Video Visitation: the Good, the Bad, & the Accessible
On October 10th, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office in Metairie, Louisiana officially discontinued in person visits, replacing them with online video visitation. Sheriff Joe Lopinto, when announcing the new policy stated, “the new system will reduce the number of personnel needed to oversee in-person visitation and increases safety and security. Video visitation reduces the chance of contraband entering the jail.”
For people with families or friends in prison, maintaining a relationship can often feel impossible. Visiting a loved one behind bars is no easy task. First, there’s the expense and trouble of taking time off of work and the difficult choice of either finding child care or bringing children along for the grueling trip — a survey from the Vera Institute of Justice found that 58% of people cited cost as something that inhibited them from visiting loved ones in prison. Then, there’s the journey itself, which can often be an hours-long drive in punishing traffic on a state-chartered bus — Vera’s report found that in Washington State, 50% of incarcerated people live at least 129 miles from where they were serving their sentence, which is in an almost 3 hour drive for friends and family members. Upon arrival, visitation hours are extremely restrictive — recently, New York State attempted to cut weekday visitations to save money. At the end of the whole ordeal, an entire weekend’s travel will often provide only a few hours with a loved one. For some, it’s just not doable: 1 out of 3 people simply didn’t have access to any transportation to visit their loved one.
Fortunately, promising new alternatives are available. Although nothing can replace real face-to-face interaction, video visitation offers potential as a less costly and more convenient option that can allow family members to stay in touch.
TeleStory is a visitation program offered in public library settings which connects families with their incarcerated loved ones via real-time video. Kids can read with their parents in local New York Libraries for up to an hour through a live video feed, free of charge. The program even allows parents to connect with their incarcerated teenagers — you can learn a little more about the program by watching this video.
There are other options for video visitation. The program is already available in 600 different prisons in 46 different states, sometimes allowing on-site video visitation as well as at-home video visitation. An on-site visitation is similar to a traditional through-the-window visitation, but instead of seeing your friend or family member through a pane of glass, you come to the prison and visit with them through a touchscreen, reducing the cost of supervising in-person visits and supposedly offering more security.
At-home visitation, on the other hand, completely eliminates the need to travel to the prison. The family member communicates with the incarcerated person from any internet connected personal computer. However, the service isn’t necessarily readily available to everyone: it requires that users have access to a computer, high-speed internet, a webcam, and preferably earbuds or headphones. Frustrating reliability issues have also been reported by the families who have used it, including this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70mM5Nj2tPs&feature=youtu.be
Costs for video visitation will vary greatly depending on the prison, and in some cases the charges for video visitation can be a serious obstacle. Some states, like Hawaii, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and Tennessee, offer video visitation services with no cost to the visitor. Other states will sometimes make exceptions for special programs, like in Alabama, where incarcerated parents who are participating in the Aid to Inmate Mothers group receive free minutes.
However, some states charge for the service. The cost will vary depending on the prison, but most video call services come at a cost of around $7.99 for every 20 minutes. In states where video visitation does cost money, it is a significant issue — 47% of incarcerated people, according to Vera’s survey, said that the cost of video visitation prevented from utilizing the service or from utilizing it more often.
It is often said that when you incarcerate someone, you incarcerate their family as well — and the families of incarcerated people should always have the right to visit their loved ones. Studies have even shown that incarcerated people who get the opportunity to interact with their families often do much better once they are released. A report from the Minnesota Department of Corrections finds that these connections are crucial: visitation helps ease the transition from incarceration back into the community, and it ultimately reduces recidivism. There is no question that video visitation could never replace in-person contact. However, if video visitation is going to exist, it should exist mindfully. Efforts should be made to keep families connected, taking cues from accessible and community-oriented services like Brooklyn’s free TeleStory program, or states where the service is available for free, like Hawaii, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and Tennessee. When it is implemented wisely, there is no question that video visitation can help families stay in touch and ultimately reduce the amount of stress and strain in the lives of both incarcerated people and the ones who love them.
