Mid-nineteenth century U.S. prisons ran a brisk business of exhibiting prisoners to the public. Female spectators, who predominated among prison spectators, were identified as causing prisoners to masturbate. With respect to Sing Sing Prison in 1864, the Prison Association of New York‘s inspection committee stated:

There is evidence which satisfies the committee that an unhealthy stimulus in this direction {masturbation} is caused by the presence of female visitors, groups of whom almost daily pass through the workshops on their tours of observation.^

The committee did not recommend ending spectator tours of prisons or providing conjugal visits or the equivalent. Instead, it recommended “vivid exhibition of the terrible consequences of this vice, both as it respects the body and the soul,” tender, patient, and discrete moral exhortation, and distribution of a religious tract describing masturbation’s extreme physical and moral consequences.

Masturbation was prevalent among prisoners. The Prison Association’s committee, reporting on Sing Sing Prison in 1864, declared:

Self-abuse is practised in this as in other prisons to a most lamentable degree. Convicts who do not indulge in it are but exceptional case; the majority give it a loose rein.^

Emphasizing the seriousness with which this practice was viewed, officials of the Philadelphia County Prison reported “death was caused by masturbation” for ten prisoners’ deaths between 1835 and 1845.^