![]() Given the great distances families must travel to visit their incarcerated loved ones, 7 it is inexcusable for states to make the visiting process unnecessarily stressful. ![]() The most humane and sensible government policies would instead be based on respect and encouragement for the families of incarcerated people. ![]() With all of these unnecessary barriers, state visitation policies and practices actively discourage family members from making the trip. And some rules are inherently subjective such as Washington State’s ban on “excessive emotion,” 6 leaving families’ visiting experience to the whims of individual officers. Arkansas and Kentucky require prospective visitors to provide their social security numbers, 5 and Arizona charges visitors a one-time $25 background check fee in order to visit. North Carolina allows just one visit per week for no more than two hours while New York allows those in maximum security 365 days of visiting. As a comprehensive 50-state study on prison visitation policies found, 4 the only constant in prison rules between states is their differences. Thankfully, the FCC’s upcoming order to cap the costs of calls home from prisons and jails should increase call volume.ĭespite the breadth of research showing that visits and maintaining family ties are among the best ways to reduce recidivism, 3 the reality of having a loved one behind bars is that visits are unnecessarily grueling and frustrating. The data on how family ties are maintained in state prison shows that prison visits are rare while the telephone is a more common way of staying in touch. Less than a third of people in state prisons receive a visit from a loved one in a typical month: 2įigure 1. ![]() Analyzing little-used government data, 1 we find that visits are the exception rather than the rule. Certainly in practice and perhaps by design, prisons are lonely places. Most of today’s prisons were built in an era when the public safety strategy was to “lock ‘em up and throw away the key.” But now that there is growing interest from policymakers and the public to help incarcerated people succeed after release, policymakers must revisit the reality of the prison experience and the false assumptions of that earlier era.Īlmost by definition, incarceration separates individuals from their families, but for decades this country has also placed unnecessary burdens on the family members left behind. Separation by Bars and Miles: Visitation in state prisonsīy Bernadette Rabuy and Daniel Kopf Tweet this ![]()
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