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.