144
Thomas, J., concurring in judgment
ously obvious. Id., at 79. Prisoners' lives were carefully regulated, including the contacts with the outside. They were permitted virtually no visitors; even their letters were censored. Any contact that might resemble normal sociability among prisoners or with the outside world became a target for controls and prohibitions. Id., at 108.
To the extent that some prisons allowed visitors, it was not for the benefit of those confined, but rather to their detriment. Many prisons offered tours in order to increase revenues. During such tours, visitors could freely stare at prisoners, while prisoners had to obey regulations categorically forbidding them to so much as look at a visitor. Lewis 124. In addition to the general "burden on the convict's spirit" in the form of "the galling knowledge that he was in all his humiliation subject to the frequent gaze of visitors, some of whom might be former friends or neighbors," presence of women visitors made the circumstances "almost unendurable," prompting a prison physician to complain about allowing women in. Ibid.
Although by the 1840's some institutions relaxed their rules against correspondence and visitations, the restrictions continued to be severe. For example, Sing Sing allowed convicts to send one letter every six months, provided it was penned by the chaplain and censored by the warden. Each prisoner was permitted to have one visit from his relatives during his sentence, provided it was properly supervised. No reading materials of any kind, except a Bible, were allowed inside. S. Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America 145 (1998). With such stringent regimentation of prisoners' lives, the prison "had assumed an unmistakable appearance," McGowen 79, one which did not envision any entitlement to visitation.
Although any State is free to alter its definition of incarceration to include the retention of constitutional rights previously enjoyed, it appears that Michigan sentenced
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