Since my husband was punished by being transferred to Frackville prison in Schuylkill County in Eastcentral Pennsylvania, I've been visiting there each week. Even at the best of times, visiting a state prison is a trying experience for all of us. Some prisons are worse that others. I've visited most of them. Frackville is one of the most obnoxious places that I've endured. While a few of Pennsylvania's 28 prisons make an effort to make visitors comfortable, most of them go out of their way to make visiting miserable. Frackville is near the top of the miserable list. At many of the prisons, the visiting room staff and the prison administration try to discourage visiting. They'll do anything to save themselves a little work. Prison employees are unbelievably lazy! Fewer visits mean less work for the idlers. Fewer visitors also mean that fewer citizens realize what's going on inside the prisons. Administrators want to keep it quiet. Frackville is near the top of the laziness list and the censorship list. There's a certain type of prison guard who needs to feel powerful. He needs to feel like a big-shot. Bullying others and badgering them makes such people feel important. In most of the prisons some effort is made to keep jerks like that off the visiting room staff. Unhappily, a great many of the guards at the Frackville prison suffer from just that bullying personality flaw. Persons with this neurosis aren't comfortable unless they can make themselves feel superior to others. For that reason, they like to pick on those who are weaker. We women make good targets for such abuse because the neurotics are physically stronger that women. Visiting at the Frackville prison I've been subjected to more than rudeness and bullying. I've been harassed because I'm a woman and because I'm the publisher of this website. If you're a woman and unfortunate enough to visit at Frackville, you must expect to be harassed and even stalked. The guards will do any thing they can to make you feel insecure, uncomfortable and agitated. They will do anything they can to make themselves feel powerful and important. In most prisons the visiting room guards try to respect the importance of the short time that a family has together to visit. They avoid intruding or interrupting a visit unless there's a substantial reason. Exactly the opposite is true at Frackville. There, the guards actively look for any excuse whatsoever to impose themselves into a visit. The whole Pennsylvania prison system is sexually obsessed. It's their cardinal preoccupation. At Frackville it's even worse. It's a psychosis! I've been badgered for sitting too close to my husband, for leaning against him (we've been married 37 years), for him touching my hair and for us talking softly. All that's much too "sexual" for these crackpots. While rules allow us to kiss at the beginning and end of the visit, at Frackville, kissing is so carnal that it may only be done with a guard standing at my elbow and French kissing is treated like a sexual assault! Maybe these guards are jealous or insecure. Maybe nobody kisses them. Whatever it is, it's a kind of mania. Men entering the prison to visit their loved ones aren't badgered as women are. For example, they don't have to turn their pockets inside out. Depending on the whim of the functionary in the lobby, I've sometimes been required to turn my skirt pockets inside out - when there was nothing whatever in them. In fact, sweaters seem to fascinate this guy. He's asked me to remove my cardigan apparently to get a better look at my chest. Once, he quizzed me about what I was wearing. I wear a keepsake locket which terrifies the inspector in the lobby. He may not care what a man carries in his pockets, but he's fixated on what's inside my locket. What does he suspect? guns? keys? secret messages? He can't suspect drugs because he uses his silly drug sniffer on me when he's not dropping its sensitive filter pad on the filthy floor. When I tried to express myself about my treatment to the prison's superintendent, he didn't want to hear it. It was just a "gripe session!" All of us wives of prisoners are keenly aware that the petty tyrants in the visiting room can easily block a visit with our loved ones or ruin a visit that we've planed for weeks. We're at their mercy and they know it. At Frackville some of them seriously abuse their authority.