That being said, and having worked at a public defender's office, I generally find it incredibly easy to complain about the police. Now, this inclination can be taken with a veritable pillar of salt, as other than a difficult to repress Outkast-born urge to yell "Hootie Hoo" when I see cops and my gay ex-roommate's police beefcake calendar, my first-person penal interactions (go ahead, get the giggles out of your system now . . . oh who am I kidding? Heh.) have generally been limited to the occasional courthouse nod and speeding tickets. Pretty much everything else is secondhand knowledge.

Regardless, Ann Arbor Police in particular seem to be sort of a rare breed - not so much erratic as their general hard-assedness seems to be in inverse proportion to the seriousness of the crime in question. Make an illegal turn, and they're all over you like white on the proverbial rice, report an incredibly intoxicated driver, and it'll take them so long to show up that the driver will have time to hit two cars, speed off, come back ten minutes later, take a leak in an alley, pass out on the hood of his car for another few minutes, possibly participate in a drug deal, and speed off again. Pee in public at the football game, get unceremoniously hauled off, stage a 400 person rally without permits, and they'll block intersections, smiling and nodding as you walk on by.

So clearly, even though we'd called the police to let them know what was going on this past Saturday, we still weren't exactly sure about what would actually happen during the rally/march itself. I personally decided to treat it like a potential car accident - memorize phone numbers and wear good underwear. So after donning a special pair of super nifty arrest panties, I headed out into the crappiest weather so far this year, and was promptly met with a completely anticlimactic police encounter, notable only for how nice all the officers were.

Now that all the danger has passed, though, I'm of course completely obsessed with what could have happened. (In my fevered imaginings it's very Boston Legal meets Oz, when clearly the most that would've occurred is likely a couple of hours in the Washtenaw County jail, but whatever.) Conveniently enough, my newfound preoccupation with possible incarceration ties in nicely with what not one, but three entirely unrelated individuals asked me to talk about in my upcoming column - conjugal visits.

I'm moderately concerned that they know something I don't.

Like, say, anything about conjugal visits.

Thus, this week, readers, we're all in a position to learn something new. (There really should have been a Schoolhouse Rock about incarceration.) What I'd do without everyone's favorite series of tubes is entirely beyond me. (Ok, that's a lie - I'd pick up a book or several, but it'd sure as hell take longer.)

Conjugal or, as they're often euphemistically called in the states that retain them, "extended family visits," are actually a relatively uncommon practice in the United States. No federal prison allows prison nookie, and only five (or six, Connecticut still being in dispute among various internet sources at the time of print) state systems allow them: Mississippi, California, New York, New Mexico, and Washington. (Now might be an excellent moment to admonish one and all to not trust Wikipedia, whose "conjugal visit" claims that there are seven states that allow same, the questionable Connecticut and the outright false South Dakota being among that number; the road to hell is paved with erroneous Wiki-cites.)

Though Mississippi, where the practice dates back to 1918, was apparently the first state to proffer conjugal visits, it's arguably the last place in which you'd like (or be able to) exercise the practice. Conjugal visits are limited to sixty minutes in duration, which, at first blush, might seem like a fairly reasonable amount of time, but when 69% of men and 71% of women in the US reported their average sexual encounter - from first kiss to last spasm - as lasting between 15 and 60 minutes, it's maybe not so much. Furthermore, a wholly unscientific poll conducted by the RG staff placed the average male refractory period at approximately 10 minutes (at least for male law students between ages 20 and 30). So presuming one doesn't engage in any idle chatter upon entering what I'm sure is a lovely and sumptuous "bedroom-like environment" provided by the Magnolia State Department of Corrections (I envision something like the LC), and the sexual encounter in question is basically a 15 minute pump-and-dump, there's still only time for, what, two sexual episodes? And forget about basking in the afterglow.

Not just anyone can qualify for conjugals, questionably satisfying though they may be. Some states, including Mississippi and New York (Doe v. Coughlin, 518 N.E.2d 536), won't allow conjugal visits for inmates with "communicable" diseases, like HIV/AIDS or tuberculosis. States that allow these visits tend to reserve the privilege to minimum security or non-violent offenders who haven't had any recent rule violations, the visiting partner can't be wearing any salacious or revealing clothing, and the couple in question had better be married and prepared to prove it by the non-incarcerated spouse bringing a marriage license. (Though in California, as of 2007, registered domestic partners count, making California the first state to officially sanction the gay conjugal visit; in Canada, by comparison, inmates can actually marry each other.)

California also favors a different visitation style, with up to 72 hour overnight visits wherein the couple (or family, in some cases/states) can cook and eat together, sleep together, sit around and watch TV and perhaps even do the do in a trailer or apartment-like setting. There is a downside, however. Whereas in Mississippi, where some sources state that one could have conjugal visits as often as weekly (all other requirements and restrictions having been satisfied), in California these visits occur far less frequently, with most sources citing between three and six months between visits. Beyond that, if the trailer's a rockin' someone will inevitably come a knockin', as guards check up on the inmates every four hours to make sure no one's escaped. If all that potential coital interrupting weren't problematic on its own, visitors are only allowed to bring 10 condoms (which just . . . doesn't seem like enough, somehow - God forbid one breaks, or you have a bad batch or improperly store them in a patch of that notorious California sunshine, or something).

Conjugal visits were originally implemented to incentivize hard work and good behavior among inmates, but now states generally justify them as a method to prevent recidivism and preserve familial bonds. (Which seems to work, at least somewhat - Criminal Justice and Behavior, Vol. 18, No. 3, 318-331 (1991).) Despite the fact that in some states the inmates have to pay for their extended family visits, placing minimal burden on the taxpayer, conjugal visits remain fairly controversial, however, as many see no sex as being one of the expected downsides of prison. Courts have, on the whole, clearly and unambiguously declared that the conjugal visit doesn't qualify as a privacy right, marital or otherwise, and that states that lack such visitations are not engaging in cruel and unusual punishment. Obviously I must, respectfully, dissent, but if that's at all surprising, than I'm fairly certain we've never met.

What may come as a greater shock is the fact that I'm not alone in my sentiment that this policy isn't particularly helpful. Conjugal visits are much more common outside of the US (where the other 75% of the world's incarcerated are held). In particular, most of the Americas, both to our north and south, have a vastly different attitude towards sex while imprisoned, with some particularly intriguing language coming out of Argentina, where one decision states that, "depriving an inmate of his intimate visits, and freedom of sexual relations, is going beyond the penalty imposed by sentence and affects his personal relationships and the freedom of sexual choice that is part of the complete development of the personality . . . " This acknowledgment of the importance of sex in how we construct ourselves as human beings is similarly, if perhaps with varying degrees of explicitness, recognized in other nations like Mexico and Canada, and has proved to be the basis of one of the LGBTQ movement's first major victories in Latin America, where it's been held that, as in California, the state should respect the sexual choices of its inmates and not privilege heterosexual intimacy over homosexual.

Now that? That's the sort of policing I can get behind.

Special shout out this week to David Brown for his general knowledge and mad translating skillz, without which the vagaries of Argentinean law might've remained shrouded in mystery. Got a question? Email our local sex columnist at betweenthebriefs@gmail.com, pendaflex your query in the dead of night, or do like the rest of your classmates and just walk up and ask her. Don't worry, she won't judge.