“They were only given to certain housing units,” Ms. Whaley said in an interview after her release. And even then, she added, “they were only dispensed to certain individuals — you had to be sort of chummy-chummy in order to receive them.”

Others agreed that it isn’t an issue of supply. Chandra Bozelko, a writer and advocate who was incarcerated at a state prison in Connecticut, said menstrual supplies were indeed used as tools of control. Officers sometimes tried to teach women a lesson by limiting access, affecting self-esteem as well as basic hygiene.

Image In the television show “Orange Is the New Black,” a prisoner uses sanitary pads as shower shoes. Credit... Netflix

“It turns you on yourself,” Ms. Bozelko said. “You start to hate your body.”

In both state and city facilities in New York, women recalled humiliating experiences related to getting what they needed.

Christine, 24, who requested that her surname not be used because she is incarcerated upstate, said she would never forget what happened to her at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum-security women’s prison in Westchester County that serves as a reception center for newcomers. She was going to be transferred to another prison, so her father came to visit her. She had her period and had not been given any pads. After the visit, she was strip-searched as blood ran down her legs. The female correction officer was cruel, she said.

“She was telling me how disgusting I was, ‘It’s disgusting,’” she recalled. “I was so embarrassed.”

When asked about the episode, a spokesman for the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, which oversees New York’s state prisons, wrote that the agency was “continuously reviewing its policies to best meet female inmates’ personal hygiene needs.” The spokesman added that under departmental policy, “female inmates are provided sanitary napkins on an as-needed basis.”

Ms. Whaley recalled an episode at Rikers when a correction officer threw a bag of tampons into the air and watched as inmates dived to the ground to retrieve them, because they didn’t know when they would next be able to get tampons.