Testimony in Minneapolis: Prison Condones Porn by Selling It

Minneapolis city officials heard testimony about peoples’ encounters with porn, those
who consume porn and those who produce it at a hearing of the Minneapolis Government Operations Committee on
December 13, 1983. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.171-172).

Testimony of Richelle Lee

I work with sex offenders. I work with the State of Minnesota Department of Corrections, in Oak Park Heights currently, and I also worked at Lino Lakes for one year. I recently have been establishing a sex offender program at Oak Park Heights. I have also worked extensively with victims in sexual family abuse…

I have yet to work with an offender that does not use pornography. I have had a number of offenders who made the statement that pornography, they believe for themselves, was directly responsible for where they got their ideas–very early in their lives they were exposed to pornography–and that these messages and images about women, about what sexuality is, this is where they got their education. And they believe that that exposure early in their life had a direct effect upon them as to why they then acted out later on.

Offenders that I work with in the Department of Corrections said the pornography is for sale, insofar as Playboy, Penthouse, Screw magazine and other contraband magazines that are sold by the prison itself in the commissary. I think the sale of pornography right there happens to condone it. Our society is condoning those images and messages about women.

I spend hours in groups a day with men discussing their attitudes about women, their beliefs about sexuality. They, in fact, fit stereotypically with those images of women, that they like to be raped, that they like to be beaten. They are very open about that. They find it difficult to change those ideas and opinions. After spending hours in a group, they go back to their cells where they read the magazines and have the pin-ups on the walls…

The incest women that I work with report that they were shown pictures of pornography by their uncles or fathers or aggressors to show them how it was done–that this is in fact what they were about, what they were for, and that this is okay.

See also:

Pornography and Male Sexuality
…a particular incident was reported in the men’s jail during the Diablo Canyon anti-nuclear blockade. While most of the activities had a strong feminist consciousness, once 800 men were separated into the prison and prison authorities distributed pornographic literature along with other reading material, “that atmosphere began to disintegrate,” as one of the participants put it. His account continues: “Some courageous and concerned men began to see what was happening and, within a few days, succeeded in changing the jail environment back to something very close to what it had been in the camp itself [prior to the blockade].”

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