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Progressive-Era Prisons and the Emergence of Prison Sexual Culture

"Fag Follies" and football games would seem to be worlds away from the dens of solitude and enforced silence held as carceral ideals just a few decades before. Changes in prison administration and prison architecture and penology aimed at enhancing inmate sociability in the 1910s and 1920s combined to create new sexual possibilities among prisoners. Material changes in prison architecture and administration that made possible new forms of contact between inmates made sexual contact more likely well, creating new sexual geographies behind bars. Prison writers probably devoted more attention to prison sex in the early twentieth century, at least in part, because there was more sex in prison to attend to.

Beginning in the 1910s, Progressive reformers undertook an ambitious agenda to transform the prison. While few prisons if any had achieved the utopian nineteenth-century goal of perfect carceral solitude, a new generation of prison reformers and administrators judged those earlier visions once inhumane and impractical. Armed with progressive ideas about trinality that emphasized environmental and psychological causes over congenital and moral ones, reformers repudiated nineteenth-century strategies of solitary penitential reflection as well as the disciplinary practices of lockstep marching, the rule of silence, the humiliation of striped uniforms, and corporal punishments such as flogging and the water torture, and the shackling of inmates to cell walls still practiced in many prisons. Embracing a new commitment to correction and rehabilitation, they encouraged inmate sociability, collective labor, exercise, and recreation that, they hoped, might approximate the normal society to which the reformed criminal would return.

The federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, opened in 1932, was built with six dormitories rather than cells, with the notion that "the openness promotes rehabilitation by teaching men how to get along with each other. " Some prisons built baseball diamonds and exercise yards and organized football leagues and prison bands, and prisoners in many institutions began to enjoy weekly movie nights. Some reform-minded prison administrators went so far as to give prisoners a role in the government of their own community. A pioneer in the concept of inmate self-government, reformer and warden Thomas Mott Osborne established the Mutual Welfare League in the New York state prisons at Auburn and Sing Sing. Designed to train prisoners in the exercise of democracy, the league was composed of a committee of prisoners elected by their peers and responsible for overseeing prison disciplinary procedures.

Changes in prison architecture and its uses, reflected most centrally in the yard, accompanied and reinforced new ideas about prison life. An iconic feature of the "Big Houses" of the day - Sing Sing, San Quentin, Stateville, and Jackson foremost among them - "the yard" referred typically to an open expanse in the middle of the prison. Often surrounded by imposing and fortified walls and towers, its barbed-wire (and later electrified) borders were closely patrolled by armed guards. The activities within, however, were often considerably less strictly monitored than its perimeters. As "freedom of the yard" was gradually extended, prisoners spent less time by themselves in their cells and more time mingling with each other.

The resulting prison sociability ran directly counter to the Benthamite vision of strict surveillance and perfect discipline, and was captured in the writing of many prisoners. On admission to Utah's state penitentiary, Jack Black explained that he was "turned loose in the yard where there were about one hundred prisoners." There, the prisoners played poker all day in the yard on blankets, and occasionally a game bull, when they could get up enough ambition." Inmate George Wright described the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth in 1915 as "a Jory": "All the prisoners are allowed to roam anywhere inside the walls, you can say run foot races, or anything you like." Edward Bunker told of living "two lives" as an inmate at San Quentin a few decades later in the early 1950s, "one in the cell from 4:30 p.m. to 8:00 am.. the other in the Big Yard." "In those days," Bunker explained, "convicts had the run of the inside of the prison. Each morning when the cell gate opened, I sallied forth to find adventure."

The yard was a place of exercise, organized athletics, and casual congregation. Reformers and administrators hoped that these changes would promote a healthier, more "natural" environment that would help prepare prisoners for life after release. But inmates in early-twentieth-century prisons took advantage of the new blind spots in prison surveillance to engage in a range of illicit as well as licit activities, including drug dealing and consuming, fighting, and sex. "Every day at nine o'clock the cells were opened by the turnkeys, and the men circulated freely in the entire prison block for the rest of the day," African American Communist organizer Angelo Herndon recalled in his 1937 autobiography. "This made it possible for the prisoners with homosexual inclinations to go prowling around for their private pleasures." Prisoner Malcolm Braly recalled a time, before the segregation of homosexuals at San Quentin initiated at the beginning of warden Clinton Duffy's regime in 1941, when "the queens had been free to swish around the yard and carry on open love affairs." The "corner of the yard" was the site of a wedding ceremony between male inmates observed by Piri Thomas, as well as for the wedding ceremonies of inmates of the women's penitentiary at Bedford Hills years later.

The new uses of the yard opened up a place of sexual display and opportunity in many prisons. But a loosely supervised yard could also be a place of sexual vulnerability and danger. "Vast and forbidding when empty," the yard, in prison chaplain Julius Leibert's description, was "a monster when packed. Five thousand heads, ... and a million pent-up hungers aching to burst forth-that's the yard. Perverts on the prowl, jockers' ganging up on a fish, 'queens' reveling in fights between rivals for their favors, homos pairing off for an affair or quarreling like obscene lovers."

The early twentieth century also witnessed the expansion of profit-making prison industries, bringing together prisoners to work in laundries, woodshops, metal shops, forges, mines, quarries, and farms. Collective workshops were much less closely monitored than cellblocks, and the movement of prisoners there, as on the yard, was less carefully regulated. These changes also produced new opportunities, settings, and spaces for encounters between prisoners, some of them sexual. Inmate John Reynolds had earlier warned of the "horrible and revolting practices of the mines" where prisoners labored together side by side in the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. There, "far removed from light and even from the influences of their officers," prisoners were free to "mistreat themselves and sometimes the younger ones that are associated with them in the work." Years later, Ted Ditsworth described his first day working to coal mine as a prisoner in Missouri in the 1920s:

"I had many propositions where these miners would dig my task for me if I would be their kid - was they meant was that they wanted to use me in a homosexual way."

Some of this new inmate sociability and relative freedom from scrutiny was the result of progressive planning, and some was an inevitable consequence of the overcrowding of prisons that had vexed nineteenth-century prison administrators and intensified in the twentieth century. The prison population in the United States more than doubled between 1890 and 1925 and grew even more rapidly from 1920 until World War II, swelling with the rise in unemployment during the Depression. Despite a new commitment to identifying and classifying homosexual, mentally ill, and "hardened" prisoners in order to segregate them from the general population, not all prisons could afford to employ trained psychiatrists or had the physical space to put those plans fully in place.

Overcrowded prisons carried associations of sexual impropriety for early-twentieth-century observers, as they had for their predecessors a century earlier. Louis Berg cited overcrowding as a serious factor contributing to prison homosexuality, writing that "when two or more men are confined in one cell and sex starvation has existed for some time, "doubling up' becomes more than a mere expression to denote cell occupancy. One prisoner described life in the military disciplinary barracks in 1919 as a place where "a man of refined sensibilities is often quartered in the same double-decked bunk with a degenerate or a moral pervert." Investigator Dean Harno wrote to sociologist Ernest W. Burgess in 1927 about the reformatory at Pontiac, Michigan: "All cells have two inmates and quite a number have three. This brings a very acute matter in connection with the morals of the institution." A prisoner of that institution called Pontiac "a 'deformatory'" in 1927, noting of sexual perverts: "They take them fellows and separate them in a separate building so they don't have to mix with the other fellows." Unevenly instituted in prison for men, the practice of segregating homosexuals was virtually unheard of most institutions for women. Kahn noted that, at the Women's Workhouse on Welfare Island, "the homosexuals have been unclassified and are not segregated so that they all mingle freely with the other and are not segregated. "

Prisons varied dramatically by geographical region, and certainly not all prisons put progressive reforms into practice. Many Western state penitentiaries in the early decades of the twentieth century, some resembling hastily built stockades, allowed for little if any classification and segregation of prisoners by offense, sexual disposition, or any other taxonomy. Prisons were peripheral to the criminal justice system that emerged in the South after the Civil War, and some Southern states lacked them altogether. Instead, convict-lease systems flourished in the post-bellum South, drawing heavily on a newly criminalized population of black men and essentially replacing the labor system of slavery. Prisoners in that system were contracted out by the state to work on sugar and cotton plantations, in coal and phosphate mines, turpentine farms, brickyards, quarries, and sawmills, and on levee and railroad construction, where they were exposed to harsh conditions and often brutal treatment. Later in the 1930s, prisoners in the South worked on chain gangs, moving about in labor camps rather than housed in permanent prisons. Mississippi's notorious Parchman penal farm, with its sprawling cotton acreage, predominantly African American field hands, and armed white overseers, resembled an antebellum plantation more closely than it did a modern prison. Constructed in 1904, Parchman served the postbellum imperatives of racial subordination and control and provided as well a cheap and steady labor supply for the rapidly industrializing New South.

Even those prisons furthest removed from Progressive ideals, however, allowed for considerable interaction among prisoners. Convicts leased by railroad companies "slept side by side, shackled together" in mobile iron cells. Collective work and living conditions on prison plantations, in which men worked together by day and slept together in stacked bunks in barracks known as "cages" by night, also allowed for considerable unsupervised contact among inmates, albeit under horrific conditions.

With this increase in inmate interaction and sociability emerged a distinctive and broad-based prison culture that expanded and flourished in the early twentieth century. Prison accounts in this period recognized the development of a prisoners' code of behavior and ethics, the establishment of a tradition of prison tattooing, prison songs and work chants, and the emergence of a comprehensive prison argot. Prison sexual culture was part of this efflorescence of inmate cultural life and increasingly expansive communal life among prisoners.

- Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. p. 73-75

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