given that officers working within these same facilities are no longer required to be vaccinated. DOCCS’ failure to ensure that people incarcerated in its facilities consistently have access to PPE since the earliest days of the pandemic further underscores that the vaccine mandate for families is merely an attempt to create additional obstacles.

Elijah says that she’s cautiously optimistic that the program will remain safe against legislative threats because of how valuable it is to loved ones on the outside and inside and its efficacy in incentivizing good behavior.

“There’s no reason that they should want to get rid of good behavior incentives,” said Elijah. “I think we’re on firm footing to push back against any effort to eliminate the Family Reunion Program, but I say that cautiously.”

A holistic view of the financial, physical, and emotional costs of intimacy while incarcerated

Campaigns or legislative efforts related to incarcerated people and their loved ones often focus on the financial toll placed on families and friends. The cost of sharing phone calls, sending care packages, traveling long distances for visits, or sending funds for commissary items are rightfully highlighted and contrasted with the abysmally low wages that people inside are paid for their labor. Families are often placed in debt and tasked with deciding whether to pay for necessary expenses or maintain contact with their loved ones inside. For instance, a recent change to the DOCCS package policy in New York is causing families new financial anxieties. In April 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a new policy only allowing care packages to be sent to state prisons via online vendors. Previously, loved ones could bring packages in during their in-person visits.

Not only do online vendors mean that families must pay shipping costs to send packages, but advocates say the new policy also limits what goods make it inside. For example, care packages have been one of the few avenues by which incarcerated loved ones can access fresh fruits and vegetables. Pivoting towards online vendors lengthens the journey from farm to table, meaning that most of these goods will spoil en route. Groups like AFJ have begun to fight back against the policy , putting out ads and sending thousands of postcards and emails to the governor’s office.

The impact of incarceration on families has just not been part of the narrative [and] mass incarceration not only destroys the people who are behind bars, but it [also] destroys the people on the outside and the communities they come from. Soffiyah Elijah

Advocates are also drawing attention to the collateral harm the policy does to the health of people inside by further restricting their diets and their emotional and mental well-being. For instance, when care packages are filtered through third-party vendors, it’s more difficult for loved ones to personalize them by including a special snack or favorite type of produce that a person inside loves and anticipates.

Focusing outreach on finances and health can help people understand the ripple effects of incarceration and lead to successful campaigns that will have an immediate, urgent impact on the lives of incarcerated people and their families. But it can also obscure the intimate lives and needs of those on the inside and the people they love on the outside. For advocates like Elijah, shifting narratives about incarceration to a more holistic view may be the best salve to the harm caused by the carceral system.

“The impact of incarceration on families has just not been part of the narrative [and] mass incarceration not only destroys the people who are behind bars, but it [also] destroys the people on the outside and the communities they come from,” said Elijah. “That holistic view of what [incarceration is] doing is essential to develop a holistic strategy for undoing that harm.”

Tamar Sarai

Tamar Sarai is a features staff reporter at Prism. Follow her on Twitter @bytamarsarai. More by Tamar Sarai

Sex, Love, & Marriage Behind Bars

What are conjugal visits really like? Incarcerated journalist John J. Lennon takes Esquire inside one of the last bastions of prisoner intimacy in America: trailers of New York.

I first heard about the trailers, prison vernacular for conjugal visits, on Rikers Island. It was 2002, I was twenty-four, and I was awaiting trial on murder charges. The guy the next bunk over in the communal dorm knew I was facing a lot of time, even if I didn’t know that. I was delusional in the beginning. We all are.

The bunkmate had just finished a dime—a ten-year sentence—for assault and was now in on a parole violation for breaking curfew, caught on a tip called in by his wife. Still, he loved her, and he loved telling me about going on conjugals with her up in Auburn, a maximum-security prison. It wasn’t just about the sex, he said. It was forty-eight hours of freedom, or close to it. Most of New York’s maximum-security prisons had them. They weren’t trailers, not anymore, but modular homes. He described the units: two, sometimes three bedrooms—the prison supplied pillows, bed linens, towels, and washcloths—a living room, a bathroom, and a full kitchen stocked with pots and pans, a coffee maker, a blender, and utensils. A wire bolted to the counter next to the sink was connected to the handle of the kitchen knife. His wife would bring clothes, cosmetics, and groceries: milk, eggs, pork chops, shelled shrimp. Glass containers weren’t allowed; neither was alcohol, not even as a makeup ingredient. Outside there was a picnic table, a barbecue pit, and a children’s play area.

conjugal visits in prison love in new york correctional facility john j lennon

It was, the fella in the next bunk told me, an opportunity for good times, good eating, and good sex. An incentive to stay out of trouble in the hope of experiencing a touch of love.

There was a hitch: Your partner had to be your legal spouse. Close family members were also eligible, of course, and this was really the objective of these visits: to build and maintain better family ties. But that was beside my bunkmate’s point. If I was convicted, he said, he recommended I put an ad on one of those prisoner dating websites (Prison Pen Pals, Write a Prisoner), find a woman, fall in love, make it official, then head for the trailers.

In 2004, I was sentenced to twenty-eight years to life. The minimum was longer than I’d been alive. Early on, I didn’t think much about the implications for my love life. At twenty-four, I’d had plenty of sex but never a real relationship, or even healthy intimacy. Besides, there were more pressing concerns: appealing my conviction, learning how to survive in this place.

I first saw the trailers at Clinton Correctional, a maximum-security prison a few miles south of the Canadian border, in Dannemora. By then I’d learned that New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision didn’t actually call them conjugal visits. Only Mississippi did. While the word conjugal simply means “related to marriage,” these visits began to carry lewd implications, and other states opted to rebrand: In California, it was known as “family visiting.” In Connecticut and Washington, they were referred to as “extended family visits.” In New York, it was, and still is, called the Family Reunion Program, or FRP.

In 2005, I had my first FRP visit—with my mother and my aunt. My aunt cooked bacon and eggs in the morning, grilled porterhouse steaks and tossed salads for dinner. We sank into the soft couches, ate, and watched Law & Order reruns, oddly Mom’s favorite show. We talked until interrupted by the muffled screams of a couple through the wall of the attached unit. We laughed awkwardly, avoiding eye contact, and I felt kind of jealous. Three times a day, a phone in the unit rang. I picked up, spat my last name and identification number into the receiver, then stepped outside and waved to the watchtower guard. That count was one of the only reminders of prison.

When I returned to my block, guys asked how the conjugal had gone. Great, I said. When I mentioned it was with my mother and my aunt, they sort of nodded, like, Oh, that’s cool, too. I loved visiting with my family. But I did start to think about what it would be like to be with a woman again.

.css-f6drgc:before{margin:-0.99rem auto 0 -1.33rem;left:50%;width:2.1875rem;border:0.3125rem solid #FF3A30;height:2.1875rem;content:'';display:block;position:absolute;border-radius:100%;} .css-1aglugu{font-family:Lausanne,Lausanne-fallback,Lausanne-roboto,Lausanne-local,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:1.625rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1aglugu{font-size:1.75rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1aglugu{font-size:2.375rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1aglugu b,.css-1aglugu strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1aglugu em,.css-1aglugu i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;}.css-1aglugu:before{content:'＂';display:block;padding:0.3125rem 0.875rem 0 0;font-size:3.5rem;line-height:0.8;font-style:italic;font-family:Lausanne,Lausanne-fallback,Lausanne-styleitalic-roboto,Lausanne-styleitalic-local,Arial,sans-serif;} Trailer visits were never perfect. Sometimes they were hard. But in many ways, they felt like rehearsals for life on the outside.

I got by with my hand and my memories, with the occasional assist from Buttman or High Society. Many of us who’ve been locked up all these years try idiosyncratic methods to pleasure ourselves. Some use a Fifi—a rolled towel with a plastic bag stuffed in the crevice; inside the bag is a rubber glove lubed with Vaseline that can be warmed in a hot pot of water, if one prefers. The crevice can be tightened or loosened by a strap wrapped around the rolled towel, creating different sensations. Fucking Fifis was an intimate ritual for one of my neighbors. At night he hung a curtain across his cell bars, prepped his Fifi, rolled the whole thing up in his mattress—he said it was more like a big-booty girl that way—laid out a few porno mags, and started thrusting.

But I wasn’t looking to hump a Fifi for the next twenty-five years.

Married men in the joint who went on conjugals seemed to have the most meaningful lives: They worked out, they went on visits, they sported crispy new sneakers and polo shirts with the horse, as if to say to the rest of us, I got a lady who loves me, and I got more status than you. At least, that’s how I took it. Every few months, they disappeared—most men kept their conjugal dates to themselves to avoid attracting envy—but we all knew where they’d gone. They came back to the cellblock with hickey-covered necks, looking pleasantly tired. I decided that was how I wanted to serve my sentence.

Mississippi State Penitentiary, of all places, was the first facility in the U. S. to offer conjugal visits, in the early 1900s. Also known as Parchman Farm, the segregated prison functioned as a revenue-generating plantation that produced cotton, cattle, pork, and more; its prisoners performed all the hard labor. To incentivize their work, administrators began arranging for prostitutes to visit on Sundays, and prisoners slept with them wherever they could—tool sheds, storage areas, the barracks. At first, only Black prisoners were allowed to participate, and for deeply racist notions “about Black men’s allegedly voracious sexual natures and appetites,” says Heather Ann Thompson, author of the Pulitzer-prize-winning history of the Attica uprising, Blood in the Water, “that Black prisoners could be forced to work even harder not just under threat of the lash but also, due to their savage nature, the promise of sex.”

Starting around 1940, all of Parchman’s prisoners were able to participate, regardless of race. By the late fifties, prostitutes were banned, replaced by prisoners’ spouses, common-law wives, and female friends. In 1972, the program opened to the facility’s female prisoners. Still, the system was marked by prejudice. “The most important question concerning a program of conjugal visiting,” wrote Columbus Hopper in his 1969 study of Parchman, Sex in Prison, “is whether it helps to reduce the problem of homosexuality in prison.” Hopper was the leading conjugals researcher of his time, and the “problem of homosexuality” seems to have been one of the main forces behind his advocacy. Truth is, in my twenty-one years of incarceration, I’ve never been sexually assaulted or witnessed that kind of assault.

New York’s first FRP began in 1976, with five 12-foot-by-70-foot trailers in a former cow pasture at Wallkill Correctional. Attica got its trailers in 1977, six years after the prisoner uprising for more humane treatment that, when law enforcement took back the prison, left thirty-nine dead. In the first eighteen months of Attica’s FRP, 1,179 prisoners participated.

By 1993, seventeen states allowed some version of extended family visits. That year in New York, 12,401 family members attended FRPs across the state. “The effectiveness of the program is beyond dispute,” the prison commissioner wrote in an op-ed around that time.

Data supports the former commissioner’s claims. According to a recent literature review, prisons that allow conjugal visits have better disciplinary records than those that do not. What’s more, studies have determined that released prisoners with an established relationship have a much better chance of not returning to prison. (In 1980, New York’s corrections department published findings suggesting that participation in the program decreased recidivism rates by as much as 67 percent.)

Yet since the start of such programs, fierce resistance has followed. By the early nineties, the era of mass incarceration was fully under way, and across the country, prison programs that incentivized good behavior—furloughs, work release, college, conjugals—were on the chopping block. Why, the thinking went, should we coddle criminals with taxpayer money? (It’s worth noting that FRP upkeep is paid for in part by prisoner fundraisers.) And don’t conjugals present one more way to introduce contraband?

As early as 1969, when Hopper published his findings on Parchman, conjugal visits were available in Chile, Ecuador, Japan, Mexico, Costa Rica, and the Philippines. Today, that list includes Qatar, Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, Sweden, Spain, France, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

The United States has shifted in the opposite direction. In the eyes of the law, conjugal visits are a privilege, not a right. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld prison administrators’ latitude to limit prisoners’ rights, including visitation, writing in 2003 that “freedom of association is among the rights least compatible with incarceration.” In 2014, Mississippi did away with its program. “There are costs associated with the staff’s time,” the state’s prison commissioner said at the time. “Then, even though we provide contraception, we have no idea how many women are getting pregnant only for the child to be raised by one parent”—as if such family planning were his call to make.

Today, only four states allow conjugal visits—New York, California, Washington, and Connecticut—though when Covid came, Connecticut’s program was suspended, and it has yet to return. Federal prisons don’t offer the privilege. New York’s program has been a success: FRP is offered at twelve of its fifteen maximum-security prisons and eleven of its twenty-six medium-security prisons. Since 2011, same-sex couples have been able to participate. Yet each year over the past decade or so, Republican state senators have introduced a bill to eliminate FRP. Conservatives preach the importance of a solid family structure. Why would they want to sabotage prisoners who are trying to build and maintain theirs?

By 2009, I was in Attica; my appeals had been denied. I was thirty-two and lonely. I’d spend hours each day watching the tiny TV in my cell. The Bachelor was my favorite show—a glimpse of intimacy, however stage-managed, and a break from my bleak reality. I felt like I was squandering an opportunity by not putting myself out there. I told Mom what the guy on Rikers Island had suggested, and she put an ad on the prison dating website Friends Beyond the Wall.

Danielly was a year younger than me and lived with her teenage son in a housing project on the Lower East Side. “I’m Dominican, and brown. Do you like that?” she wrote. Yes, yes, I loved it! In an early letter, I brought up the trailers, told her to imagine an uninterrupted weekend together in a sort of cabin, no cell phones, no distractions—just us. She didn’t need to be sold. Her mom had married a guy who’d done time, she told me, and she remembered visiting those little homes in the prison as a young girl.

Danielly started visiting me at Attica. She was my type—curvy, full of attitude and affection. We had the kind of chemistry that made my stomach flutter. But I soon learned that my type was much harder to handle on the inside than it had been when I was on the outside. The guy she’d described as her ex-boyfriend was more like her current boyfriend. When I called her, she sometimes wouldn’t answer. I was left lovesick, and that’s no way to live in prison. So I let her go.

In January 2011, I started corresponding with Raina, a California blonde, thirty-nine, who’d never been married and had no kids, and it wasn’t a dealbreaker that I’d killed a man. She had a great sense of humor, and while she’d known darkness in her own life, she’d needle anyone who took theirs too seriously. I was hooked. She was emotionally intelligent, we spoke the language of recovery, and our relationship felt safe. She moved across the country for me. One day in 2012, in Attica’s visiting room, I proposed to her, and she said yes. Six months later, we joined a few other couples in a small room with a Goofy mural painted on the wall and Attica’s town clerk seated at a table, and we got married.

By 2014—after a series of applications, denials, appeals, and interviews, including one in which Raina was told I didn’t carry any sexually transmitted diseases—we had our first FRP date.

Two days beforehand, I had to piss in a cup under a guard’s gaze for my drug screen. Then again the day of, and again after I came off the trailer. Most of the work was on Raina: shopping, traveling, then getting processed, food pushed through an X-ray machine, gloved fingers sifting through her panties and K-Y jelly.

The corrections officer escorted a handful of us through the Attica lobby, a part of the prison I had never seen before. Gates opened and closed, and we walked to the FRP compound. A fence enclosed the five red-sided homes, situated so that the rest of the prison couldn’t see in. Though the watchtower guard kept a close eye.

Sitting on the couch, looking around, I felt . . . joy. In the system, you’re always waiting, and never for anything good: trial, sentencing, transfers, getting cuffed and shackled, always in a cell or a bullpen or on a bus eating bologna sandwiches. Now I didn’t know what to do with myself, and I loved it. I got up from the couch, turned on the stereo, then walked outside on the grass, sat on the children’s swing, went back inside. I grabbed the remote, turned on the flat-screen television, flipped through the stations. To do whatever I wanted, and to be waiting for my wife so we could do whatever we wanted—I felt giddy. Through the window I watched my neighbor in his kitchen as he boiled the silverware—forks, (butter) knives, a spatula, a ladle, all metal and engraved with tracking numbers—in one pot of water, and added a few drops of scented oil to another, to perfume the place. Finally, I heard one of the guys yell, “They’re here!”

A corrections van with blue-tinted windows pulled up, and the family members got out. A little boy ran to his father and jumped in his arms. And there was Raina. The CO let me help her with her luggage, which was in a container marked with our unit number.

As soon as the door of our unit closed, we threw the groceries—including cuts of filet mignon and A.1. sauce—on the table and started awkwardly kissing. As we began to undress, there was a knock on the door. Raina put on a shirt and I cracked the door. It was the CO, who just needed our container. It was like that, the conjugals; they were such a departure from regular prison life. Even the staff interactions were all good.

Raina and I got back to it. It was my first time in eleven years, so I figured I’d finish fast. But it was the opposite. We went at it for a while—soft, hard, slow, fast, this way, that way—and nothing seemed to bring either of us closer to climax. It was like I’d never touched a woman before. It felt weird that nobody else was watching us. I eventually pulled out and brought myself to ejaculation.

On some level, we hadn’t expected the first time to be amazing. Though it’s hard to make bad sex better, we had to try. We loved each other. We went on six more FRP visits, but the situation didn’t improve. Our issues were less about friction and more about fantasy, or the lack thereof.

Danielly had sent me letters over the years since we’d first met, none of which I’d replied to. But in 2015, as my relationship with Raina was coming to an end, I finally wrote back, explaining my marital woes. Danielly replied that I never should have gotten married in the first place, that she was my soulmate. She said she was still on and off with her boyfriend, but he didn’t matter. If I got divorced and married her instead, she’d come to Attica and fulfill all my fantasies.

I divorced Raina and proposed to Danielly.

In October, we got married by the same Attica town clerk who’d officiated the last time. The Goofy mural was gone. We posed for our wedding picture in front of a seascape of sea lions and colorful fish. Danielly looks sad in the photo, barely smiling. She’d wanted this day to be so much more special than it was.

Afterward, I bribed a CO with a few packs of Newports to let the cellblock’s tattoo artist come into my cell, and with a needle made from an uncoiled lighter spring powered by a repurposed beard-trimmer motor, he inked danielly on the inside of my upper arm in looping script. Once she ditched the boyfriend for good, she had my name inked on her forearm. We craved each other. Our kisses, deep and long and wet, always felt like good sex.

I wanted to transfer to Sing Sing, forty miles north of New York City—among other reasons, it would take Danielly an hour by train, as opposed to the eleven-hour bus trip she took both ways to visit me at Attica. But Attica was a disciplinary prison, rife with violence; the number of prisoners on good behavior was low, the FRP waitlist short. You could book a spot every forty or fifty days. At Sing Sing, the wait was closer to ninety days. I weighed the pros and cons. Con: waiting twice as long to be together. Pro: saving Danielly the hassle of a big trip to the middle of nowhere, which would probably mean I’d see her more often.

I submitted my paperwork, got approved, and transferred in November 2016.

In February, we had our first FRP date. The compound was pretty much the same as the one at Attica, but at Sing Sing we got a Polaroid camera and twelve blank photos. Some couples went into the units and did not come out for the allotted forty-eight hours. Others were more social. Me and my friend Andy Gargiulo—convicted in 2006 of killing his reputed mobster brother-in-law; we’d had the same lawyer—would sometimes coordinate our FRP visits. He was a lot older than me, around eighty, but we got along. So did our better halves. His wife brought the best Italian food in Brooklyn—cannolis, fresh mozzarella, and tender veal—and when the weather was nice, the four of us would sit outside and barbecue.

Danielly was provocative, and that turned me on. We argued; we canceled visits on each other. We often had angry, shit-talking sex. Sometimes we played nice, but she’d never let it get to my head. “Boy,” she’d say, “you have so much to learn about women.” We couldn’t have sex for the entire forty-eight hours, but it sometimes felt like we were trying.

Intimacy came in other forms. She introduced me to ASMR; I brewed Bustelo for her and microwaved the half-and-half so it wouldn’t cool off the coffee too much. “Coffee,” by Miguel, became our song. We watched The Notebook, and she recited her favorite lines. We watched Warrior, and when Tom Hardy’s character hugs his drunk father, played by Nick Nolte, Danielly comforted me as I cried.

I know now that our relationship wasn’t healthy. My moments of joy were outweighed by my jealousy and anxiety. I’d get annoyed if she didn’t read my latest article. “You’re all into yourself and your career,” she’d say. “Women don’t like that, bro!” Or “I fell in love with the guy at Attica, before he became the writer.” That one hurt. But it’s not like I’d ask about her job as a nurse at a Bronx clinic. She’d want to talk about our future, and I’d urge her to stay in the present. She’d storm off into the bedroom, slam the door, and curse me out in rapid-fire Spanish. Well, I’d think, this is life.

By March 2020, our relationship was rocky. But for the first twenty-four hours of our first FRP in more than a year, we were getting along. As we prepped lunch, a knock came at the door. It was the security captain. Because of Covid, our visit was over, along with our last shot at rekindling.

By the time FRP visits were restored, a year and a half later, I’d been transferred to Sullivan Correctional, in the southern Catskills. Danielly came up twice. But too much time had passed, and other relationships had formed: hers with somebody else, mine with my career. Becoming a journalist in the joint brought its own stress, and my anxiety worsened; things like pissing in a cup with a guard peeking seemed impossible. Recently, we divorced.

Would I have been better off not having experienced intimacy for the past twenty-one years? Would Raina and Danielly have been better off never having met me? I’ve since realized that in both relationships, I focused more on the affection I was getting than the affection I was giving. All this time spent living in my head, confined to a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell, has rendered me less expressive and more emotionally stuck. My thoughts would bounce around my brain but never make it out of my mouth, which left Raina, then Danielly, feeling neglected. The time I used to spend writing love letters I now spend writing articles. Sometimes I feel like I took the two of them for granted. There’s an immense effort, this leap toward love in which the only physical manifestation comes in the form of conjugal visits. And it’s exerted not by the prisoners but by our partners. They wait, they shop, they lug, they travel, they get gossiped about by friends and family and insulted by COs.

Trailer visits were never perfect. Sometimes they were hard, especially at the end—me returning to prison, my woman going home alone. But in many ways, they felt like rehearsals for life on the outside. I believe that because of my experiences with conjugals, when I do get out, I’ll be more sensitive to the feelings of those closest to me. “It remains utterly and inescapably true that to be a human being is to need to be connected to, to bond with, and to be nurtured by other human beings,” Heather Ann Thompson told me. “Serving one’s sentence does not change that.”

So I’m single now. Middle-aged, too. Sometimes I imagine the kind of woman I’ll attract when I’m on the outside, and I wonder if I’ll resent her because she didn’t fall for me when I was on the inside. Which is absurd, and I know I need to work that shit out. But it also feels like a nod to the women who’ve loved me, a thank-you to all the partners who’ve sacrificed so much to share their love with those of us who are locked up.

I think about a moment Danielly and I shared with Andy and his wife, who was wearing Prada glasses and a perfume called La Vie Est Belle. The sun was bright; we sat at the picnic table, eating the best of both kitchens. Andy was talking about a TV show he watched in his cell—maybe it was America’s Got Talent —and Danielly told him how she also loved that show. While recalling the final performance of a child singer who’d recently won, Andy choked up. Right there at the wooden table, surrounded by the thirty-foot concrete wall and the guard with the AR-15 perched in the tower. Danielly teared up, too. “He gets emotional on these visits,” Andy’s wife said in a tough Brooklyn accent, smiling. More than the sex, it’s moments like these—simple, safe, and endearing—that have provided me with what prison has stripped away: a taste of intimacy.

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This couple wants you to know that conjugal visits are only legal in 4 states

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Editor's note: This story was co-written by inside-outside couple Steve Higginbotham and Jordana Rosenfeld, weaving together Jordana's personal experience and reporting with letters from Steve. Together, they examine popular myths around conjugal visits, their decreasing availability, and the punitive logic behind the state's policing of sex and intimacy that stifles relationships like theirs. Jordana's words appear below in the orange boxes on the right; Steve's are in the purple on the left.

The other day, when I told my grandmother I was researching the history of conjugal visits for an essay, she said, "Oh, like in my stories?"

You can't talk about conjugal visits without talking about television, because television is pretty much the only place where conjugal visits still exist. A wide variety of TV shows either joke about or dramatize conjugal visits, from popular sitcoms that have little to nothing to do with prison life, like The Simpsons , Family Guy , and Seinfeld, to prestige dramas like Prison Break and Oz that purport to offer "gritty" and "realistic" prison tales. Conjugals loom large in public imagination about life in prison, which leaves people under the unfortunate impression that they are in any kind of way widespread or accessible.

Their availability has been in steady decline for more than 25 years. The mid-to-late 1990s are the often-cited high point of conjugal visits , with 17 states offering some kind of program. (Federal and maximum security prisons do not allow conjugals.) This means that at their most widespread, conjugal visits were only ever permitted in one-third of all states.

There are only four U.S. states that currently allow conjugal visits, often called "extended" or "family" visits: California, Connecticut, New York, and Washington. Some people say Connecticut's program doesn't count though, when it comes to conjugals—and the Connecticut Department of Corrections agrees. Their family visit program is explicitly intended for the benefit of children and requires that the incarcerated person receiving visitors be a parent. Their child must attend .

My boyfriend has been in prison for 28 years. He was 18 during the high point of conjugal visit programs. That's when the state of Missouri decided to lock him up for the rest of his natural life, effectively sentencing him to a lifetime of deep loneliness and sexual repression, not just because Missouri doesn't offer conjugal visits, but because when you are incarcerated, your body belongs to the state in every possible way—from your labor to your sex life.

Every prison riot ever could have been prevented with some properly organized fucking.

That's my boyfriend, Steve.

Not being able to physically express love—or even lust—builds frustration that boils over in unintended ways.

Intimacy is policed rigidly in prison, and it has certainly worsened over the years. For most people with incarcerated lovers, intimacy happens not on a conjugal visit, but in the visiting room. Visits now may start and end with a brief embrace and chaste kiss. Open mouth kissing has been outlawed. These rules are enforced with terminated visits and even removing a person from the visiting list for a year or more.

Steve and I have kissed a total of six times.

We have also hugged six times, if you don't count us posing with his arm over my shoulder three times for pictures. The kisses were so brief that I'm not sure I remember what they felt like. He told me later on the phone that he knew he had to be the one to pull away from the kiss before we gave the COs in the bubble reason to intervene because I wouldn't. He knew this, somehow, before he ever kissed me. He was right.

When I last visited him in Jefferson City Correctional Center, Steve told me about a real conjugal visit from '90s Missouri.

Years ago, people used to mess around in the visiting room at Potosi [Correctional Center]. Everyone knew to keep their sensitive visitors away from a certain area, because there was frequent sex behind a vending machine. I can neither confirm nor deny that cops were paid to turn a blind eye to it. I met a guy recently in my wing at JCCC who said he had heard of me, and that maybe I knew his father. I did know his father. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I probably saw his conception behind a Coke machine back in 1995.

The increasing restriction of physical touch—the expanded video surveillance of visiting spaces, the use of solitary confinement for the smallest infractions, and the withering of both in-person and conjugal visit programs—reflects the punitive logic that consensual human touch is a privilege that incarcerated people do not deserve.

This is an evil proposition, and it's one that is at the core of the ongoing dehumanization of millions of people in U.S. prisons, and the millions of people like me who love them.

One woman with an incarcerated partner put it to researchers this way: "The prison system appears to be set up to break families up." And she's right. For the duration of his incarceration, I will never be closer to Steve than the state of Missouri is. I'm reminded during each of our timed kisses: His primary partner is the state.

The most difficult part for me about a romantic relationship with a free woman is that I feel selfish. A lot of self-loathing thoughts creep in. I want the best for her and often question if I am that "best." However, an added benefit is that we can truly take things slowly and explore each other in ways that two free people don't often experience nowadays. We write emails daily. And these are important. We vent. And listen. We continue to build, whereas many free people stop building at consummation.

But these are the realities rarely captured in media portrayals of romantic relationships between free world and incarcerated partners. Conjugals on TV are so disconnected from what it's actually like to be in a romantic relationship with an incarcerated person: Trying to schedule my life around precious 15 minute phone calls, paying 25 cents to send emails monitored by correctional officers, finding ways to symbolically include Steve in my life, like leaving open the seat next to me at the movies. Instead, television shows depict implausible scenarios of nefarious rendezvous that often parrot law enforcement lies. When they do so, they undermine the public's ability to conceptualize that love and commitment fuel relationships like ours.

Although contraband typically enters prisons through staff , not visitors , television shows often present conjugal visits as a cover for smuggling, like in the earliest TV plot I could find involving a conjugal visit, from a 1986 Miami Vice episode. After his girlfriend is killed, Tubbs gets depressed enough to agree to go undercover at a state prison to bust some guards selling cocaine. In his briefing on the issue, Tubbs asks how the drugs are getting into the prison. Conjugal visits and family visits are the first two methods named by the prison commissioner, never mind that I have yet to find any evidence that Florida ever allowed those kinds of visits.

Often, the excuse for policing visits so strictly is that drugs can be exchanged. But I know that lie is used for every type of control in prison. For over a year we had NO CONTACT visits because of the pandemic. During that time, dozens of inmates [at my facility] still overdosed and had drug-related episodes that caused them to need medical attention. Those drugs certainly didn't arrive through visits. They strip search and X-ray me going to and from visits anyway.

Everything in prison now is on camera. When a drug overdose occurs, the investigators track back over footage from visiting room cameras. One officer told me that while they were investigating drugs allegedly passing through the visiting room, they saw a guy covertly fingering his wife. This has happened on more than one occasion, but most guards will have enough of a heart not to bother with violations for some covert touching that wasn't caught until the camera review. Most. Sometimes, a rare asshole will just have to assert his power and write a CDV (conduct violation).

Write-ups or CDVs are given by staff at their discretion. The threat of solitary confinement is always looming in prison. It's another clever way of withholding physical interactions with other human beings as a form of torture. Solitary confinement for anywhere from 10 days to three months is a favorite punishment for "[nonviolent] sexual misconduct. "

There's also a persistent media narrative that prison systems offer conjugal visit programs out of genuine concern for human welfare. A brief glance at the origins of conjugal visits in the U.S. prison system quickly disproves that theory, showing that conjugal visit programs were conceived as a tool of exploitation and social control.

Conjugal visits originated in Mississippi at the infamous prison plantation, Mississippi State Penitentiary, or Parchman Farm. Mississippi state officials opened Parchman in the early 1900s, writes historian David Oshinsky in his book Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, in order to ensnare free Black people into forced labor. Mississippi, like other Southern states during Reconstruction, passed "Black Codes" that assigned harsh criminal penalties to minor "offenses" such as vagrancy, loitering, living with white people, and not carrying proof of employment—behaviors that were not considered criminal when done by white people. Using the crime loophole in the relatively new 13th Amendment, Mississippi charged thousands of Black people with crimes and forced them to work on the state's plantation.

Parchman officials started offering sex to Black prisoners as a productivity incentive, "because prison officials wanted as much work as possible from their Negro convicts, whom they believed to have greater sexual needs than whites," Oshinsky writes.

"I never saw it, but I heard tell of truckloads of whores bein' sent up from Cleveland at dusk," said a Parchman prison official quoted by Oshinsky. "The cons who had a good day got to get 'em right there between the rows. In my day, we got civilized—put 'em up in little houses and told everybody that them whores was wives. That kept the Baptists off our backs."

A certain kind of sexual morality has been instilled in the minds of many people with conservative religious upbringings. They naturally force this morality on people they consider children. That is how many guards see prisoners: as children.

Many states did not begin to join Mississippi in offering conjugal visits until much later in the century, when conservative governors like California's Ronald Reagan would determine in 1968 that allowing some married men to have sex with their wives was the best way to reduce " instances of homosexuality " in prisons.

Abolitionists who wrote the book Queer (In)Justice , consider how concerned prison administrations have historically been and continue to be about queer sex in prisons. The book exposes both the deep fear of the liberatory potential of queer sexuality, and a broader reality that prisons are inherently queer places since prisons' "denial of sexual intimacy and agency is a quintessential queer experience."

Beyond behavioral control, the rules that determine conjugal visit eligibility are always also about enforcing criminality, since the state decides what kind of charges render someone ineligible to wed or to have an extended visit. Even in the four states that allow these visits, most people with "violent" charges are only allowed to hold their lover's hand and briefly embrace at the beginning and end of visits.

We don't even have enough privacy to masturbate.

I can be written up if anyone sees my dick, especially in the act of masturbation. I could face solitary confinement, loss of job, visits, religious programs, treatment classes, recreation, canteen spend, and school for getting written up. Conversely, I can be strip-searched at any given time and be forced to show everything.

Living in this fishbowl has taught me there is no hiding. Too many bored eyes in the same small area to miss anything. Guards may come knocking on the door at any moment. My cellmate is often inches away from me, and it takes coordination to manage time away from each other because we eat, sleep, go to yard, and do just about everything on the same schedule.

I choose to skip a meal occasionally and embrace the hunger, because it is much less painful than persistent relentless desire. After years of self-release in showers, in a room with snoring cellmates, or as quickly as possible when a brief moment of privacy occurs, my sex drive is all shook up. Current turn-ons could be said to include faucets running and/or snoring men.

Ultimately, this article is not about the right to conjugal visits. It's about the ways that punitive isolation and deprivation of loving physical contact have always been tactics of the U.S. prison system.

Regardless of the quality of the representations, the prevalence of conjugal visits in movies and TV allows people to avoid thinking too hard about what it's like to be deprived of your sexual autonomy, maybe the rest of your life.

I have been locked up since I was 18, and I am 47 now. To be horny in prison for decades is painful. To the body and soul.

There is justice as well as pleasure at stake here, and the difference between the two is slight.

People who love someone in prison live shorter and harder lives. That we do it anyway shows the significance, centrality, and life-affirming nature of intimate relationships to those on both sides of the wall. Maybe it even points to the abolitionist power of romantic and sexual love between incarcerated and "free" people.

So, I guess we start with that thought and work from there to find a way to tear down the system.

As part of Scalawag's 3rd annual Abolition Week, pop justice is exclusively featuring perspectives from currently and formerly incarcerated folks and systems-impacted folks.

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Barbie: Pretty Police

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Related stories:, steve higginbotham & jordana rosenfeld.

Steve Higginbotham is a writer who spent many years narrating and transcribing materials into braille for the Missouri Center for Braille & Narration Production . He is serving a death by incarceration sentence in Jefferson City, Missouri. Jordana Rosenfeld is a journalist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. More of her work can be found at jordanarosenfeld.com .

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Conjugal Visits Are Real and They’re Great for Society

May 28, 2021 Written by Jill Harness and Edited by Peter Liss

Conjugal visits are regularly referenced in movies and TV shows but they almost seem unreal. After all, why should people serving time for crimes be allowed to have sex when they’re supposed to be punished? But that’s one of the big misconceptions about what the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation calls “Family Visits.” The official name isn’t just bureaucratic code for conjugal visits -the real reason the state allows these visits is to provide inmates to stay close to their families. And studies show this kind of visitation program has some profound benefits.

How did Conjugal Visits Get Started?

Conjugal visits were originally introduced in Mississippi state in the early 1900s. At the time, inmates were essentially just used as slaves, even physically beaten if they broke the rules or failed to work hard enough. To provide positive encouragement for those who worked hard and followed the rules, the prison brought prostitutes for the best inmates every Sunday. Eventually, the prison started allowing prisoners’ wives and girlfriends to visit as well.

The idea eventually caught on, and over the years, many other states adopted the idea of letting wives spend time with their inmate husbands, with over 1/3 of states in the United States eventually enacting some type of conjugal visit program. Unfortunately, with the push to “get tough on crime” that took place in the 90s, many states got rid of these types of programs, which were seen as “being soft on crime” by giving prisoners “sex visits” when they should be being punished. Nowadays, the only four states that offer conjugal visits are California, Connecticut, New York and Washington.

What is a Conjugal Visit?

A conjugal visit is where an inmate gets to see their family with some slight level of privacy and intimacy. One of the big misconceptions about these visits is that they are purely designed to allow prisoners to have sex. While that may be how the program started and may be part of the experience for married couples, the true purpose of the visits is to allow prisoners the opportunity to spend time with their families. Notably, in New York, where inmates are allowed to visit with extended family members, only 48% of these meetings were with a spouse.

Even when the visit is with a spouse, most inmates say that while the chance to have sex with their partners was nice, the family visit was more about being intimate with the person they love for anywhere from 30 to 40 hours. Considering that standard prison visits require all conversations be monitored by guards, and partners are only permitted to kiss at the start and end of the visit, the chance to have private discussions for 24 hours and spend the night in bed together is a welcome change.

How do the Visits Work?

Inmates who qualify for family visits can spend up to 40 hours in an apartment located on prison grounds with their spouses, domestic partners, or other immediate family members, including children, siblings or parents. These apartments are equipped with toiletries, sheets and condoms.

Prisoners are allowed no more than four visits per year. Unfortunately, because of the program’s popularity and the limited number of prison apartment spaces, it’s more likely prisoners will only be able to participate twice a year.

Not all prisoners are eligible for the program. Anyone on death row, who is serving a life sentence, or who was convicted of a sex offense is ineligible. Additionally, inmates must have a record of good behavior, and anyone on disciplinary restrictions cannot participate. Those eligible must apply through their correctional counselor.

Visiting family members will not be strip-searched, though the prisoner will. While the visit is mostly unsupervised, the area will be searched as often as every four hours.

Visitors must follow many rules , including what they wear. For example, no one can wear blue jeans, and women cannot wear short dresses, short skirts, strapless tops or form-fitting clothing.

Why do States Allow for Family Visits?

There are many benefits, but the biggest one is a dramatic reduction in recidivism rates . One study in New Mexico (which recently discontinued conjugal visits) showed that prisoners who participated in extended family visits had 70% less chance of ending up in prison than those who did not participate.

Family visits are, therefore, more effective than education in keeping former felons out of prison. The effectiveness of these programs makes sense, considering they help maintain relationships between inmates and their loved ones. These relationships are critical in helping convicts readjust to life outside prison after release.

Though many people consider these programs to be a waste of taxpayer money, it’s been shown that every $1 spent on education in prisons saves taxpayers $5 annually due to the reduced cost of housing prisoners. Given that visits with family members cost less and are even more effective at reducing crime rates, maintaining these programs seems to be a no-brainer.

Reducing recidivism rates is not the only benefit of conjugal visits. By encouraging prisoners to be good to earn time with their loved ones, prisons can reduce violence and dangers to other inmates and guards -which could further reduce the tax rates associated with incarceration. More savings can be realized as well, because the more prisoners are model citizens, the more likely they are to be eligible for early release programs, where they can enjoy a complete family reunion outside of the prison.

There is also evidence that conjugal visits reduce prison rape . One study found that sexual violence in prison occurred at a rate of 226 per 100,000 prisoners in states without these programs while occurring at a rate of 57 per 100.000 prisoners in states with family visits.

Conjugal Visits During Covid-19

Unsurprisingly, these programs were temporarily discontinued as a result of the ongoing pandemic, but they have since been reinstated. To participate in visits , all guests over 2 must be vaccinated or show proof of a negative covid test taken within 72 and 96 hours of the visit. Following the visit, inmates must take a covid test within 72 and 96 hours. Those who test positive, are unvaccinated, or refuse to take the test will be placed in quarantine after the visit.

Alternative Sentences are Still Preferable

Of course, being allowed to continue living with your family is better than any conjugal visit. Maintaining your family life is possible if you prove your innocence or are given an alternative sentence such as probation. Your choice of criminal lawyer makes such a drastic difference in the outcome of your case. If you have been accused of any crime, please call (760) 643-4050 to schedule a free initial consultation with Peter M. Liss.

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So What are the Actual Rules with Conjugal Visits and How Did They Get Their Start?

To begin with, in Britain, conjugal visits aren’t a thing, though in some cases when prisoners who have been locked up for a long period are getting close to their release date, if they are considered particularly low risk for committing crimes or going off on their merry way, they may be allowed to have family leave time for brief periods. This is time meant to help re-acclimate them to the world outside of prison and get their affairs in order, including re-connecting with family and friends, looking for work, etc.- all as a way to try to help said person hit the ground running once fully released.

Moving across the pond to the United States, first, it’s important to note that prisoners in federal custody and maximum security prisons are not allowed conjugal visits. Further, in the handful of states that do allow conjugal visits, prisoners and their guests must meet a stringent set of guidelines including full background checks for any visitors. On the prisoner’s side, anyone who committed a violent crime, has a life sentence, is a sex offender, and other such serious crimes are also not eligible. Further, in Connecticut, if an inmate is a member of a gang or even thought to be so, they are also banned from conjugal visits. On top of that, pretty much everywhere, any inmate who does anything wrong whatsoever while in prison also finds themselves either temporarily or permanently banned from such visits.

This brings us to how the whole conjugal visit thing got its start in the United States; the earliest official-ish policy with regards to allowing, in this case male, prisoners to enjoy the company of the fairer sex started in the Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman Farm) in the early 20th century. This was instituted as a way to get its black prisoner populace, who were used pretty literally as slave labor, to work harder while working the 20,000 acres of land at this institution. In fact, the superintendent of the prison at the time was actually a farmer himself, which is why he was hired to oversee things. As historian David M. Oshinsky, author of Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice , notes, “[The Administrator’s] annual report to the legislature is not of salvaged lives. It is a profit and loss statement, with the accent on the profit.”

Prisoners who didn’t work hard could be beaten and other such “stick”-type incentives leveraged. On the other hand, prisoners who worked hard, were willing to help keep their fellow prisoners in line, etc. etc. were given various rewards. In fact, in the extreme, a prisoner who managed to kill another prisoner attempting to escape could even be rewarded with a full pardon for that and whatever crime they’d previously committed to get locked up in the first place.

Most pertinent to the topic at hand, for those prisoners who were particularly well behaved and worked the hardest, one reward they could be given was the company of a prostitute on their Sunday off-day. To help facilitate this, every Sunday a literal truck load of women would be brought in to tend to the best behaved prisoners. Later, the policy was expanded to include girlfriends and wives for the men who preferred their company.

To illustrate the thinking of the prison officials in perhaps the most offensive way possible, we have this time-capsule of a quote from one contemporary prison guard from Mississippi- “You gotta understand that back in them days n***ers were pretty simple creatures. Give ‘em pork, some greens, some cornbread, and some poontang every now and then and they would work for you.”

Moving very swiftly on from there, the effectiveness of promised sex for a male prisoner, regardless of race, if they toed the line caught on and, as the century progressed, around 1/3 of the states in the U.S. eventually adopted the practice, as well as many other countries through the 20th century also instituting similar programs.

As for that effectiveness, former warden of Great Meadow Correctional Facility in New York State, Arthur Leonardo, explains, “We don’t have much to give to people in prison. If you don’t have anything to take away from someone, you don’t have anything to take away to urge them to do the right thing.”

Illustrating the effectiveness on the prisoner’s side, one Ray Coles, whose temper resulted in an assault that saw him given a nine year prison sentence, states of the incentive the conjugal visits give him to never step out of line, “Every action or choice I make is made with my wife in mind.”

As for what actually goes on during a conjugal visit, the Hollywood idea and reality, as ever, are somewhat different. While in film and TV shows, a conjugal visit is a time to get hot and sweaty with your partner, the reality is that, while sex may or may not be involved, much of the time is spent just doing normal things with not just a partner, but kids and other family members. In fact, in New York, it’s reported that around 40% of conjugal visits don’t include a spouse or the like, rather often just children and other loved ones. For this reason, these visits are usually officially called things like “Extended Family Visits” or, in New York, the “Family Reunion Program”.

As one California inmate summed up of his extended family visit with his partner, “I got to spend 2 1/2 days one-on-one with my partner, my best friend, my confidant, my life partner. It wasn’t about the sex.”

For further context here, in the United States for most prisoners, at best during normal visitation they might be allowed a brief 2 second hug with their partner and a peck on the cheek, if the latter is allowed at all. On top of that, everything you say or do is being watched, and the time together is relatively brief.

As you can imagine from this, for many prisoners, regardless of their crime, whatever prison sentence was doled out often comes with a generally unmentioned punishment of the finishing of a relationship with their partner. Combined with limited access to phones and the extreme expense of prison and jail phone calls, this also often sees a near complete disconnect from their kids, friends, etc. while in prison.

Thus, for prisoners, while sex may or may not be involved, the reality of the extended family visit is just that- depending on the exact rules for a given prison, 6-72 hours where you can spend time with your partner, kids, and sometimes other family members or friends in a somewhat normal setting, doing normal things.

As for frequency, while in movies it’s a regular thing, and little lead up time, in reality in the United States, this may be granted at best once per month all the way up to once per year, or not at all.

Towards the end of facilitating family bonding, many prisons that allow this provide a couple bedrooms to accommodate a couple and their kids, as well as things like board games, a TV, and potentially food, though costs of things like food are footed by the inmate or their loved ones. For reference, the wife of the aforementioned Ray Coles, Vanessa, states she pays around $100 per extended family visit for things like food, which is then provided by the prison.

As for regions outside the United States, places like Canada allow for extended family visits up to 72 hours in length once every couple months, including allowing anyone with a close familial bond to take part, even friends if the authorities deem the bond strong enough. As in the United States, food and other such items are paid for by the inmate or their family or friends.

Interestingly one of the most generous of the nations when it comes to family visits is Saudi Arabia, which allows a once a month visit; but if you have multiple wives, you get once per month per wife! On top of that, beyond allowing such frequent visits, the government actually pays for the travel of those coming to see you.

Back over in the United States, at its peak in the late 20th century, extended family visits were allowed in about 1/3 of states, but began dropping precipitously starting around the 1980s and 1990s to just four states today- California, Washington, New York, and Connecticut.

This was around the same time a number of such programs designed to keep people from being repeat jailbirds were given the axe across the nation, unsurprisingly directly corresponding to the prison population in the United States absolutely exploding, in the four decades since rising an astounding 500%! For reference, before the 1980s, the growth was relatively slow and steady, more or less tied to population growth. More on this in the Bonus Fact in a bit.

As for the impetus for cutting the extended family visit programs, this is generally tied to increased public sentiment starting around the 1980s and 1990s that prisoners are there to be punished, not to be coddled, and that the program costs too much. For example, in New Mexico, who relatively recently killed the extended family visit program, it was costing taxpayers about $120,000 per year.

Now, this might sound like a lot, and if you go read the news reports, this was certainly used as the driving political rhetoric to get the program nixed by the politicians involved. However, it’s noteworthy that New Mexico reports an average cost per inmate annually is a whopping $35,540, which is pretty close to the national average of about $31,000…. Meaning the entire extended family visit program was costing about what it costs to house just over 3 of their approximately 16,000 inmates per year.

Of course this is still costing taxpayers something… except when you consider, for example, a 1982 study done on New York’s prison populace which found that prisoners who were allowed extended family visits were almost 70% less likely than other prisoners to end up back in prison within three years. This makes it potentially the single most effective recidivism program known, even soundly stomping on the second king of recidivism programs- education, which we’ll talk a bit more about in the Bonus Facts.

As to why family visits seem so effective at reducing recidivism, as the aforementioned warden Arthur Leonardo, notes, those who are able to maintain family bonds while in prison, when they get out, have “someone who loves you and will help you, and in the case of children, people who depend on you…”

Going back to the reality of an extended family visit, it’s usually required that partners and the inmates be tested for STDs and come out clean before being allowed to have their little rendezvous. Further, the prisoners themselves are strip searched both before the extended family visit and after. Should they test positive for drug or alcohol use after, they are then banned from future visits indefinitely, and those who brought in the contraband may also be banned from taking part again.

On top of that, those that are visiting the prisoners must be cleared as well, though strip searches, at least in the United States, are not allowed on the visitors, so contraband may occasionally be smuggled in in certain orifices or the like. To try to get around this in, for instance California, inmates and their families are searched regularly during the extended family visits, usually at a rate of about once every four hours.

This brings us to what you can bring for an extended family visit. Well, not much- mostly just things like clean linens, certain toiletries, strictly regulated clothing, and the like. No cell phones, no electronic devices, and really not much of anything else. Even things like family pictures are pretty strictly regulated in number, type, and size. Going back to clothing, one Myesha Paul, wife of California inmate Marcello Paul who is in prison for robbery, states, “They don’t want you to have anything that’s form fitting… although we come with hips and all that, so it’s kinda hard to find what don’t fit around, you know? I just buy some men’s sweat pants and make it work.”

If you go look at the California regulations on this, they also have strict regulations when it comes to colors of clothing, for example no blue denim or forest green pants, no tan shirts, no camouflage, nothing strapless, no skirts or dresses or non-capri shorts- the list goes on and on.

Myesha also helpfully describes what a real extended family visit is like, stating, “We sat outside and played dominoes on Saturday. After that we went in and watched TV, watched movies.” And while she states her and her husband do have sex during the visit, as is almost universally noted by every other inmate and their partner we looked it, it’s more about the closeness and little things like getting to hold your partner’s hand or just hold them in general, as well as waking up next to them. She states, “It feels good… because I don’t get that at home. Ya know. At home I’m sleeping by myself, unless my grandbaby or one of my kids wanna sleep with me. But they’re grown. But they still do sleep with me sometimes. But other than that, you know, I’m waking myself up in the morning, or the alarm clock is waking me up, or my grandson comes and wakes me up. It’s good to have my husband waking me up. It’s the nicest thing about being married. Isn’t it? Waking up?”

She also states of her husband, “He watches me through the night… I know he does ’cause sometimes I wake up and he’s looking at me. And I do the same to him. Sometimes he’s sleeping and he wakes up and I’m watching him.”

Similarly summed up by the aforementioned Vanessa Coles, the value of extended family visits is about keeping her family together- “It keeps our bond going, keeps our marriage strong and keeps him on track.” As for the couple’s young kids, “The little one needs it because that’s all he knows. The older one needs it to remember what he knows.” And as for those arguing against allowing such visits, she states, “[The prisoners] are being punished. I get it. [But] destroying your marriage and family should not be a part of your sentence.”

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show ( iTunes , Spotify , Google Play Music , Feed ), as well as:

What Happens to Your Stuff When You Get Sent to Prison for Life?
When Did Having a Prisoner’s Last Meal Be Anything They Want Start?
From a Life of Crime to One of the Most Prolific Actors of All Time- Danny Trejo’s Prison Break
Are You Really Entitled to a Phone Call When Arrested?
What Happens if You Commit a Crime in Space?

Bonus Facts:

Going back to what caused the massive spike in U.S. incarcerations starting in the 1980s that has more or less continued unabated since, one thing often pointed to is that this was around the time the war on drugs was ramped up, generally considering to account for about 25%-50% of the increase in inmate population. This still leaves the rest, which is the majority. And unless you just think U.S. citizens are far more likely to commit crimes than, for example, our European brethren, obviously there is something weird going on. As to what, a variety of factors are pointed to including the cutting of many programs designed to keep people from being repeat offenders, marked increase in sentence length, especially compared to the rest of the world for similar crimes, and perhaps the catch-all which has driven a lot of this to the extreme- the privatization of prisons that occurred at this time, making many prisons for-profit institutions.

In the decades since, these entities have heavily lobbied for things that seem pretty directly tied to doing everything possible to make prison sentences longer and keep people coming back for more- most pertinent to the topic at hand, cutting costs wherever possible for themselves, including any and all recidivism programs. After all, they get paid per inmate, so aren’t too concerned with what the total cost is to the state, other than the greater that cost, the more they make.

Naturally, the longer sentences and increased likelihood of repeat offenders, at a rate of about 45% within 3 years and 76% within five, has seen prison populations skyrocket in the United States since the 1980s. The net result of all of this being that, at present, the land of the free currently houses almost one quarter of all inmates imprisoned in the entire world! The cost of housing these inmates comes to about $50-$70 billion annually. This does not include the police and judicial costs that get the prisoners put there in the first place- all summing up to massive sums of money being spent and many more crimes being committed while proven recidivism programs that see massive reductions in repeat offenders going largely unused. And noteworthy here is that about 95% of prisoners do get out at some point.

And speaking of recidivism programs like extended family visits, a study done by the United States Department of Justice noted that prisoners given access to educational programs were, for vocational certificates 14.6% less likely to find their way back in prison within 3 years vs. the general prison populace. For those achieving a GED while in prison, they were 25% less likely to end up back in the slammer. And those who attained an Associates degree were the highest of all in their study at about 70% less likely, approximately the same benefit as those given access to extended family visits.

Averaging it all out, the net effect of the educational programs was about a 43% reduction in rate of returning to prison within 3 years. From this, crunching the numbers, the study showed that this meant for every $1 spent by the states towards educating prisoners, it saved $5 annually thanks to the reduction of prison population, let alone other cost savings in court and police expenditures and, of course, a reduction in crime rate. Given each year about 700,000 inmates are released in the United States, that amounts to a massive reduction in crime, while a rather large increase in a better educated and more skilled populace.

Finally, one more bonus fact- while violent criminals are almost always seen as the most dangerous and most likely to re-offend by the general public, the data does not back that up at all- not even close. According to the United States Department of Justice, the highest rate of re-offenders within 3 years after being released were those stealing motor vehicles at 78.8%! Next up are those in prison for selling stolen property at 77.4%. The list goes on and on, but essentially, those who steal are generally about 70%+ likely to re-offend within 3 years and are the highest at-risk re-offenders. In stark contrast, violent crime convicts are massively less likely to re-offend. For example, rapists and murderers are only 2.5% and 1.2% likely to re-offend respectively. Of course, the latter is much more news worthy and traumatic, leading to the skewed public perception.

Conjugal Visit
Prisoner Murders Girlfriend
The Dark Origins of Conjugal Visits
No Laughing Matter
Mississippi Ending Conjugal Visits
How Conjugal Visits Work
States That Allow Conjugal Visits
Conjugal Visits Correlate to Fewer Sexual Assaults
Conjugal Visits Rules and History
Extended Family Prison Visit
One Conjugal Visit
Conjugal Visits
California Inmate Visitation
San Quentin Visitation
Prison Visits
The Conjugal Visit
Canada Visiting an Inmate
Pennsylvania Visiting Rules
National Crime and Justice
Conjugal Visits Not Practical
Australia Conjugal Visits
South Dakota Corrections
United States Incarceration Rate
New Mexico Incarceration Statistics
New Research on Prison Education
State of Phone Justice
Cost of Incarceration

I can’t comment on everything in the bonus facts, but I think the low (1.2%) re-offending rate for murder can be put down to two things: (1) they receive very long sentences (if not actually executed!), and so leave prison in their old age, and (2) they were more likely to have committed a crime of passion, rather than be career criminals. For that matter, I read that, at Devil’s Island, the murderers looked down on the thieves. Murder might be a worse crime, but it was usually the only one they committed, while the thieves were habitual criminals. (That might be a reason behind the high re-offending rate for stealing cars and receiving stolen goods.)

You might want to look that up because it is actually not correct. Depending on the severity of the crime murder can carry as little as a 5 year sentence, and remember it is not uncommon to serve as little as one quarter of the issues sentence. Also, execution is remarkably rare with many US states banning it or in moratorium. For a detailed state by state list of murder recommended sentences see this wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_punishments_for_murder_in_the_United_States

Inmate Search & General Jail Guide

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How To Visit An Inmate In Prison | All Your Questions Answered

Table of Contents

Visiting an inmate for the first time is one that is filled with mixed feelings of what to wear, what form of identification to present to the guards, what to bring along as a gift, if kids are allowed in, and other random thoughts like that.

With all these thoughts popping up in your head at the same time, you may end up more confused and frustrated. Not to worry!

This guide contains what you need to know when visiting an inmate for the first time, and perhaps will provide answers to all your confusions.

Types Of Prison Visitations

There are several types of visitation for inmates. Visitation ranges from video visitation, non-contact/telephone visitation, and contact visitation.

Prison Video Visitation

Video visitation is the one that’s mostly being used today. Just like the way you’d use Skye, video visitation can be done even from the comfort of your home.

No Contact Jail Visitation

Non-contact/ telephone visitation is one that involves sitting behind a glass barricade while talking with your inmate on the telephone.

Full Contact Prison Inmate Visitation

Contact visitation is the most common and often preferred by visitors. Here, you are able to sit with the inmate and talk for a short period of time. It even gives you the opportunity to even make contact with your ok inmate, however there’s a limitation to that.

Forms of contact usually allowed include a brief hug, hello, and goodbye. Holding of hands is often frowned at by prison officials.

What To Do Before You Visit A Prison

It is important that before you are granted access to visit your inmate, you must have previously been in contact with him/her. The prison has a visitors list that contains the friends and family members that are allowed to visit.

Some facilities provide inmates a list containing slots for 10 visitors that they wish to include. As such, the inmates must have all the details of the visitors he intends to include In the list, which include: the visitor’s full name, the visitor’s address, the phone number, and at times more other information about the visitor.

So if your inmate does not know all this information, you can send him a mail containing a letter that stipulates your information.

Other facilities may request all prospective visitors of the inmate to fill out a visiting application (some only give out this form based on the wish of the inmate).

How To Apply For A Visitation At The Prison

The visiting application is given to visitors who intend to pay a visit to inmates, however not all facilities will request that you fill a visitors application (most facilities do anyway).

The visiting application is more like a questionnaire that contains a portion in which you are required to fill out your name, address, and questions that seeks to find out if you are a convicted felon, or if you’ve been incarcerated or worked in the department of corrections.

Proceed to answer, fill in your names and answer the questions as truthful as you can because the information provided will be used to perform a background check up on you.

The findings will determine if your visit will be approved or denied.

What Can Make You Denied From Visiting A Friend In Jail?

If the information provided in the visiting application is false.
If you’re a convicted felon.
If you’ve previously served time in a correctional facility, or have worked in the department of corrections.
If you have outstanding warrants.
If there’s a protective order against you or the inmate.
If you are seen as a threat to security at the facility.
If you are on PTI, probation, or parole (although some exceptions can be made to this).
If you’ve already filled a visiting application to another inmate at the facility.

You will only know if your visiting application is approved or denied when your inmate tells you, most institutions will not inform you. Therefore, you must ensure a constant communication with your inmate to ascertain the status of your application.

However, if you’re denied visiting privileges, you have a choice to appeal the decision. Only make sure you file for appeal within the stated time frame.

How To Prepare For A Prison Visitation

If your visiting application is approved by the facility, check the schedule of the visitation hours specified by the institution.

You check visiting hours for some facilities on their website, and be sure to double check if possible, as visiting hours may be changed at any time or even cancelled without notifying you.

A correctional facility may cancel visiting if the facility goes on a lockdown, if an inmate has escaped, or due to reasons known to the facility. An inmate may also be denied visiting privileges if they’re confined in solitary.

Once you are sure of the visiting hours, ensure to take along every needed form of identification on the day you intend visiting your inmate.

Although in most cases you only need your valid state issued identification card or drivers license, some facilities however vary in the type of identification they accept.

Visiting A Jail As A Minor Or With A Minor

If you’re visiting with a child or minor, the facility will require you to first fill out a special visiting with minors authorization form.

When such a minor is above 14, he/she would have to come along with a school issued photo ID or birth certificate before they’re allowed to visit.

Also, minors are not allowed to visit inmates alone, as it is required that they must be always accompanied by a parent or guardian. Inmates who were incarcerated for crimes against a child cannot have access to visits by minors.

Small children or babies may also need to come along with their birth certificate to be allowed to visit, but it is not a must in all cases. When visiting with children, try as much to control them because they’re found causing a nuisance, you can get kicked out from the visiting area.

How To Dress For A Prison Visitation

Every correctional facility has a dress code for visitors thus, if you’re visiting any, ensure to put on the specified dress code else you’ll be refused from visiting.

Here are some things to keep in mind when selecting a dress for visiting inmates:

Do not put on a dress that resembles the inmate’s clothes in design or color, and that of the staff.
Do not visit in medical scrubs or any sort of uniform, as this may pose a threat to the facility’s security.
You must dress in shirts and put on shoes.
Clothes that expose sensitive parts of the body are prohibited.
See through fabrics are not allowed.
Sleeveless shirts are prohibited.
Shorts and skirts that are above the knee or those with slits are prohibited.
Offensive imprints or languages on clothing is prohibited.
Tight clothing which include spandex, leggings, tights are prohibited.
Jewelries are also prohibited, so keep that in mind when dressing.

Sometimes, it is up to the prison guard to scrutinize which kind of dressing is allowed into the prison. To avoid being sent back because of a violation in dress code, you can come with a change of clothing just in case.

Getting Searched At A Prison During Visitation

It is advisable to arrive a few minutes early to the facility when visiting, as you may be required to fill out more paperwork (you may get into trouble if you arrive too early though).

Keep in mind that you’ll be searched from your arrival at the parking lot, your car will also be searched by the prison guards or even security dogs for any incriminating item or one that violates the rules of the facility.

Even when you enter the facility, expect to be searched again usually by pat down or with a metal detector. And If you refuse to be searched, you’ll be banned from visiting.

There are even cases where visitors must consent to strip search before they’re allowed in, but if you’re not comfortable with this, it doesn’t mean you’ll be refused visitation.

Strip searching was mainly done to detect drugs hidden in the body that scanners couldn’t pick. However, it is now a thing of the past as security dogs are used by facilities instead.

What To Take With You On A Prison Visitation

This varies from one facility to another. Some facilities may provide lockers that can be rented for about a quarter to store your belongings in, others do not.

You’re only allowed to bring in your ID, single car key, eyeglasses (if any), some change for use at the vending machine, as you may need it to buy snacks for your inmate while you talk.

If you’re visiting with a baby, you may be allowed to come with a feeding bottle and a change of diaper. Items such as medications, cigarettes are considered illegal, as you can be banned if found in possession of any of these, and possibly charged.

Questions About Visiting A Friend In Jail

If you have about visiting an inmate that was not answered in this article, you can post in the comment section below and we’ll do our best to provide answers to such questions.

Can you kiss on prison visits?

You can kiss during prison visitation at a low risk community prison, however, in many other centres, the case is different. Kissing on a prison visit depends on the type of prison facility where your loved one is incarcerated.

These days, most facilities do their best to prevent direct contact in order to avoid smuggling of drugs and other prohibited substances. If you intend to kiss your loved one, then make sure the rules in the facility permit you to do so.

How long does it take to get approved for prison visitation?

Most prison visitations are approved on a first-come first-served basis. Your request for a prison visit can be approved in less than a week, however the visitation date may vary.

You need to put in every prison visitation request on time so as to factor in the time it may take to process other requests submitted before you, and to give the prison operations director enough time to make adequate preparations for the security and safety of you and other visitors.

What is the process of visiting someone in prison?

For most prisons, you will need to fill out a visitation request online, and submit it for them to get started on processing your visitation request. FOr many others, you will need to schedule a visit through the visitation centre.

How do I visit someone in jail in Canada?

Most prisons in Canada accommodate visits through a visitation centre. You will need to schedule an appointment through the visitation centre for your request to be processed.

Can you wear jeans to visit an inmate?

Members of the public are allowed to wear jeans or any form of clothing to a prison visitation. Notwithstanding the type of clothe you put on, highly sophisticated infra-red sensors will always be at major entry points to scan you for prohibited items.

How many visits do prisoners get a week?

Prisoners are allowed to get as much visits as the prison can accommodate. Most prisons tailor their activities to only accept a number of visitors per day and once this number is reached, other visitation requests are pushed on to the next available day.

Are conjugal visits monitored?

Conjugal visits are usually monitored for the safety of both the inmate and the visitor. A highly trained staff will monitor the activities that happen during the visit to make sure that the visitation conforms with acceptable practices.

Conjugal visits were designed as a means to preserve families and give incarcerated people the opportunity to procreate even while in prison. These days, there are not many prison facilities around the world that still allow conjugal visits from an inmate’s registered spouse.

Can you swear in a letter to an inmate?

If a letter to an inmate contains a swear word, it will be given a second review to determine what to do with it. The level and context of the swearing in a letter will determine if it will be handed over to the inmate, or confiscated for vulgarity.

What happens to your clothes when you go to jail?

When you go to jail, your clothes are locked up in your property. This is a little lock box assigned to all inmates where clothes, keys, wallets, shoes and received books/letters are kept.

How should I dress for a prison visit?

While preparing for a prison visitation, wear something that you feel very comfortable in. Do not put on very oversized clothes that may put you on the spotlight and have the guards second-guessing if you;re hiding something underneath.

Do Death row inmates get visitors?

Yes. Death row inmates are allowed to receive visitors just like any other inmate. Friends and family, loved ones, lawyers, human rights organisations and other religious societies are allowed to visit inmates on death row.

Can you wear a bra in jail?

Inmates are given adequately sized bras in jail to put on. While these bras are issued, it is however the responsibility of the inmate to put them on.

Can you hug an inmate during visitation?

Hugging an inmate can be allowed in certain incarceration facilities, but in some others, a no contact law is usually enforced and must be adhered to.

Your ability to hug a loved one during a prison visitation will depend on the laws guiding that particular institution. Make sure you check in with the regulations before you attempt to hug an inmate.

Can you wear your wedding ring in jail?

A wedding ring is usually considered a sentimental item and thus, inmates are allowed to wear their wedding rings after they are vetted by the security department.

If an inmate poses some degree of threat, or is seen capable of inflicting bodily harm or injury through a ring, then they are denied the ability to wear their wedding ring while in prison.

Can you FaceTime inmates?

It is not possible to facetime with inmates. Electronic gadgets are prohibited in prisons and any inmate found with a mobile phone will face very serious charges which could increase their sentence.

What can you bring to a conjugal visit?

If you’re approved for a conjugal visit, you will be given a list of items that are permitted, and a list of items that are prohibited.

Breaking the law during a conjugal visit may lead to very serious consequences for both the visitor and the inmate.

What is a conjugal visit in jail?

A conjugal visit is a visitation that allows an inmate have some private time for intercourse with a listed spouse. This type of visitation is allowed to help families cope with their intimate desires.

Why are conjugal visits not allowed?

For most facilities, conjugal visits are denied because they pose a great risk to the operations of the prison facility. Most times, prisoners use conjugal visits as an opportunity to smuggle prohibited items like drugs and weapons into the prison facility.

Can you get sperm from an inmate for artificial insemination?

It is impossible to get a sperm from an inmate for artificial insemination. This is a practice that has not been approved in any prison facility. If you intend to conceive, you can request for a conjugal visit if it is allowed, or have intercourse with your partner if they are ever released to attend a funeral or family event.

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Types of Visits

All incarcerated people are eligible to receive visits unless they have temporarily lost that privilege due to disciplinary action. See below for information on in-person and family visiting. Please note that all visiting is dependent on the Department’s Roadmap to Reopening and health and safety factors.

In-Person Visits

Most incarcerated people in the general population may participate in an in-person visit. These visits allow the incarcerated person to sit together with their visitor(s) in a designated shared space, usually furnished with tables and chairs. In-person visits are limited to five visitors at a time and are not limited in duration except for normal visiting hours or terminations caused by overcrowding.

In-Person Non-Contact Visits

Incarcerated people who are still in reception (recently admitted to CDCR or transferred between prisons) or who are segregated (i.e., Administrative Segregation, Security Housing Units, Adjustment Centers, pending specific rules violation report charges, or assigned to Behavior Management Units) are restricted to non-contact visits. Non-contact visits occur with a glass partition between the incarcerated person and his/her visitors. The incarcerated person is escorted in handcuffs by staff to the visit. The handcuffs are removed only after the incarcerated person is secured in his/her side of the visiting booth; thus, parents who do not wish to have children see the incarcerated person in restraints should wait away from the booth or glass partition until the prisoner is settled. Non-contact visits are restricted to three visitors and are limited in time (usually one to two hours, depending on the prison and the reason for the non-contact status of visits).

Incarcerated people on Death Row, often referred to as “condemned”, are housed either at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County (men) or at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla (women). “Condemned Grade A” incarcerated people on Death Row may receive contact visits (meaning no partition between incarcerated person and his/her visitor) unless their visiting privileges have been restricted for disciplinary or security reasons. “Condemned Grade B” incarcerated people on Death Row may only receive non-contact visits. All Condemned visits are in a secured booth and involve the incarcerated person being escorted to visiting in handcuffs. Visits for all incarcerated people on Death Row are limited in time (usually one to two hours).

Family Visits

Some incarcerated people are eligible for “family visits.” Family visits occur in private, apartment-like facilities on prison grounds and last approximately 30 to 40 hours. The following individuals are excluded from family visits: Incarcerated persons on Death Row, any incarcerated person with convictions for sex offenses, anyone in the Reception Centers process, or anyone under disciplinary restrictions. Family visits are restricted to immediate family members (parents, children, siblings, legal spouses, registered domestic partners, or who have a bona fide and verified foster relationship) of the incarcerated person. There are no age restrictions for prospective visitors. Family visits are further restricted by availability. An eligible incarcerated person must put in an application for a family visit with their assigned correctional counselor at the prison. Further inquiries about family visiting should be directed by the incarcerated person to their counselor or by the family to the respective institution visiting staff.

Scheduling Family Visits

To schedule a family visit, an incarcerated person must request to schedule a Family Visit with the Family Visiting Coordinator. The Family Visiting Coordinator at the institution will provide the necessary paperwork for the incarcerated person to complete, as well as a packet for them to send to their approved visitors to complete. Once all paperwork is complete and a visit is scheduled, the Family Visiting Coordinator will assist in arranging meals and other details. Depending upon the institution, family visits may be offered on the weekend, during the week, or both. Incarcerated persons and their families must pay for meals; all other accommodations are provided at no cost.

Waitlist for Family Visits

Each institution compiles a waitlist for family visit requests, prior waitlists are no longer in effect. Availability of visits, and turnaround time between approval and visit, varies with each institution.

In‑Person Marriage Ceremonies

Effective immediately, in-person marriage ceremonies may be scheduled and facilitated at adult institutions in the OPEN Phase of the Roadmap to Reopening . Each institution has its own protocols for marriages; please contact your institution for details.

The process for requesting and completing a marriage packet has not changed. The incarcerated person must request the marriage packet from their counselor. Prior wedding waitlists will be honored. For more information, contact the institution in which your loved one is housed.

If an institution is not in OPEN Phase, adult applicants may continue to appear before a county clerk to obtain a marriage license via videoconference, rather than in person per Governor’s Executive Order #N-58-20 . While CDCR is in compliance with this order, the authority to issue marriage licenses and to validate marriage ceremonies continues to rest entirely with the individual counties.

An in-person ceremony may be cancelled at any time due to health and safety reasons. When this status changes, a request may be submitted to the Marriage Coordinator to reschedule.

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What States Allow Conjugal Visits?

A 2012 research conducted by the Southern Criminal Justice Association indicated that state prison systems prohibiting conjugal visits experienced sexual violence at an average rate of 226 cases per 100,000 prisoners.

Meanwhile, states permitting similar visits had a less frequent occurrence of such violence: 57 per 100,000 inmates.

These findings may suggest support for conjugal visits. However, decision-makers may need to look at more than the numbers to determine whether such visits are practical and beneficial in the long term.

How do conjugal visits work, and what states permit these visits? Are conjugal visits a right or privilege? How about same-sex couples? Should individuals still call it a “conjugal visit” today?

lookupinmate.org addresses these questions and many more. This article also covers the requirements for inmates to be allowed conjugal visits and the arguments regarding such visits.

Which U.S. Prisons Allow Conjugal Visits? Which States Have Them?

During the 2000s, only California, New Mexico, Mississippi, Connecticut, Washington, and New York allowed such visits. By 2015, Mississippi and New Mexico discontinued their programs.

In 1993, conjugal visitation programs existed in 17 U.S. states. However, no existing records mention what these states were. One survey mentioned that in 2013, there were at least nine states with such programs, namely:

Connecticut
Mississippi
South Dakota

What Is a Conjugal Visit?

A conjugal visit is when a prisoner is allowed to receive a visit, usually from a husband or wife, to spend private time together.

The idea behind such visits is to let inmates have the time for intimate contact with their partners.

Depending on the state’s conjugal visit program, sometimes called the extended family visitation program, a visit may last for several hours or overnight.

What Everyone Gets Wrong

Conjugal visits are not entirely only about physical intimacy or sex. Officially, such visits are called family visits, and kids are permitted to stay overnight.

In Connecticut, the inmate’s spouse or partner cannot visit alone: the inmate’s child must be present.

Meanwhile, Washington allows two related inmates in the same facility, like siblings or a parent and child, to be visited jointly by immediate family members from outside. About one-third of extended visits occur between spouses alone in the state.

Conjugal Visits to Help Preserve Families

Conjugal visits can help preserve family units. In New York, conjugal visits are referred to as family reunion programs (FRP).

Since conjugal visits are also called extended family visits, the concept of such visits should not be limited to physical intimacy only.

How Conjugal Visits Work

In states offering extended prison visits, inmates must have a record of good behavior to be permitted conjugal visits. However, prisoners with life sentences , criminals convicted of domestic violence, or sex offenders charged with crimes like sexual assault are usually excluded.

If you want to fully understand how conjugal visits work, here are a few questions to consider:

Is There a Long Waiting List?

Prisons allowing conjugal visits keep a schedule and inform inmates of the next visit date. A facility with a large number of inmates may have a long waiting list depending on how many visits the facility can accommodate.

Who Is Eligible?

Although conjugal visit rules vary between states, prisoners, in general, must apply for that privilege. Before being granted visitation, the prisoner must undergo and pass a health screening.

In California, an inmate must be married to a legal spouse to qualify for conjugal visits.

Prisoners who committed several infractions, like fighting and swearing during the past six months, are not eligible.

How Often Can Prisoners Have Visitors ?

Extended family visits usually have three schedules: 6, 12, and 24 hours. The facility allows these visits to eligible convicts an average of once or twice a year.

Where Do Conjugal Visits Take Place?

Correctional facilities allowing conjugal visits typically have private, apartment-style accommodations where inmates and their visiting loved ones or significant others can stay. These rooms come with sheets, towels, soap, and condoms.

Can Same-Sex Couples Take Part?

In 2007, California allowed conjugal visits to married same-sex couples or those in a civil union. New York permitted the same privilege in 2011.

Conjugal Visitation Is a Privilege, Not a Right

The United States Supreme Court and several federal courts believe prisoners have no constitutional right to conjugal visits. So such visits are considered a privilege, especially for inmates exhibiting good behavior while serving their time in prison.

Still, some prisoners and their spouses have filed lawsuits in federal and state courts, claiming that denying conjugal visits violates these rights :

The marital privacy rights of the prisoner and spouse
The right to procreate
The constitutional prohibition against unusual and cruel punishment
Religious freedom rights provided by the First Amendment

Despite these arguments, courts found no constitutional right to a conjugal visit and rejected these claims.

Are Conjugal Visits Free of Charge?

Conjugal visits are free for prisoners except in Washington. As of 2013, the state’s participation fee for such visits was $10 per night.

Are Conjugal and Extended Visitation Privileges Highly Regulated?

States regulate and determine who a family member is. Inmates and visitors must submit applications to be allowed conjugal visits.

All prison visitors are subjected to a physical search for contraband or weapons, whether for a conjugal or different type of visit. Facilities do not allow drugs or alcohol and prohibit cell phones or other electronic devices.

Prison staff ensures that visitors bring only a few highly regulated items into the facility and prohibit certain foods or gifts. The staff can also turn away visitors who are not wearing appropriate clothing.

Why Have Visitation Programs Been Discontinued?

There are claims that the discontinuation of conjugal visits in many states is due to public opinion. There are individuals who believe criminals should not have access to anything, including time with family members. Others complain when they learn inmates have health care access.

Another reason is reports of contraband getting snuck into prison and babies being conceived during conjugal visits. However, there are no figures to back up these claims, leading to conclusions that these reports are unfounded.

Still, states mention that the actual reason for the discontinuation of such programs is budget cuts.

In New Mexico, the program costs taxpayers $120,000 every year. Though the state’s budget in 2016 was $6.2 billion and the median household income was $43,782, the state did not seem to see the benefits outweighing the cost.

Why Should Visitation Programs Continue?

Initial claims suggested that visitation programs help lower parole violations by 25%. However, one study involving New York’s family reunion program showed that extended family visits might lower recidivism (tendency to reoffend) among prisoners by 67%.

There are also claims that one potential benefit of conjugal visits is lowering the rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among prisoners. However, studies have not conclusively established a correlation between conjugal visits and lower STD levels.

Because there is more than only intimacy involved in these visits, prisons in states allowing conjugal visits have renamed such programs “family visits.”

Correctional officers claim that prisoners with visitation access are generally happier and are encouraged to maintain good behavior to earn visitation privileges or even early release .

If you or your family members are planning to visit a loved one in prison, you need a platform to search for records about that inmate. lookupinmate.org is a nationwide online inmate records checker that can help you locate prisoners detained in any correctional facility.

10 Arresting Realities Regarding Conjugal Visits

Despite not having many states implementing conjugal visits, individuals who may have relatives or spouses in prison need to understand the following facts about this program:

Prisoners and Their Visitors Must Meet Certain Requirements to Get Permission for a Visit

Rules on extended family visits typically vary from one state to another. However, one common rule in California, Connecticut, New York, and Washington is that conjugal visits occur only in prisons with medium security or lower . Inmates must also have a record of good behavior and clean health.

Another requirement is that spouses who visit their incarcerated husband or wife must pass a body search and background check and be registered on the prison’s visitor list.

The “ Conjugal Visit ” Phrase Is a Misnomer

Conjugal visits today are called extended family visits or family reunion visits. The reasons for these visits include:

Maintaining the connection between inmates and their families
Reducing recidivism (or an inmate’s tendency to reoffend)
Motivating good behavior

Renaming the program to “extended family visit” helps emphasize the inclusion of all family members instead of only the inmate’s spouse or partner.

Like Hotels, Prisons Facilitating Extended Family Visits Have Toiletries for Guests

U.S. prisons have special facilities like trailers, cabins, or apartment-style housing for extended family visits. Some prisons provide inmates with sheets, toiletries, towels, condoms, and lube.

Other prisons have two-bedroom apartments featuring a living and dining room and amenities like TVs, DVD players, and games like dominoes and Jenga.

Visitors may be permitted to bring prepared food or groceries during the visit, depending on the state prison’s rules.

Mississippi Was the First State That Allowed Conjugal Visits Nearly 100 Years Ago

Mississippi was the first state to allow conjugal visits in the early 1900s. The state even provided the prostitutes who charged 50 cents for their services.

The first conjugal visits occurred at Parchman Farm, also called Mississippi State Penitentiary , in 1918. James Parchman, the warden, used conjugal visits as an incentive for male prisoners (who were mostly African-American) to work harder in the prison’s farming industry.

However, the state later canceled the costly program despite protests from prisoners’ families and rights groups who believed that even infrequent visitations promote family bonds and boost prisoner morale.

Only Four States Still Allow Conjugal Visits

As of 2015, the only states allowing conjugal visits are California, New York, Washington, and Connecticut.

Mississippi and New Mexico also had conjugal visit policies before. However, Mississippi halted allowing these visits on February 1, 2014, and New Mexico did the same on May 1, 2014.

Connecticut Prisoners Cannot Be Level 4 or Above to Be Eligible for Conjugal Visit

In Connecticut’s prison system, levels on a scale of 1 to 5 refer to how much guards monitor inmates daily.

Prisoners also cannot be gang members, on restrictive status, or convicted of a class A or class B disciplinary offense within the last 12 months before requesting eligibility.

In India, Married Prisoners Have the Legal Right to Conjugal Visits and Bear Children

In 2015, India’s government passed legislation declaring that married inmates have the right to conjugal visits. These inmates are also entitled to provide sperm to their spouses for artificial insemination if the inmate so wishes.

Saudi Arabian Prisons Are Surprisingly Liberal and Generous

In Saudi Arabia, male inmates are allowed one conjugal visit per month, and the rule applies to each spouse. So, men with multiple wives can have numerous visits every month.

The Saudi government provides inmates’ families monthly allowance for food, housing, and education. The government also pays for airfare and hotel expenses family members incur when visiting a relative in prison.

A prisoner who wishes to attend a family wedding or funeral is provided $2,600 to give as a gift. In 2014, the Saudi government spent $35 million on these prisoner privileges.

A German Prisoner Used Their Unsupervised Conjugal Visit to Murder Their Visitor

In April 2010, a 50-year-old prisoner killed his 46-year-old girlfriend during an unsupervised conjugal visit in a German prison. During one of those visits, the prisoner stabbed his girlfriend using a steak knife and strangled her.

Outraged Germans criticized the justice minister and prison authorities for this incident and questioned a few other instances of relaxed security at German prisons, including prisoner escapes and beatings.

Eventually, German prisons increased security and implemented stricter rules for conjugal visits.

Brazil Has a Sexist Conjugal Visit Policy

In Brazil, straight and gay male prisoners can receive visitors. However, female inmates rarely receive the same privilege.

Though such differences in conjugal visit policies appear discriminatory, female prisoners in Brazil may have to worry more about overcrowded and unsanitary prison cells. Pregnant inmates do not have sufficient access to proper medical care, and many female prisoners can be unjustly confined in isolation units.

The Checkered History: How Did the Conjugal Visit Program Start? When Did Conjugal Visits Start?

Conjugal visits started in 1918 at Parchman Farm, a labor camp in Mississippi.

At first, the camp allowed visits for Black prisoners only. The visitors were local prostitutes who arrived every Sunday and were paid to service single and married inmates.

Historian David Oshinsky said Jim Crow-era prison officials perceived African-American men as having stronger sex drives than whites and would not work hard in the cotton fields until they were sexually sated.

In the 1940s, the government expanded the conjugal visit program to include white male prisoners and their wives. Finally, in the 1970s, the program included female inmates.

Do prisoners in South Carolina get conjugal visits ?

A journal dated 1981 mentioned that South Carolina was among the states allowing conjugal visits at that time. Today, the state no longer implements that program. Additionally, federal prisons also do not allow conjugal visits.

Do death row inmates get conjugal visits?

Death row prisoners are not eligible for conjugal visits, even in states that permit conjugal visits for other inmates. Also, no state officially allows conjugal visits for death row inmates.

Do other countries have conjugal visits ?

The U.S. is not the only country allowing conjugal visits despite having only four states implementing this program.

In Brazil, Venezuela, and Columbia, prisons allow unmarried inmates to have such visits. India and Saudi Arabia also have conjugal visit programs.

While Germany permits prisoners to apply for conjugal visits, the screening is strict, and security is tight, especially since an inmate murdered his girlfriend during one such visit in 2010.

Searching for an inmate in the U.S., not knowing where your loved ones are detained? lookupinmate.org lets you search for a prisoner by state or prison type . This one-stop inmate lookup site has access to more than 7,000 correctional facilities across the United States.

The Effect of Conjugal Visitation on Sexual Violence in Prison https://www.prearesourcecenter.org/sites/default/files/library/theeffectofconjugalvisitation.pdf
Prison Visitation Policies: A Fifty-State Survey https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/center/liman/document/prison_visitation_policies.pdf
Conjugal Visits https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/02/11/conjugal-visits
Heaven https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/02/11/heaven#.ybmNK2evz
Conjugal Visitation in American Prisons Today https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/conjugal-visitation-american-prisons-today

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Federal Bureau of Prisons

General visiting information.

Make sure your visit will be a success by carefully following these four steps.

Discover or confirm the whereabouts of the inmate you would like to visit.

Before you can visit you must be placed on the inmate's approved visiting list.

Review all visiting rules, regulations, and procedures before your visit.

Find out when you can visit and get directions to the facility.

Locate the inmate

Sometimes an inmate may be moved to a different facility so that they can benefit from unique programs offered at that location. They might also be moved to receive treatment for a medical condition or for security concerns. Therefore, the first step in planning your visit should be to determine where the inmate is currently housed.

Please verify you are a human by entering the words you see in the textbox below.

To visit, you must be pre-approved.

You can only visit an inmate if they have placed you on their visiting list and you have been cleared by the BOP.

An inmate is given a Visitor Information Form when he/she arrives at a new facility.
Inmate completes their portion of the form and mails a copy to each potential visitor.
Potential visitor completes all remaining form fields.
Potential visitor sends the completed form back to the inmate's address (listed on the form).
We may request more background information and possibly contact other law enforcement agencies or the NCIC
The inmate is told when a person is not approved to visit and it is the inmate's responsibility to notify that person.

Who can an inmate add to their visiting list?

Step-parent(s)
Foster parent(s)
Grandparents
No more than 10 friends/associates
Foreign officials
Members of religious groups including clergy
Members of civic groups
Employers (former or prospective)
Parole advisors

In certain circumstances such as when an inmate first enters prison or is transferred to a new prison, a visiting list might not exist yet. In this case, immediate family members who can be verified by the information contained in the inmate's Pre-Sentence Report, may be allowed to visit. However, if there is little or no information available about a person, visiting may be denied. You should always call the prison ahead of time to ensure your visit will be permitted.

Be Prepared

You should be familiar with all visiting rules, regulations, and procedures before your visit.

The following clothing items are generally not permitted but please consult the visiting policy for the specific facility as to what attire and items are permitted in the visiting room:

revealing shorts
halter tops
bathing suits
see-through garments of any type
low-cut blouses or dresses
backless tops
hats or caps
sleeveless garments
skirts two inches or more above the knee
dresses or skirts with a high-cut split in the back, front, or side
clothing that looks like inmate clothing (khaki or green military-type clothing)

Plan your trip

the prison location
the prison type
inmate visiting needs
availability of visiting space

The inmate you plan to visit should tell you what the visiting schedule is for that prison; however, if you have any questions please contact that particular facility .

General Visiting Hours

Camp general visiting hours, fsl general visiting hours.

Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani and Arizona 'fake electors' charged with state crimes

A state grand jury in Arizona on Wednesday indicted Trump aide s including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and Boris Epshteyn, as well as s o-called "fake electors" who backed then-President Donald Trump in 2020, after a sprawling investigation into the alleged efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the presidential election in the state.

One month after the 2020 election, 11 Trump supporters convened at the Arizona GOP’s headquarters in Phoenix to sign a certificate claiming to be Arizona’s 11 electors to the Electoral College, though Biden won the state by 10,457 votes and state officials certified his electors. The state Republican Party documented the signing of the certificate in a social media post and sent it to Congress and the National Archives.

Trump is described as “Unindicted Coconspirator 1” in the indictment, which includes charges of conspiracy, fraud and forgery. The document also describes people who have been charged in the case but have not yet been served and whose names are redacted: Meadows, Trump's former White House chief of staff; Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Trump attorney; Epshteyn, a Trump campaign official and attorney; former Trump campaign and White House official Mike Roman; former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis; former Trump attorney Christina Bobb; and John Eastman, another attorney and Trump legal adviser in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Epshteyn sat at the defense table with Trump when he was arraigned in his New York hush money case last year, though he has not appeared during the trial.

Ted Goodman, a spokesperson for Giuliani, said in a statement Wednesday that Giuliani “is proud to stand up for the countless Americans who raised legitimate concerns surrounding the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.”

Also among those charged in Arizona is Kelli Ward, who served as chair of the Arizona GOP during the 2020 election and the immediate aftermath. She tweeted on Jan. 6, 2021, after the attack on the U.S. Capitol: “Congress is adjourned. Send the elector choice back to the legislatures.” Ward was a Trump elector and a consistent propagator of false claims that Arizona’s election results were rigged.

Others charged along with Ward as "fake electors" were: state legislators Anthony Kern and Jake Hoffman; Michael Ward, Kelli Ward’s husband; Tyler Bowyer, the Republican National Committee's Arizona committeeman and the chief operating officer of the Trump-aligned Turning Point USA; Greg Safsten, the former Arizona GOP executive director; former U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon; Robert Montgomery, the former head of the Cochise County GOP; and Republican Party activists Samuel Moorhead, Nancy Cottle and Loraine Pellegrino.

Another passage of the indictment appears to describe attorney Kenneth Chesebro, one of the planners of the alleged scheme, as an unindicted coconspirator. Chesebro pleaded guilty last year in Georgia to conspiracy charges brought against him, Trump and 17 other people in the state. He is also believed to be one of the unidentified co-conspirators special counsel Jack Smith described in his federal election interference indictment of Trump last year.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, led the investigation. She won her election to be the state’s chief prosecutor in November 2022, replacing Republican Mark Brnovich, a onetime ally of Trump who later earned his scorn for not substantiating his claims of election fraud in the state.

"We conducted a thorough and professional investigation over the past 13 months into the fake electors scheme in our state," Mayes said in a video announcing the charges . "I understand for some of you today didn't come fast enough. And I know I'll be criticized by others for conducting this investigation at all. But as I've stated before, and we'll say here again, today, I will not allow American democracy to be undermined."

The Republican Party of Arizona said in statement posted to X that the indictments represented a “blatant and unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial power, aimed solely at distracting the public from the critical policy debates our country should be focusing on as we approach the 2024 election.”

“The timing of these charges-precisely four years after the 2020 election and as President Biden seeks re-election-is suspiciously convenient and politically motivated. This is not justice; it is pure election interference,” it said. “They do nothing but undermine the trust in our state’s legal processes and are clearly designed to silence dissent and weaponize the law against political opponents.”

The Arizona charges are the latest example of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election sprouting into legal cases during his 2024 bid to retake office.

Arizona was one of seven states where “alternate electors” signed paperwork falsely claiming Trump had won the states. Prosecutors have already charged “alternate electors” in Nevada , Georgia and Michigan .

Chesebro and others, including Eastman , argued in the months after the 2020 election that then-Vice President Mike Pence could use the existence of the alternate electors to name Trump the winner of the election as he presided over the electoral vote count in Congress on Jan. 6.

Eastman wrote in a memo: “At the end, he announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States. … There are at this point 232 votes for Trump, 222 votes for Biden. Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.”

Trump lost Arizona by just under 11,000 votes. As the Republican electors sent illegitimate certifications to Washington, Trump sought to put pressure on Maricopa County officials and other Arizona Republicans, including then-state House Speaker Rusty Bowers and then-Gov. Doug Ducey.

Trump placed a phone call directly to Ducey as the governor certified the state’s election results. Ducey muted the call.

Mayes’ term as Arizona attorney general has been marked by other election cases stemming from Trump’s false claims about fraud in the 2020 election and after.

Last fall, Mayes charged two local officials who delayed the certification of midterm election results in 2022 in Cochise County. The officials voted against certifying the county’s election results by the statutory deadline after they aired baseless accusations about the integrity of the election for months. The county certified its election results only after a court ordered it to do so.

Vaughn Hillyard is a correspondent for NBC News.

Dareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.

IMAGES

What Actually is a Conjugal Prison Visit
Conjugal Visits and Prison History
How do conjugal visits work in prisons?
How do conjugal visits work in prisons?
How Do Conjugal Visits Work?
How Do Conjugal Visits Work?

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COMMENTS

How Do Conjugal Visits Work?
A conjugal visit is a popular practice that allows inmates to spend time alone with their loved one (s), particularly a significant other, while incarcerated. By implication, and candidly, conjugal visits afford prisoners an opportunity to, among other things, engage their significant other sexually. However, in actual content, such visits go ...
States That Allow Conjugal Visits
An "extended family visit" may be an opportunity for the prisoner to spend time with his or her relatives and children, but it is also used as a euphemism for conjugal visits. A conjugal visit is private time that a prisoner may spend with a spouse or married partner. The idea behind such visitation is to allow inmates to have intimate contact ...
Conjugal visit
A conjugal visit is a scheduled period in which an inmate of a prison or jail is permitted to spend several hours or days in private with a visitor. The visitor is usually their legal spouse. The generally recognized basis for permitting such visits in modern times is to preserve family bonds and increase the chances of success for a prisoner's eventual return to ordinary life after release ...
The Process and Regulations for Conducting Conjugal Visits in ...
First, the inmate's spouse applies to the prison administration. If the application is approved, they can move on to the next step: the background check and health screening. This ensures the couple doesn't pose a danger to each other. In some states, there may be additional steps before the visit.
Conjugal Visits
Conjugal visits began around 1918 at Parchman Farm, a labor camp in Mississippi. At first, the visits were for black prisoners only, and the visitors were local prostitutes, who arrived on Sundays and were paid to service both married and single inmates. According to historian David Oshinsky, Jim Crow-era prison officials believed African ...
Benefits and risks of conjugal visits in prison: A systematic
Imprisonment impacts on lives beyond the prisoner's. In particular, family and intimate relationships are affected. Only some countries permit private conjugal visits in prison between a prisoner and community living partner. Aims. Our aim was to find evidence from published international literature on the safety, benefits or harms of such visits.
Controversy and Conjugal Visits
"The words 'conjugal visit' seem to have a dirty ring to them for a lot of people," a man named John Stefanisko wrote for The Bridge, a quarterly at the Connecticut Correctional Institution at Somers, in December 1963.This observation marked the beginning of a long campaign—far longer, perhaps, than the men at Somers could have anticipated—for conjugal visits in the state of ...
Prisons control incarcerated people's relationships and their access to
At Parchman, corrections officers authorized the first documented conjugal visits, arranging for local sex workers to enter the prison to incentivize incarcerated men to work harder in the prison cotton fields. Rooted in stereotypes about race and hypersexuality, these visits were initially only offered to Black Parchman prisoners.
An Incarcerated Journalist Explains Conjugal Visits and What Sex in
In the eyes of the law, conjugal visits are a privilege, not a right. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld prison administrators' latitude to limit prisoners' rights, including visitation ...
Which states allow conjugal visits?
A brief glance at the origins of conjugal visits in the U.S. prison system quickly disproves that theory, showing that conjugal visit programs were conceived as a tool of exploitation and social control. ... Parchman officials started offering sex to Black prisoners as a productivity incentive, "because prison officials wanted as much work as ...
Benefits and risks of conjugal visits in prison: A systematic
Abstract. Background Imprisonment impacts on lives beyond the prisoner's. In particular, family and intimate relationships are affected. Only some countries permit private conjugal visits in ...
What is a Conjugal Visit and Do California Prisons Offer Them?
A conjugal visit is where an inmate gets to see their family with some slight level of privacy and intimacy. One of the big misconceptions about these visits is that they are purely designed to allow prisoners to have sex. While that may be how the program started and may be part of the experience for married couples, the true purpose of the ...
So What are the Actual Rules with Conjugal Visits and How Did They Get
In fact, in New York, it's reported that around 40% of conjugal visits don't include a spouse or the like, rather often just children and other loved ones. For this reason, these visits are usually officially called things like "Extended Family Visits" or, in New York, the "Family Reunion Program". As one California inmate summed up ...
How To Visit An Inmate In Prison
Do not put on a dress that resembles the inmate's clothes in design or color, and that of the staff. Do not visit in medical scrubs or any sort of uniform, as this may pose a threat to the facility's security. You must dress in shirts and put on shoes. Clothes that expose sensitive parts of the body are prohibited.
What is a Conjugal Visit?
However, prison officials usually exclude individuals convicted of domestic violence and sex crimes and those serving life sentences from the eligibility list. Conjugal visits are private periods an inmate spends with a spouse. The purpose behind such visits is to permit inmates to have intimate contact with their partners, including sexual ...
Types of Visits
In-Person Visits. Most incarcerated people in the general population may participate in an in-person visit. These visits allow the incarcerated person to sit together with their visitor (s) in a designated shared space, usually furnished with tables and chairs. In-person visits are limited to five visitors at a time and are not limited in ...
Conjugal Visitation in American Prisons Today
American courts have almost unanimously refused to declare that any class of incarcerated persons is entitled to conjugal visitation rights. Only one court decision has declared that any such right exists. However, demands are still made in the courts for the implementation of conjugal visitation programs. Evolving standards of what constitutes ...
Conjugal Visiting in United States Prisons
1979. Length. 28 pages. Annotation. CASE LAW, INSTITUTIONAL PROGRAMS, PUBLIC OPINION, AND THE U.S. CONSTITUTION ARE ALL INVOKED IN THE FIGHT FOR PRISONERS' RIGHT TO HAVE CONJUGAL VISITS. Abstract. STUDIES ILLUSTRATE THE SEVERE IMPACT PROLONGED DEPRIVATION OF INTIMATE AND SEXUAL CONTACT CAN HAVE ON THE PERSONALITY STRUCTURE OF THE INMATE ...
Prison visits
Conjugal and private visits with temporary release from prison were found to be more effective (in older studies) in reducing reoffending than in-person visits to prison. In implementing prison visits, prison facilities are advised to offer concessions in visiting fees in jurisdictions where this applies, as well as providing more public ...
What States Allow Conjugal Visits?
James Parchman, the warden, used conjugal visits as an incentive for male prisoners (who were mostly African-American) to work harder in the prison's farming industry. However, the state later canceled the costly program despite protests from prisoners' families and rights groups who believed that even infrequent visitations promote family ...
BOP: How to visit a federal inmate
General Visiting Information. Make sure your visit will be a success by carefully following these four steps. Locate the inmate. Discover or confirm the whereabouts of the inmate you would like to visit. Be Approved. Before you can visit you must be placed on the inmate's approved visiting list. Be Prepared.
EXTENDED FAMILY VISITS IN PRISON
1. a certified copy of the child's birth certificate showing the inmate as the biological father, 2. a written document from an authorized visitor stating that he or she will accompany the child, and. 3. consent to the visit in a notarized letter from the child's legal guardian. CR:ka.
How do conjugal visits work in prisons?
How do conjugal visits work in prisons?May 25, 2019Conjugal visits are there to help preserve families. ... Conjugal visits are also called extended family v...
There's nothing woke about ruling against sleep deprivation in prison
In northern European prisons, there are features rarely found in America, such as cells with natural daylight and the opportunity to earn through exemplary behavior the occasional conjugal visits ...
Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani and Arizona 'fake electors' charged with
A state grand jury in Arizona on Wednesday indicted Trump aide s including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and Boris Epshteyn, as well as s o-called "fake electors" who backed then-President Donald ...

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