Policy Reforms to Facilitate In-person Prison Visits
Current Barriers to In-person Visits
Complicated prison visit logistics
Restrictive visitation policies
Invasive security processes
Prison environments and visiting policies are extremely child-unfriendly
Proposed Policy Reforms
Prisons should provide visiting hours on evenings and weekends, making it easier for children in school and caregivers who work to visit.
Prisons should adopt more child friendly visiting policies, reducing the traumatic elements of the visit for the children without compromising security.
Prisons should invest in making visitor waiting areas and visiting rooms more child-friendly.
Prisons should provide a staff member or volunteer to walk first-time children and caregiver visitors through the steps of the process and allow them to ask questions, recuding feelings of anxiety.
Prisons should offers children a sticker as a reward for successfully going through security to help the children see staff and volunteers as friendly and approachable, setting a positive tone for the visit
Prisons should streamline/automate the logistics of scheduling prison visits.
Prisons should clearly communicate and post on their website the visitation rules/requirements, scheduling logistics, and necessary pre-approvals.
Social workers, child-serving agencies, nonprofit organizations, prisons, and the Department of Corrections should work together to create an optimal visitation experience from the children’s point of view.
Policies Adopting Free Prison Video Visits
Current Barriers to Video Visits
The steep price of prison video visits (and calls) make them unaffordable for the children and family of most prisoners
Pre-pandemic implementation resulted in numerous technological problems causing lost time during the video visit
Pre-pandemic poor video quality
Affordable Internet for children and families
Examples of Barriers
Toys prohibited in the visiting room
Termination of visit based on child’s behavior
Physical contact is not permitted
Extended waits in sterile waiting rooms
Children subject to physical full body search
Prison Exploitation
According to Prison Phone Justice, prison video visits and calls cost significantly more than non-prison ones because the prison has contracted out to telecom service providers who pay the prisons a commission from the money charged to the incarcerated person and their family.
Prisoners are quite literally a captive market— forced to accept unregulated predatory pricing charged by monopolistic vendors.
New Video Visitation Model
The pandemic has created a new policy opportunity to reform video visitation to capture the benefits while eliminating the drawbacks of the pre-pandemic solutions.
Prisons should adopt video conferencing technology that allows them to offer free video visits so that children can maintain a relationship with their incarcerated parent regardless of the caregiver and families’ financial resources.
Prisons should not partner with companies that profit from captive prisoners and should ensure that the free video visits are genuinely free without any hidden costs.
Prisons should minimize their video conferencing costs by renegotiating current contracts or conducting a request-for-proposal (RFP) process with new vendors.
Prisons should leverage the prevalence of free video meetings, such as Zoom, in price negotiations and bundle video solutions with phone and e-mail, often available at no additional cost through one telecommunications provider.
Prisons can improve the economics of offering free video visits by using the video conferencing technology to reduce other prison costs and streamline logistics.
Prisons should adopt a highly reliable video conferencing solution that minimizes technology problems to address pre-pandemic video quality barriers.
Prisons should form partnerships with community-based organizations to host computer stations for families to ensure that children and caregivers without internet access have access to video visitation.