Occasionally, long-time readers of Penthouse choose to cancel their subscriptions.

Some think that our humble publication doesn’t go far enough, while others aren’t fully on board with our editorial direction. But it’s shocking to us when the reason is nudity. Correctional facilities around the country — which house a population that needs the stress relief of nudity the most — seem to feel this way, and have declared Penthouse and similar (but lesser) publications “inappropriate” for prisoner use. We wanted to know why.

“At Christmas, before [the Massachusetts Department of Corrections] started cracking down, we’d actually distribute porn mags to inmates to pacify them,” says Al Murphy (not his real name), a retired prison guard who worked at MCI-Norfolk, the state’s largest medium-security prison. “They’d keep those magazines for years.”

So why was there was a crackdown?

“[The magazines] were like money,” Murphy says. “‘This for that.’ And the state didn’t think inmates should be ‘rewarded’ by having a Penthouse or Playboy or two.”

Skin mags and other nudity delivery systems are also seen as evidence of larger rackets — the currency prisoners use for drugs, protection, “nefarious acts,” and other services. Not only that, but men’s magazines like this one, once considered simple tools of stress relief and condoned by wardens and corrections officers, are increasingly banned because it’s believed they contribute to a hostile work environment.

“I think some female guards complained,” Murphy says, admitting he never worked with female guards.

An actual female corrections officer (C.O.) from Texas (who refused to be named or identify her facility) doesn’t think porn magazines should be banned. She says bluntly, “I would never complain about porn magazines making a hostile work environment. I’d rather have [inmates] jerking off to a magazine than jerking off to me, because that is the number-one complaint of female guards.” She adds, “And while we’d definitely take away phones — because those could be used for all sorts of bad reasons — we know the nudie magazines actually calm the guys down.”

“The state didn’t think inmates should be ‘rewarded’ by having a Penthouse or Playboy or two.”

You’d think that there would be more of an attempt to prove harm (or potential harm) when justifying the banning of something, such as pornography. A 2015 study by UCLA neuroscientists concluded that the brain on porn did not behave the way the brain on drugs did. Measuring Late Positive Potential (LPP), an indicator of emotional response, scientists determined that the brain of a cocaine addict responded a certain way to an image of cocaine, but no such reaction was evident among a large sample of people exposed to pornographic images. So the porn-as-contraband idea seems to exist solely on the basis of comforting guards and disrupting the prison economy (while conspiring to enlarge the prostates of inmates).

As you can imagine, that doesn’t mean porn isn’t all over our jails, finding its way into prison populations in other, often ingenious, ways. “I got an SD card full of porn in the filling of an Oreo cookie once,” writes an ex-con on the PrisonTalk.com forum. “At least that’s what I thought it had on it. It didn’t work.”

Prison is many things to Americans: a source of housing for a greater percentage of the population than any industrialized country (according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the U.S. incarcerated 1.5 million of its adult men and women in local jails, state facilities, and federal prisons at the end of 2014, not counting juvenile detention centers, reservation jails, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities); a major public and private employer (the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted nearly half a million bailiffs and C.O.s in 2014); and big business for private firms making billions in contracts running prisons for states saving money on employee-benefits packages.

Incarceration in America is a cultural touchstone, too. Prison films from Cool Hand Luke to The Shawshank Redemption and TV shows from Oz to Orange Is the New Black (not to mention all their X-rated variants) are such a part of American culture it’s no wonder a stay at the Graybar Hotel isn’t much of a deterrent to crime. After all, if Morgan Freeman can survive prison, so can you.

(It should be mentioned that when protagonist Andy Dufresne takes over the prison library in Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, the shelves are stocked with “fuck-books.” That was a pretty happy prison library, in general.)

If the United States is the world’s largest source of incarcerated citizens, it is also by far its largest trafficker of porn (Rwanda doesn’t even come close). It seems that porn and prison are uniquely American and, though we try to force them apart, they are (unfortunately) as inseparable as church and state.

Officer Bill Valdez* of the LAPD knows that one thing is for certain. “A person’s sexual desires don’t just stop once he gets locked up,” he says. A former reporter for an L.A.-area daily newspaper, Valdez signed into L.A.’s massive Men’s Central Jail one day in 2015 to interview an inmate. Men’s Central is one of the largest jail complexes in the world, an overcrowded warren that opened in 1963 and that has since expanded into a sizable chunk of downtown Los Angeles, holding as many as 17,000 convicts and prisoners awaiting trial. Notable guests have included Sean Penn and Richard Pryor. Like all correctional facilities in California, Men’s Central bans the possession of pornographic material.

“I noticed that [an inmate] had a folded-up newspaper in his hand,” Valdez says, “and I told him I was happy he supported my old employer. But it happened to be a full-page picture of Katy Perry in concert. ‘She’s really pretty,’ the inmate said. I figured out pretty quickly that he wasn’t reading the news. He was just clutching that picture.” Valdez goes on, “It’s fairly illustrative of the fact that if people are willing to jack off to the newspaper, there’s a pretty strong urge there.”

French author and jurist Nina Califano agrees. In her book Sexualité Incarcérée she writes, “Prison can be incredibly frustrating: you can’t open doors by yourself, you can’t see your loved ones. And so the consequences of the absence of sexuality are considerable…can we, fighting recidivism with the aim of the rehabilitation of the convict, [not see that] what is taking place during the execution of the sentence is a major deconstruction of the individual?”

But is preventing jailhouse porn “a major deconstruction of the individual”? Or is removing a visual aid to masturbation (that’s bound to happen anyway) merely an inconvenience?

“Prison can be incredibly frustrating: you can’t open doors by yourself, you can’t see your loved ones. And so the consequences of the absence of sexuality are considerable…”

A personal story: Before we became parents, my kids’ mother and I just couldn’t seem to conceive. We’d been conspiring for six whole months after we’d removed the goalie (following years of individually trying not to impregnate or become pregnant). Finally we decided that I should get my swimmers tested.

Being someone whose only impression of prison was gleaned from Raising Arizona, I had a decidedly media-fed picture of a fertility clinic. I legitimately expected a nice, quiet, carpeted room containing various paper and digital aids to coax forth my specimen. And I would be led there by a hot nurse that looked like Janine Lindemulder on that Blink-182 album. After all, this was a fraught time and I’d need to be relaxed.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I arrived at the dingy, fluorescent-lit North Hollywood clinic and entered a waiting room with a bunch of unwed mothers and their screaming kids. I was given a plastic collection cup and told to go to a room down the hall. This room turned out to be the unisex lavatory. There was nothing to look at beyond an unsexy Norman Rockwell print above the toilet. The only soundtrack was the wail of the brats outside, each of whom seemed to say, “You don’t really want this.” Without anyone to help or anything to look at, I completed my standing jerk in about 20 minutes, interrupted twice by the knocking of the impatient lab guy at the other side of the door.

Turns out nothing was wrong with either myself or my children’s mother. But I’ll go on record as saying that the lavatory experience was a “major deconstruction of the individual,” and that was only 20 minutes. How might it feel for a prisoner?

Unless you’ve been incarcerated, it’s hard to imagine the day-to-day deprivation of prison life. And while theorists on the outside clash over the question of whether a felon goes to jail to be punished or if jail is the punishment itself, I talked with some former inmates who shed light on porn’s heightened role in stir.

“I would move Penthouse, Hustler, Playboy around in pillow cases,” says Karl Weber (not his real name), a former inmate at ASPC Yuma, in Arizona by the Mexican border. Weber, who’s on parole, says that guards could fetch “up to $150” to bring in a copy of Penthouse, and the magazines would be cut up, photocopied, and redistributed “for months.”

Weber explains that he never used pornographic material (“I’ve got my thoughts and memories,” he says), but he would encounter magazines that had made it around the facility in pristine condition while others would make their way back to him “torn up and disgusting, all crusty.”

“It was like two different roads,” he says. “It was the dudes who were like, ‘Don’t touch my girl,’ and the ones who needed to bust a nut hard.”

Toward the end of his seven-year stay (Weber is vague about the type of assault that landed him in Yuma), “I could get a phone from one source and an SD card from another. The SD card would come in under a [male visitor’s] balls or in [a female visitor’s] pussy. And the card would just be loaded with porn. You’d rent that out and either pass the SD card around or you’d find somewhere where dudes would line up to use it.”

We ask Weber if he thinks not having access to dirty movies and magazines makes a man less of a human.

“Less of a human? No,” he responds, “but everything that makes things easier gets a price bump. It’s the same with razors and things like that. No one likes the plastic razors because it’s not a nice shave. But you get a razor handle with a good blade and somebody’ll pay a lot of money for it. With the fuck-books it just makes jerking off more convenient.”

Porn is considered contraband, Weber continues, “because people use it to pay for other stuff, like someone will use it to pay for protection, or it’s gonna get exchanged for sexual favors.” Like cigarettes and razor blades, he says, “except more personal.”

Writing for the site Corrections One, Joe Bouchard, prison librarian at the Baraga Correctional Facility in Michigan, doesn’t address inmates’ innate need for sexual expression or porn’s connection to aggression, but stresses contraband’s use as currency.

“Men were just going to masturbate to me every time I walked by for my rounds.”

“One of the most common hazards in corrections occurs when staff underestimate the far-reaching nature of seemingly harmless but forbidden goods and services,” Bouchard writes. “The simple trade of candy, for instance, can be a cover for protection services. A few betting slips may be the starting point for a widespread gambling empire. One prisoner giving a cigarette to another may be payback for a nefarious act.”

Vicky Waters, press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, directs me to the state Code of Regulations, which neither mentions porn making inmates more aggressive nor addresses its use for barter.

“Contraband includes materials that are obscene, and/or contain sex acts, sexually explicit images, and frontal nudity,” she says. “Also, publications of this nature may create a hostile work environment for our female staff.”

A female C.O. writing on the Prison Talk forum says that, after transferring three times, she finally accepted that “men were just going to masturbate to me every time I walked by for my rounds.”

The guards we contacted all felt that prison porn should “probably be regulated,” but not banned.

“I’m not saying that guys got docile after getting their porn fix,” the female C.O. from Texas says, “but it just makes sense that if you can spend your aggression on some titties in a book, you’re less likely to be looking somewhere else.”

Hector Lazarino says of his three-year stint at SCI Mercer, in Pennsylvania,that “porn helped with sex.”

Lazarino says he was the only man he knew who went to prison already identifying as gay, and that prison sex was facilitated with “jail punks” (men who were situationally homosexual for the purpose of protection or companionship) using porn magazines.

“We called it ‘tenderizing,’” Lazarino says. “We tenderized them with magazines and we made the move.”

They knew the move was going to be made?

“Yeah, but if they saw some porn with women in it beforehand, it made it easier.”

Lazarino pinpoints the physical need for sexual release, comparing it to the Olympics.

“You got young men — young people in the best shape of their lives,” he says. “They aren’t doing nothing but exercising. They need to let it out. It’s what you know is happening in (the Summer Olympics in) Rio. You can’t just turn off a switch. They need to have sex.”

But, California’s Department of Correction’s Article 15 calls any sexual expression–including pornography — “disorderly.” It reads, in part: “Sexual Disorderly Conduct means every person who touches, without exposing, his or her genitals, buttocks, or breasts in a manner that demonstrates it is for the purpose of sexual arousal, gratification, annoyance, or offense, and that any reasonable person would consider this conduct offensive.”

We ask Lazarino if he ever met any “reasonable person” in prison.

“You’re not reasonable until your dick is soft,” he says.

Most correctional systems employ some version of the following language from California’s Code of Regulations, to ban sexual depictions of any kind, and any nudity that isn’t a line drawing in a medical journal or a floppy boob from a National Geographic:

“Sexually explicit images that depict frontal nudity in the form of personal photographs, drawings, magazines, or other pictorial format.”

You can’t even make a drawing.

Weber, the former inmate from Yuma, talks about the time a laundry-room porn stash was discovered and confiscated: “There was a little shower of SD cards and Vanessa Williams pictures,” he said. “Vanessa Williams? Miss America? Old stuff. And the guards took it all away. There were like six big fights that week until we started getting a supply back.”

Penthouse and other adult outlets may be illegal in prisons across the country, but magazines like this one clearly serve a purpose for both good and ill, depending on how they’re regulated. Maybe some thoughtful Andy Dufresne-type can revolutionize prison libraries again by setting up a little room off to the side: a nice, quiet, carpeted room containing various paper and digital aids, to usher in a less-awful prison experience that isn’t a major deconstruction of the individual.

Regulate it — don’t confiscate it.

Illustration by: iStock / julypluto; PHOTO: iStock / mediaphotos