Kate Richards O'Hare: Homosexuality among women prisoners, 1919-1920

Kate O'Hare, a prison reformer, Socialist lecturer-organizer, and self-styled "Agitator," was indicted in 1917 under the U.S. Espionage Act for speaking against American participation in World War I. She was convicted and sentenced to five years in the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City.

After appeals failed, O'Hare entered the penitentiary on April 15, 1919; another political prisoner in the penitentiary at the time was Emma Goldman. A Socialist amnesty campaign resulted in O'Hare's release on May 29, 1920.

While still incarcerated, she published Kate O'Hare's Prison Letters (1919) and In Prison (1920), a detailed, eyewitness expose of the horrifying treatment of female convicts.

Her references to sex between women and masturbation, are, however, characterized by a traditional puritanism, and her account of an evil, Black female prison trusty fails to place this individual's authority and conduct within the larger prison power structure. Yet O'Hare's firsthand account remains a rare and chilling document of female prison life. In Prison conveys the general barbarity of conditions and the oppressive context of the prison sex between women discussed in the following excerpts.

"A thorough education in sex perversions," says O'Hare, "is part of the educational system of most prisons, and for the most part the underkeepers and the stool pigeons are very efficient teachers." She adds:

In the cell house the silence rule was the letter of the law, but it was enforced only spasmodically and at the whim and discretion of the negro stool pigeon who ruled the cellhouse twelve hours each day. . . .

The prisoners who, by tips and gifts and sycophancy and willingness to submit to sex perversions, had a "stand in," could talk as much as they liked; but if for any reason a prisoner got in bad with the stool pigeon, she would be brutally punished for the violation of a rule ignored for the majority. . . .

It is a stark, ugly fact that homosexuality exists in every prison and must ever be one of the sinister facts of our penal system. In the Missouri State Penitentiary it is, next to the task, the dominating feature of prison life and a regular source of revenue to favoured stool pigeons. There seems to be considerable ground for the commonly accepted belief of the prison inmates that much of its graft and profits may percolate upward to the under officials.

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The negress trusty or stool pigeon, who had absolute control of the women's cell building and all its inmates from six in the evening until six in the morning, handled the details of pandering to the homosexual vices so rampant in the prison, and there was a regular scale of charges for permitting the inmates to indulge. The charge for the use of a pervert was usually fifty cents, and the charge for having the cell door left open at night by the stool pigeon was one dollar. In fact, homosexuality was not only permitted by this trusty, but indulgence was actively fostered by this coloured murderess, and, in the cases of young, helpless, and unprotected women actually demanded and enforced. In two or three instances at least I managed to have young and unperverted girls moved into cells near mine, where I could protect them from the demands made by the trusty that they submit to vicious practices.

Because this stool pigeon had sole charge of the cell house and of the lives of the women at night; because her word was always and unquestionably accepted without investigation by the matrons; because she, in fact, held the power of life and death over us, by being able to secure endless punishments in the blind cell, she could and did compel indulgence in this vice in order that its profits might be secured.

OutHistory.org would be grateful for any additional sources documenting the prison relationships, or revealing information about her prison experience vis a vis female homosexuality.

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