Love is still the best motivation: Jarvis DeBerry
Published: Sunday, August 01, 2010, 7:00 AM
As news leads go, this one was one of my most cherished: "First came love. Then came marriage. Then came a 15-year prison sentence with no hope of conjugal visits."
In this 1997 file photo, prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola who had been evacuated for a flood move from a temporary tent city back to their dormitories.
The story, published in October 1999 about a crime the previous Thanksgiving, told the sad tale of a Slidell groom who in his apparent eagerness to get his honeymoon started was confronted with a guest who refused to leave the house where the wedding and reception were held. The guest expressed his desire to hang around and keep drinking, and the groom indirectly expressed his desire for his new wife when he picked up a steak knife and cut up the guest.
Three times the groom stabbed Mr. Party All The Time, an act officials deemed attempted murder and for which a judge gave the groom 15 years without the possibility of probation, parole or sex with his bride.
In my reporting, I called the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections to be sure that I had it right and that the couple's consummation of their marriage would be at least a decade and a half off. After all, Mississippi's Parchman Farm -- referred to in many a blues lyric as the most God-forsaken place on Earth -- allows its inmates some occasional cuddle time with their ladies.
But the conjugal visit is verboten in Louisiana, which allowed me to joke about the jailed newlywed's predicament.
Those who didn't know Louisiana's policy were informed of it last week when state prison officials announced an investigation into illicit sex between inmates at Angola and their visitors. The sheriff of West Feliciana Parish said that prison investigators had questioned 96 inmates and determined that 10 had had a little fun in a storeroom.
Sheriff J. Austin Daniel said that allegations are that some employees at the prison had been paid to look the other way during the sexual pairings and that two prison employees had resigned to avoid punishment.
There doesn't seem to be any good that can come from inmates paying prison guards for privileges, illicit or otherwise. But Louisiana probably would benefit if it gave inmates some opportunities for conjugal visits, the same way they do in that hot-bed of liberalism next door: Mississippi.
One of the reasons we allow prisoners to see their loved ones at all is a belief in the positive power of relationships. An inmate who becomes utterly cut off from all contact with friends and loved ones and starved of all contact from the outside isn't well-suited to make the transition back to life on the outside.
It was from that point of view that a local physician asked me last week, "How are (prisoners) to be integrated back into our communities? Can we help them develop meaningful and lasting relationships, perhaps which would help motivate them to stay out of prison when they are released?"
"Perhaps," he continued, "the wardens could use this to help change behaviors and attitudes with positive rewards."
That, to me, is one of the strong arguments for permitting conjugal visits: It would give prisoners something pleasant to anticipate and serve as powerful motivation for good behavior. To paraphrase Richard Pryor, if you had a choice between acting up and getting in trouble or acting mellow and getting a conjugal visit, "which line would you be in?"
There's a popular belief that prison should be a place of unrelenting torment, a place so devoid of goodness that those entering will feel that they're entering hell, a place Dante said was inscribed with the instruction, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."
In earthly situations, though, one would think that a hopeless man is particularly dangerous and all the more difficult to control. There are taxpayers who have a knee-jerk objection to every creature comfort at a prison, believing each to be a luxury that a convicted prisoner forfeited with his or her crime. But there are wardens who value those so-called luxuries, not because they give inmates pleasure but because they give prison officials something they can deny uncooperative inmates.
The Slidell groom struck out violently when the annoying guest threatened to delay his and his wife's intimacy by minutes. Wonder how much more violent he is now after almost 12 years?
Jarvis DeBerry is an editorial writer. He can be reached at jdeberry@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3355. Follow him at http://connect.nola.com/user/jdeberry/index.html and at twitter.com/jarvisdeberrytp.
