From the 1830s, communication between prisoners and family and friends increased through low-profile, local changes in prison rules. Penal reformers early in the nineteenth century were intensely concerned about communication among prisoners. Communication between prisoners and their family and friends was little discussed. These latter ad hoc communication policies varied considerably, but over time became less restrictive. For example, New York’s Sing Sing prison in 1839 was fully suppressing prisoners’ communication with family and friends:

No communications were allowed between the prisoners and their friends, neither personally nor by letter; and so thoroughly was this arrangement carried out that a convict from his commitment to his release was as completely cut off from his family as if dead^

A new administration at Sing Sing in 1840 gave convicts the opportunity to send and receive personal letters and receive personal visits.^ ^ Another change in administration in 1843 cut off prisoners’ personal correspondence and abridged personal visiting. By 1849, prisoners at Sing Sing were again allowed to engage in personal correspondence. Prisoners at the Auburn prison and at least three other state penitentiaries similarly had such communication opportunities.^

U.S. Prisons' Communication Policies About 1870

(% of reporting prisons with given frequency limit)

frequency limit	Writing Letters	Receiving Visits
no restriction	11%	33%
restricted, but more than one per month	20%	9%
monthly	46%	31%
less than monthly, more than bimonthly	7%	4%
one every three months	17%	22%
less than one every three months	0%	0%
reporting prisons	46	45
Source: see 19th-century prisoner communication in US.

More comprehensive evidence from the mid-nineteenth-century shows considerable communication policy variation within the common practice of permitting some communication between prisoners and their families and friends. State prisons in the U.S. about 1870 imposed no frequency restrictions on prisoners receiving letters, but writing letters and meeting with friends and family were subject to frequency restrictions. Prisoners were allowed to write one letter per month in 46% of reporting prisons (mainly state prisons) about 1870. The state prisons in Maine and Missouri allowed prisoners to write at state expense once every three months and monthly, respectively. Prisoners were permitted to write at their expense weekly in Maine and more often than monthly in Missouri. The most constraining regulation on prisoners writing letters to family and friends was one letter allowed every three months. That was the policy in 17% of U.S. state prisons about 1870.

In state prisons about 1870, personal visits with family and friends were permitted at a frequency of one every three months or greater. About a third of reporting state prisons imposed no restrictions on frequency of visits. That was similar to the typically unrestricted communication policy in jails. Lack of restrictions on visiting for some state prisons may reflect the practical difficulty of actually visiting prisoners in relatively remote prisons. While a higher share of prisons allowed unrestricted visiting compared to unrestricted letter writing, restrictions on visiting were not uniformly less stringent than restrictions on writing letters: 22% of prisons restricted personal visits to one every three months, compared to 17% doing so for letter writing. Overall, the pattern of communication liberalization across prisons and across modes of communication was disparate.

Regulation of Writing Letters from U.S. State Prisons About 1912

maximum permitted frequency of writing letters	% of states
unlimited letter writing	17%
3-5 letters per month	42%
1-2 letters per month	40%
1 letter per 2 months	2%
less than 1 letter per 2 months	0%
Note: 48 states reporting. Source: see prisoner communication early in 20th century.

Liberalization of prisoners’ communication with family and friends has continued through to the present. By 1912, state prisons in 59% of U.S. states allowed prisoners to write three or more letters per month. Eight states did not restrict the number of letters that prisoners could write. Virginia, the most restrictive state, limited prisoners to writing no more than one letter every two months. Prisons in eleven states divided prisoners into different classes and regulated communication differently for the different classes of prisoners. This class-based regulation often differentiated between being allowed to write one letter per month and being allowed to write two or four letters per month. That structure of regulation suggests that such differences mattered to prisoners. Prisoners in the U.S. in 1912 typically were allowed to write letters five to ten times as frequently as they were allowed about 1870.

Prisoners’ opportunities to correspond and visit in person with family and friends continued to increase across the twentieth century. In 1971, 58% of U.S. state prisons allowed prisoners to send an unlimited number of letters. Among those same prisons in 1981, the share limiting letters from prisoners to less than eight per week fell from 37% to 3%. Prisoners were also allowed more frequent visits from family and friends. In 1956, U.S. prisons typically allowed family and friends to visit prisoners twice per month. Only 6% allowed at least five visits per month. In 1981, 75% of state prisons allowed at least five visits per month. By 1987, 35% of U.S. state prisons allowed prisoners to receive visits daily. Eastern State Penitentiary, a leading early model for attempting to suppress completely prisoners’ communication, in 1970 was allowing inmates to receive an unlimited number of letters.

Communication Policies in U.S. State Prisons, 1956-2005

in given year, prisoners allowed to:	1956	1971	1981	1991	2005
receive at least five visits per month	6%	56%	75%	76%	62%
send at least eight letters per week		63%	97%	99%	99%
receive at least eight letters per week		97%	100%	99%	99%
receive telephone calls		38%	44%	33%	12%
make telephone calls		14%	94%	90%	82%
make more than three phone calls each month		7%	66%	86%	82%
number of prisons surveyed	112	64	66	91	162
Sources: see US prisoner communication policies since 1956.

Extending telephone service to prisoners was a relatively late development in the U.S. About a third of U.S. households in 1920 had telephone service. By 1970, 85% of households had telephone service. However, in 1971, all U.S. prisons surveyed did not allow prisoners to receive ordinary telephone calls. Prisoners in 86% of prisons in 1971 were not allowed to make any ordinary telephone calls. In U.S. federal prisons in the 1970s, prisoners were allowed to make one call every three months.^ Telephone service for prisoners expanded rapidly in the 1970s. In 2005, 82% of prisons allowed prisoners to make more than three phone calls per month.

Administrative rules in most prisons in the U.S. today no longer directly constrain the frequency of communicating with most prisoners. In 2005, about two-thirds of prisons allowed prisoners to receive at least five visits per month. Prisoners on average actually received about three visits per month. Almost all prisons allowed prisoners to send and receive at least eight letters per week. Prisoners on average actually sent and received four letters per week.^ Most prisons do not restrict the number of telephone calls that a prisoner can make.

Factors other than direct administrative rules have become the most important constraints on the frequency of prisoners’ communication with their families and friends. The quantity, quality, and practice of prisoners’ personal relationships affect the extent of communication through letters, visits, and telephone calls. Prisoners’ education affects their ability to communicate through letters. Travel costs and visiting arrangements affect the total cost and value of in-person visits to prisoners. Telephone calling rates and telephone use queuing affect the amount of prisoners’ telephone use. Different communication technologies such as text messaging and video conferencing offer different types of communication. The range of communication services available to prisoners affects their communication relative to communication now typical for persons not incarcerated.

Most prisons’ ordinary regime of confinement is now not directed toward suppressing communication among prisoners. Prisoners typically eat together, exercise together, and work together without rules forbidding communication among prisoners. In Britain, Canada, and Scotland about 1995, more than a quarter of prisoners in non-local prisons apparently shared a sleeping space with another prisoner.^ More detailed data for the U.S. indicates that 83% of prisoners in state and federal prisons shared a sleeping space with other prisoners in 1997. Only 17% of state and federal prisoners were housed in cells holding a single prisoner. While prisons now restrict some forms of communication, they do so for purposes of security and order, not because suppressing communication is itself a penological goal.

Prisoners per Sleeping Space in U.S. Federal and State Prisons, 1997

architecture type	architecture share	prisoners per sleeping space
		1	2	3	4	5 or more
all prison architectures	100.0%	17.2%	43.7%	3.0%	2.3%	33.8%
open dorm	26.9%	0.6%	1.0%	0.5%	0.4%	97.5%
dorm with cubicles	14.8%	27.3%	32.0%	4.0%	7.1%	29.5%
unit with cells	38.3%	26.8%	68.8%	2.8%	0.6%	1.0%
unit with rooms	18.3%	12.6%	65.5%	6.3%	5.0%	10.6%
other architectures	1.7%	25.0%	17.4%	1.5%	1.2%	55.6%
Source: see prisoners per sleeping space in US prisons in 1997.

Communication among prisoners has largely disappeared as an issue in current public deliberation. In 1995, about 16% of U.S. state prisons were under court order to limit their prisoner populations.^ Discussion of prisoner overcrowding, however, no longer typically concerns its effects on communication among prisoners. Prison overcrowding has become an issue with respect to prisoners’ rights, prisoners’ health, prison violence, and provision of services to prisoners.^ A male prisoner raping another male prisoner until very recently was commonly treated as if it were a joke or just punishment. The number of persons experiencing inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization while legally incarcerated in the U.S. is roughly estimated at 60,000 per year. In stark contrast to the intense early-nineteenth-century concern about communication among prisoners, relatively little concerns now exists even with respect to highly abusive communication among prisoners.

Prisons in Europe tended to liberalize prison communication regulations even more slowly than did prisons within the U.S. In the Pentonville Model Prison in England, prisoners in 1855 were allowed one fifteen-minute visit with friends after six months of confinement. Prisoners were allowed another such visit three months later. Prisoners were permitted to receive one letter every three months, to send one letter upon entering the prison, and to send one letter three months later. Prisoners in the largest cellular prison in France (at Fresnes, near Paris) had their heads hooded when moved within the prison through at least the beginning of the twentieth century.^ European countries at the beginning of the twentieth century generally had more restrictive communication policies than did state prisons in the U.S.

Among European countries plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, the most frequent limitation on visits in 1956 was one per month. Visit duration was typically regulated to be under an hour. In some countries, visits in some prisons began to be allowed only in the early twentieth century. European countries, while more tightly restricting prison visiting than the U.S., allowed prisoners greater opportunities for temporary home leave. Home leave allowed prisoners to communicate extensively with family and friends outside of prison communication regulations.^

Prisoners in England have had regular access to telephone service only since the early 1990s. In the 1960s, prisoners in England were allowed one letter per week and one visit per month. A major prisoner riot occurred at Strangeways prison in April, 1990.^ Lord Woolf’s enquiry into the causes of the Strangeways riot found that lack of communication between inmates and their families contributed to tension.^ That finding led to telephones being installed on landings in English prisons and visits being increased to one per week.^

Countries at the margins of the European sphere of public deliberation have innovated the most in regulating prisoners’ communication. Early in the twentieth century, the Philippines established the Iwahig Penal Colony. In this penal colony, prisoners were allowed to live with their families and have considerable freedom of association within geographic boundaries. Some time prior to 1947, Mexico allowed prisoners in the Federal Penitentiary in Mexico City to have intimate visits once per week. In addition, Mexico established the Tres Marias Penal Colony about that time. Like the Iwahig Penal Colony, the Tres Marias Penal Colony allowed prisoners to live with their families. Columbia took a different approach to intimate communication. In the mid-1960s, prisoners in Columbia were allowed escorted visits to a licensed house of prostitution once every two weeks.^ ^ Such programs, while poorly documented and little noticed, radically departed from the early nineteenth-century deliberative consensus to suppress prisoners’ communication.

International efforts to support prisoners’ communication with their families and friends have been relatively modest. In 1929, the International Prison Commission adopted “Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners,” later entitled “Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners.” One rule concerned prisoners’ communication with their families and friends:

31. Prisoners should have the opportunity of communicating with their relations and respectable friends, under necessary supervision. Arrangements should be made to allow this communication at regular intervals, both by receiving visits and by correspondence.^

In 1934, the League of Nations adopted this rule. In 1955, the United Nations adopted a slightly reworded version of this rule in its Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. In 1970, reviewing implementation of the Standard Minimum Rules, the Secretariat of the United Nations noted:

Letters and visits are usually regulated according to the stage of imprisonment and usually vary from once a month to twice a week. The spirit of the Rules would require a minimum of at least one letter and one visit per month. Postage should be granted to prisoners without any funds.^

In 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990, and 1996, reviews of the implementation of the Standard Minimum Rules found almost all reporting countries reported that they had implemented this rule. Among the 72 countries responding to the 1996 inquiry, 75% reported that prisoners were allowed to send letters six time or more per month. Visiting regulations were more restrictive. Twelve countries reported allowing visits only once per month (Armenia, Barbados, Belarus, China, Czech Republic, Germany, Mauritius, Mongolia, Russian Federation, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, and Vanuatu). Three countries allowed less than one visit per month to at least one regular class of prisoner (Latvia, Tajikistan, and Slovakia).^

The Standard Minimum Rules reflect rather weak international support for communication with prisoners. The rule that prisoners be allowed to communicate “at regular intervals” is prone to arbitrary interpretation. In addition, this rule and the subsequent five reviews of its implementation have taken little notice of new communication technologies such as telephones. The United Nations’ resolution, Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners, adopted in 1990, doesn’t mention prisoners’ communication with family and friends.^ The United Nations’ proposed Charter of Prisoner Rights likewise doesn’t address the issue.^ In the nineteenth century, international interest in suppressing prisoners’ communication was much more intense than current international interest in supporting prisoners’ communication.

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.

Henry Martyn Boies teaches how types of communication shape discussion of prisoners’ communication with their families and friends. From early in the nineteenth century, members of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons personally visited prisoners. Henry Martyn Boies became part of the top governing circle of Pennsylvania prisons late in the nineteenth century. Boies’ thinking on communication reflected new socio-economic developments and new currents in American intellectual life. Boies described prisoners as a separate class of persons and argued against communicating with them.

Boies was highly successful in public life. A graduate of Yale College in 1859, Boies joined his father’s gunpowder firm, Laflin, Boies & Tarck, in 1865. While Boies avoided service in the Civil War, afterwards he commanded the Thirteenth Regimental National Guard of Pennsylvania (1878-1883). He attained the rank of colonel. His first marriage, in 1861, was to Emma Brainerd, the daughter of a prominent Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia. She died in 1868. Bois’ second marriage, in 1870, was to Elizabeth L. Dickson, daughter of the president of the Delaware & Hudson Co. Boies was president of Moosic Powder Company (1869-1882), a founder and director of the Third National Bank (1872-1882), and president of the Dickson Manufacturing Company (1883-1887). All three companies were major businesses. He also was president of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), a charter member of the Second Presbyterian Church (1874), and one of the organizers and promoters of the Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia.^ ^ Boies, in short, participated in the highest ranks of public life in late nineteenth-century America.

Boies became a leading U.S. penologist. In 1887, the Governor of Pennsylvania, one of Boies’ personal friends, appointed Boies to the State Board of Public Charities. The Board’s responsibilities included overseeing penal institutions in Pennsylvania. Boies served on the Board through three successive terms, 1887 to 1902. Drawing on his public stature and his established expertise, Boies wrote two lengthy books on penology. A major New York press published both. Boies’ books were widely studied and acclaimed.

Boies’ first book, published in 1893, was entitled Prisoners and paupers; a study of the abnormal increase of criminals, and the public burden of pauperism in the United States; the causes and remedies. This book presented the then-fashionable perspective of biological evolution and Darwinian fitness. Boies favored exterminating the “abnormal and defective class,” but not directly. Instead, he advocated outlawing marriages with persons of this class, as well as their castration and sterilization. Boies explained:

We believe that the progress of medical and surgical science has opened up such a way entirely practicable, humanitarian in the highest sense, unobjectionable except upon grounds of an absurd and irrational sentiment. The discoveries in the use of anæsthetics and antiseptics have rendered it possible to remove or sterilize the organs of reproduction of both sexes without pain or danger. This is the simplest, easiest, and most effectual solution of the whole difficulty. It promptly and completely stops the horrid breed where it begins and obviates the necessity of permanent seclusion otherwise imperative.^

Beginning in 1907, sterilization laws were enacted in 33 U.S. states. More than 60,000 U.S. citizens were involuntarily sterilized.

In Prisoners and paupers, Boies also endorsed strictly repressing prisoners’ communication. Largely assimilating prisoners, paupers, and the “abnormal and defective class”, Bois declared:

Convicted prisoners should invariably be held in solitary confinement, and secluded from intercourse with the outside world. … Visits by friends and companions of convicts should be strictly prohibited, except by a member of the immediate family, at rare intervals.^

About a century earlier, leading public figure Jonas Hanway had strongly urged suppressing communication among prisoners. Unlike Hanway, Boies explicitly emphasized strictly constraining prisoners’ communication with the outside world. Boies’ primary concern was the effect of prisoners, understood as a specific class of persons, on others not of that class.

Boies’ second book, The Science of Penology (1901), did not specifically address prisoners’ communication. However, The Science of Penology largely translated the views in Prisoners and Paupers into an authoritative style useful in disciplined teaching. Boies’ work reads like modern college textbooks in a variety of disciplines:

Penology may be defined as the science of the protection of society from crime by the repression, reformation and extirpation of criminals. … It is the discovery, formulation, and explanation of the immutable laws which govern and regulate successful action for the defense of society against criminality. This knowledge is now sufficiently extensive and exact, and the consensus of intelligence concerning these laws and principles ample enough, to warrant the presentation of a distinct systems which will constitute a complete and independent science. …The science of Penology… is naturally divided into three departments or sections: Diagnostics, Therapeutics, and Hygienics. … It is a theorem of Penology that criminality is a diseased condition of human character. {italics in original}^

This type of writing readily generates test questions, e.g. 1) define Penology and state its three subdivisions, 2) true or false: criminality is a diseased condition of the human character. Occasionally, however, Boies slips into morally fraught normative analysis more characteristic of U.S. law reviews and women’s studies journals:

In America, the absence of caste and class exclusiveness, encouraging freedom of social intercourse, fairly invites the subtle microbe of degeneracy to infect all ranks and conditions and render legislation especially necessary. No family can be safe while the currents of intermarriage spread without let or hindrance over the whole people. The ferment of immorality and disease will naturally burrow upward and diffuse itself eccentrically until all are contaminated, and the nation becomes enfeebled and degenerate.^

Science of Penology was adopted as a textbook at Yale University, in both the academic and theological schools, and at other institutions of learning.^

Many persons and organizations eulogized Boies following his death in 1903.^ Among them was a penal scholar. He lavishly praised The Science of Penology:

Mr Boies is likely to exert an influence surpassing that of any of his contemporaries, in moulding the thought and inspiring the energies of future generations with correct views regarding crime and the treatment of criminals. Thus, the Science of Penology must be regarded as a really monumental work; and, while Mr Boies in many ways served his day and generation, this book is the crowning work of his life and a useful public service which justly claims for its author a grateful and lasting memory.^

Boies’ entry in the Dictionary of American Biography (1928-1936) describes his books on penology as taking “relatively advanced positions with respect to the humanitarian treatment and reformation of offenders.”

Boies work was not merely the expression of his class position and the now-discredited ideology of eugenics. What Boies wrote, and the way what he wrote was read, documents a public style of communication. Boies’ “humanitarian treatment and reformation of offenders” was intended for a course of authoritative education for persons of a different class from offenders. Offenders themselves Boies described as objects that “must be got rid of.”