ABSTRACT
Sexuality and incarceration might seem strangely juxtaposed. Sexuality, in its modern and idealized form, is often aligned with liberation and self-determination. Incarceration, by contrast, connotes radical unfreedom and constraint. Prison sexual culture was also shaped by coercion, exploitation, and sometimes violence, as part of the broader context of violence that permeated the practice and experience of incarceration. Sexual assault, sexual harassment, and coerced sex perpetrated by both prisoners and staff was common throughout US prisons and jails. Social scientists leveraged the conditions of incarceration for the purposes of studying sex and producing new knowledge about sexuality. Since the mid-1970s, the practice of mass incarceration has swelled the US prison population to more than two million people. The policing and incarceration of people for same-sex sex accelerated in the late 1930s and gathered momentum in the late 1940s and 1950s, when twenty-six states and the District of Columbia passed sexual psychopath laws.
