The most liberal prisoner communication policies in the U.S. developed beyond the boundaries of public deliberation. By 1918, the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman was allowing black prisoners to have intimate visits.^ This plantation-style penitentiary was officially established in 1901 in an isolated, rural area. Mississippi at this time placed black citizens in the position of an inferior caste. The state was fundamentally concerned to preserve white minority rule.
Like censorship of prison library books, the system of intimate visits for prisoners at Parchman “evolved in a very informal manner.”^ Racist views of black men’s sexuality and the value of rewarding black men for productive labor apparently contributed to the innovation. A long-time employee at Parchman, expressing the racism and sexism that was surely prevalent in early twentieth-century Mississippi, probably described well the rationale for Parchman’s communication policy:
Hell, nobody knows when it started. It just started. You gotta understand, mister, that back in them days n****rs were pretty simple creatures. Give a n****r some pork, some greens, some cornbread and some p**nt**g ever now and then and he would work for you. And workin’ was what it was all about then. I never saw it, but I heard tell of truckloads of whores bein’ brought up from Cleveland at dusk. The cons who had a good day got to get ’em some right there between the rows. In my day we got civilized – put ’em in little houses and told everybody that them whores was wives. That kept the Baptists off our backs.^
Renaming whores as wives served legitimate penological interests, as those interests were understood at the Parchman penitentiary in Mississippi early in the twentieth century.
The first description of the Parchman intimate-visiting program in a professional presentation occurred in 1959.^ By that time, prison officials no longer brought prostitutes to the prisoners, the program was open to both black and white prisoners, and it was limited to married male prisoners. A scholar who in 1969 published a book about the provision of sexual visits to prisoners at Parchman noted that this program “has received remarkably little attention”:
Most knowledge of the practice has been limited to personal communication at meetings {among criminologist and penologists} and a brief article or two in popular magazines.^
By the mid-1970s, married female prisoners at Parchman were being allowed conjugal visits.^ Throughout this period the program operated on the basis of informally understood practice. Written policy for the Parchman visiting program was established only in the 1980s.^ The deliberative structure that supported this program could hardly have been more different from the detailed, extensively documented deliberation about the Auburn and Pennsylvania systems for suppressing prisoners’ communication.