"Facilities must be provided to enable UK prisoners to enjoy conjugal visits," a landmark European court ruling concluded this week. By forbidding "sexual relations" between prisoners and their visitors, the court decided that the British government was in breach of article eight of the Human Rights Act: the right to family and private life.
Of course there has been no such ruling – yet. But following the successful appeal to the Strasbourg court by six prisoners who argued that under article eight of the act they should be allowed to provide sperm to their partners to enable them to become fathers, surely it is only a matter of time. The prisoners, all long termers, had based their claim on the premise that they would be too old to father children if they were made to wait until they were released. Previously the government had dismissed all such requests, unless it could be shown that there were "exceptional circumstances". The Strasbourg court ruled that this policy in effect set the bar "too high to allow proper consideration of the proportionality of any such decision". Accordingly the government must now consider each application on a case by case basis. Six applications requesting access to artificial insemination services are now on Justice Minister Jack Straw's desk awaiting his considered decision, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice has confirmed.
The rights and wrongs of enabling men serving long sentences to father children, to whose upbringing they can only ever make a limited contribution, could be debated in perpetuity. But however outraged some may feel about it, it has long been established that people who are sent to prison do not forfeit their rights under the European convention on human rights. So if the Strasbourg court agrees that prisoners are entitled to a family and private life, how can it not rule, when the appropriate case is brought before it, that people in prison are entitled to sexual relations with partners on the outside?
One of the most cruel aspects of imprisonment is the denial of sexual expression – outside of masturbation. Sex in prison in the UK is great unspoken that looms large but is never acknowledged in any serious way. It is no myth that in male prisons homosexual relationships thrive – between those who are naturally inclined towards same sex and those who on the outside would never consider having sex with men but for whom the need for warm skin on warm skin intimacy is so overwhelming that they are driven to compromise. Prisoners having sex is a great taboo among prison officers, yet there is no bar against prisoner couples setting up home together in a shared cell – which is then referred to jovially by staff and prisoners alike as "married quarters".
Transsexual prisoners often become popular with apparently "straight" men: the female appearance of a prospective male sex partner, however vague, can be enough to authenticate the fantasy for many. The tragedy of those who succumb and who are then seen in the visits room indulging in awkward fumblings with wives and girlfriends is all too apparent.
No manifestly heterosexual prisoner would admit to any notion of sexual compromise, yet the trade in sexual services is rife: a hand job for tobacco, a blow job for drugs. Some men resort to raping others – assaults that occur more frequently than the authorities would care to admit. Even gang rape occurs occasionally, and rarely are the needs of the victims in all such attacks taken seriously. Convictions in prisoner on prisoner rape cases are even more rare. Less innocuously female members of staff, irrelevant of size, shape or looks, become objects of sexual fantasy – any woman who enters a male prison wearing a skirt knows that – and illicit relationships are not uncommon, though disgrace and humiliation awaits any prison worker who gets caught, while the prisoner simply gets a transfer.
The sexual frustration that dominates almost every interaction in a prison is responsible for a great many of the ills that plague prison life and drive prison culture. Anyone who takes a human rights case on the matter to Europe citing article eight should also be able to argue that prison life distorts sexual appetites and inflicts unquantifiable sexual damage from which many struggle to recover.
Conjugal rights for prisoners, already granted in some European countries, including France and Spain, may not provide the whole solution – dysfunction, sexual or otherwise is already the norm for the majority of people who end up behind bars – but the issue of how we deal with human sexuality for those held captive will have to be acknowledged and accommodated sooner or later. A genuinely humane prison system demands it.
