Litigation, a legal loophole and pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union to respect First Amendment rights have brought the issue of pornography in prison to the forefront in recent weeks.
A Washington man accused of molesting young boys got his hands on child pornography this week because of a legal loophole, the Boston Globe reported. In Michigan in the meantime, an inmate is suing the state over his jail's ban on pornographic materials, arguing that he is being subjected to "cruel and unusual punishment," according to the Detroit News. The incidents, in concert with the ACLU's recent campaign to force a South Carolina prison to loosen restrictions on reading materials to include pornography, have sparked controversy about whether pornography is harmful or harmless in the prison environment.
No prisons allow inmates access to child pornography. Because Weldon Marc Gilbert, a former pilot, is acting as his own lawyer, he is legally allowed to review the evidence against him, ABC News reported. That includes hundreds of videos he made of the abuse.
Pierce County prosecutor Mark Lindquist said he intends to fight the judge's decision to approve Gilbert's access to the porn based on a previous Washington Supreme Court decision.
"In my 16 years as a prosecutor, this is one of the most absurd and maddening results I've ever heard of," Lindquist said. "We don't have to turn over the guns used as evidence for a defendant … and it's absurd that we have to turn over the child porn as evidence."
State policies on adult pornography, though, are "all over the place," according to the Hartford Courant. Some states attempt to define what is acceptable and what is not. Some states, like Alabama and Arizona, ban it completely. Connecticut became the latest to crack down on sexually explicit material Monday when officials announced prisoners have until June 30, 2012, to wean themselves off pornography.
Connecticut decided to ban pornography because inmates fought over it and stole it from each other, the Hartford Courant reported. Staff members also felt it was counterproductive for sex offenders who were undergoing treatment to be surrounded by pornography in their living quarters.
On a scientific level, the idea of connecting pornography with increased aggression has been a hot topic for decades. As early as 1986, for example, researchers like Neil Malamuth and Joseph Ceniti argued men were more easily angered and had a greater "desire to hurt" after repeated exposure to pornography. Recent meta-analyses of such scientific studies, have concluded "experimental research shows that exposure to nonviolent or violent pornography results in increases in both attitudes supporting sexual aggression and in actual aggression," according to Neil M. Malamuth's 2000 Review of Sex Research.
"This material is detrimental to the safety and security of our institutions, to our efforts to rehabilitate the offender population, and it creates a hostile work environment for our staff, which is exposed to it on a daily basis," said Connecticut Correction Commissioner Leo C. Arnone in a prepared statement.
An editorial published in the Hartford Courant Thursday backed up Connecticut's decision. "It should be axiomatic that incarcerated people enjoy fewer freedoms than the general population, starting with the right to move about freely and associate with whom one wishes," the newspaper wrote. "It ought to be entirely within the purview of the Department of Correction to decide which materials are allowed inside correctional facilities, including printed material."
The ACLU argued, though, that pornography bans are enforced in an "arbitrary and overly broad manner."
"Similar regulations have been used to censor an image of the Sistine Chapel, newspapers and magazines with lingerie ads and the novel 'Ulysses,'" Andrew Schneider, executive director of the ACLU of Connecticut, told the Hartford Courant.
In a recent article in Salon Magazine, writer Tracy Clark-Flory concluded that pornography does not incite prison violence.
"There isn't evidence that porn causes aggression — and yet prisons continue to ban explicit material on those very grounds," she said. "Considering our general disregard for science — not to mention the fact that prisoners' sexual fantasy lives are not at the top of most people's lists of important world problems — it's no real surprise."
Citing research by Milton Diamond and Ayako Uchiyama, she argued that research linking pornography with increased aggression is invalid because "there is a fundamental problem with assuming that people in the real world function just like these laboratory experiments."
Kyle Richards, the 21-year-old inmate who is suing Michigan for the right to access sexually explicit photographs, made a different argument for allowing pornography in prisons, according to the Detroit News.
In his five-page handwritten lawsuit, Richards complained that the lack of pornographic materials behind bars forces him to endure "a poor standard of living."
"Such living conditions have been used as a method of 'psychological warfare' against prisoners, in order to both destroy the morale of inmates and break the spirit of individuals," wrote Richards, who has been accused of bank robbery. "Sexual deprivation has been used against plaintiff in a way as to both sexually frustrate the plaintiff, deprive the plaintiff of any sort of sexual gratification, and deny the plaintiff his right to sexual reproduction."
Richards has had three unrelated cases thrown out by judges who ruled them frivolous. He has found little support, including his state's ACLU chapter.
"Prisons have a lot of leeway to regulate the material that comes in and out," Michigan ACLU executive director Kary Moss told the Free Press.
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