Yale Law School had a pretty important study in 2012, which makes it clear that these are both incentives for good behavior, but also that it's really good for reducing violence in the prison and so forth. I mean, there's been several studies - American Journal of Criminal Justice has a pretty important study in 2012. MARTIN: Well, is there any data to show that it, in fact, has this benefit? But, again, we need to understand that this is something that's given to people who are in medium to minimum-security facilities, with the idea being that it's very important for people to see their families because there's just so much evidence that shows that this is good for society in general. THOMPSON: Each state has a slightly different arrangement, but basically these could be trailers or they could be small apartments. Can, what? Stay for the weekend? How does it work? MARTIN: But how does it actually work? I mean, is it that these are, what - trailers or there are facilities or buildings set aside on the prison grounds where families. And it's really unfortunate that this focus has been on the sex and the conjugal part of this program because the idea is that this is about both the good of families on the outside as well as people on the inside. And eventually, the various states that have it - the idea is to really keep families together. THOMPSON: Well, eventually even Mississippi, I mean, Mississippi in the '30s extends this to white prisoners, and in 1972 extends it to women. MARTIN: So has the attitude about it changed? Is it now believed to be, what - a way to keep family bonds intact? And so they did so by carrots and sticks, and of course the sticks were much more frequent and much more brutal. The historian that really writes the most about this, David Oshinsky, makes clear, though, that it was quite explicit also that this is what whites thought and that their bottom line desire was to get as much productivity as they could. THOMPSON: Well, certainly holding out the carrot of having sex was quite explicit.
Was this explicit? I mean, were they - did they say, if you meet such and such a quota, then you get a conjugal visit? And unfortunately, the origins of this are quite insidious, which is that there was a belief at the time that - on part of white Mississippians - that African-Americans had stronger sexual desires than whites and that having sex provided for them would make them work harder as an incentive. After the Civil War when - many laws changed so that there was a much higher incarceration rate of African-Americans, primarily to staff and to labor the former plantations, there was a major increase of black labor in Mississippi penitentiaries, such as Parchman Farm. THOMPSON: Well, it's an interesting history. actually started in Mississippi in around 1918. MARTIN: You were telling us that conjugal visits in the U.S. She's an associate professor of History at Temple University and she's with us now. But this made us curious about the history of conjugal visits. But now officials there say that the privilege is too expensive to maintain and they will end them. Mississippi is one of only six states where these visits are still permitted for lower-level offenders. We're talking about conjugal visits, also known as extended family visits. Now we go to Mississippi where a change in prison conditions is set to take place next week.
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