Family Transportation to Prisons in Kentucky Forever Family

Separation by Bars and Miles:

Visitation in land prisons

Past Bernadette Rabuy and Daniel Kopf Tweet this
October 20, 2015
Press release
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Well-nigh of today's prisons were built in an era when the public safety strategy was to "lock 'em up and throw away the key." Only at present that there is growing involvement from policymakers and the public to help incarcerated people succeed subsequently release, policymakers must revisit the reality of the prison experience and the false assumptions of that earlier era.

Almost past definition, incarceration separates individuals from their families, just for decades this state has also placed unnecessary burdens on the family members left behind. Certainly in practice and perhaps by design, prisons are lonely places. Analyzing little-used regime data,¹ nosotros find that visits are the exception rather than the rule. Less than a third of people in state prisons receive a visit from a loved one in a typical month:ⁱⁱ

Figure 1. The data on how family ties are maintained in state prison shows that prison visits are rare while the telephone is a more mutual manner of staying in touch. Thankfully, the FCC'southward upcoming order to cap the costs of calls abode from prisons and jails should increase call book.

Type/time frame	Per centum receiving that contact
Personal visit in the past month	31%
Phone in the past week	70%

Despite the breadth of research showing that visits and maintaining family ties are amongst the best ways to reduce recidivism,^three the reality of having a loved one behind bars is that visits are unnecessarily grueling and frustrating. Every bit a comprehensive l-country study on prison visitation policies found,⁴ the but constant in prison house rules between states is their differences. Northward Carolina allows merely one visit per calendar week for no more than two hours while New York allows those in maximum security 365 days of visiting. Arkansas and Kentucky crave prospective visitors to provide their social security numbers,⁵ and Arizona charges visitors a one-time $25 background cheque fee in gild to visit. And some rules are inherently subjective such equally Washington State'due south ban on "excessive emotion,"⁶ leaving families' visiting experience to the whims of individual officers. With all of these unnecessary barriers, country visitation policies and practices actively discourage family members from making the trip. The most humane and sensible government policies would instead be based on respect and encouragement for the families of incarcerated people.

Given the swell distances families must travel to visit their incarcerated loved ones,⁷ it is inexcusable for states to brand the visiting procedure unnecessarily stressful.⁸ Using the aforementioned dataset, we discover that nearly people (63%) in state prison are locked up over 100 miles from their families,^ix and unsurprisingly, distance from abode is a strong predictor for whether a person in a state prison volition receive a visit in a given month.

Locking people up far from home has the unfortunate but strong event of discouraging visits. We constitute that among incarcerated people locked up less than fifty miles from home, half receive a visit in a calendar month, only the portion receiving visits falls as the distance from home increases:

Figure two. Incarcerated people in state prisons report whether they were visited in the past calendar month, by altitude from home (in miles)

Distance	Percent visited last month
Less than fifty miles	49.half-dozen%
Betwixt 50 and 100 miles	xl.0%
Between 101 and 500 miles	25.nine%
Between 501 and 1,000 miles	14.5%

And while there are a variety of reasons why an incarcerated person might not receive a visit, the fact that well-nigh prisons were congenital in isolated areas ensures hardship on the families of incarcerated people. Studies of incarcerated people in California, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, South Dakota, and Tennessee institute that distance is a top barrier preventing them from in-person contact with their families.¹⁰

Millions of families are victims of mass incarceration, and policymakers are starting to understand that. Having established that large distances discourage visitation, this study makes several recommendations for how the U.S. criminal justice arrangement can support — rather than punish — the families of incarcerated people. States should:

1. Use prison time as an option of final resort.
   Agreement how putting great distances between incarcerated people and their families is oftentimes damaging, states should implement alternatives to incarceration that can keep people dwelling house or closer to home¹¹ such equally Washington Land's Family and Offender Sentencing Deed, which allows judges to waive prison house time and instead impose community custody for some chief caregivers of minor children.¹² At the same fourth dimension, states' criminal justice policies should match their rhetoric of decarceration. States such as California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Due south Carolina, and Texas should recognize that they have been able to successfully reduce both imprisonment and crime^xiii and pb the rest of the nation by closing remote prisons.
2. Eliminate and refrain from adopting visitation policies that dehumanize families and actively encourage visitation.
   States should recognize that incarceration is often an emotional and vulnerable fourth dimension for families and should actively encourage visiting by making the prison surround as comfortable every bit possible. States such every bit California¹⁴ and Massachusetts¹⁵ should stop their unnecessary and dehumanizing strip and domestic dog searches of visitors. States can enact family-friendly visitation programs such as the children'southward center in New York State's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility^sixteen and Oakland Livingston Human Service Agency'south program in Michigan that allows incarcerated fathers to have several hour-long visits with their children with room for activities. In the short-term, states can brand visits more than comfy for families with children by making crayons and coloring books bachelor.¹⁷
3. Willingly cooperate with the Federal Communications Commission'south upcoming prison house and jail telephone regulations, and have the courage to reduce the costs to families fifty-fifty further. Stop making other forms of communication exploitative.
   Fortunately, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is finally poised to end $1-per-minute telephone calls from prisons and jails with its strong proposal¹⁸ to regulate local, intra-state, and inter-state calls as well as ancillary fees. The FCC will be encouraging states to view these rate caps as a federal ceiling. States tin and should reduce the costs to families fifty-fifty further,^nineteen and states such as Arkansas and Indiana should stop fighting the regulations.²⁰ Further, states should avoid implementing video visitation as a replacement for in-person visits — as has been done in hundreds of local jails throughout the state — and avoid overly restrictive post policies like those of the New Hampshire Department of Corrections that ban children's drawings and greeting cards.²¹
4. Listen to the recommendations of incarcerated people and their families who can best identify the obstacles preventing them from staying in impact during incarceration. ²²
   Families have long been saying that no thing how much they would like to visit and see firsthand that their loved ones are prophylactic, sometimes the money and time required brand visiting incarcerated loved ones virtually incommunicable.²³ The sad reality is that currently, a bulk of incarcerated parents of minor children practice non receive visits from any of their children during their prison sentence.²⁴ Recognizing that their families are ofttimes the main source of hope for people during their incarceration and the main source of back up upon release, correctional facilities should gather and seriously consider family input when making decisions about visitation and communication policies.
5. Implement programs that assistance families who want to visit.
   The costs of visitation and communication literally drive some families of incarcerated people into debt.²⁵ States should consider implementing gratuitous transportation to prisons as the New York Country Department of Corrections and Community Supervision did earlier budget cutbacks in 2011. Departments of Corrections should also consider video visitation equally a supplement to in-person visits,²⁶ especially for remote prisons. The Oregon Department of Corrections commencement implemented video visitation as a supplement to traditional visits in its two most remote prisons,²⁷ and information technology has since expanded the engineering to prisons throughout the state. States can also easily model video visitation programs after that of the Mike Durfee State Prison in South Dakota where, for 12 hours every calendar week, incarcerated people have access to complimentary video visits using Skype.²⁸
6. When faced with prison overcrowding, explore sentencing and parole reforms instead of prison house expansion and out-of-state transfers.
   Frequently, when states are faced with prison overcrowding, they prefer band-aid fixes like sending people to out-of-country prisons where they will be even further from their families.²⁹ More effective solutions are to first prefer low-hanging fruit reforms such as reducing the crumbling prison house population or allowing primary caregivers to serve their sentences in the customs, and then to explore larger-scale sentencing and parole reforms.

Appendix

Using the Bureau of Justice Statistics'southward 2004 Survey of Inmates in State Correctional Facilities, we found the breakdown of how far people in state prisons reported being locked upwards from their dwelling house communities. The table below provides estimated counts for the total U.S. state prison house population based on the responses of the 14,500 people imprisoned in country prisons who responded to the BJS survey.

To get this data, we relied on the question: S7Q6c. How far from this prison is … where you were living at the time of your abort? Is information technology less than 50 miles, between l miles and 100 miles, between 101 and 500 miles, between 501 and ane,000 miles, or more than 1,000 miles?

Figure 3. How far incarcerated people in state prisons are imprisoned from their homes (in miles)

Distance	Count	Proportion
Less than 50 miles	184,041	xv.7%
Between fifty and 100 miles	244,981	20.9%
Between 101 and 500 miles	623,011	53.2%
Between 501 and 1,000 miles	92,356	seven.9%
More than one,000 miles	26,017	2.2%

Methodology

The Bureau of Justice Statistics collects visitation and distance from home data periodically as a part of its Survey of Inmates in State Correctional Facilities, ³⁰ but BJS does not routinely publish the results in a format that can be accessed without statistical software. The Bureau of Justice Statistics published data on how far incarcerated parents of minor children are from their children in Parents in Prison and Their Minor Children. ³¹ We prepared this report to focus on people imprisoned in state prison house in general.

This report relies on the Agency of Justice Statistics survey from 2004, which is the newest available. The next survey³² is being conducted in 2015–2016 with the data to be bachelor several years later. While 2004 is older than we would like, we know of no reason or trend that would make visitation data from the 2004 survey an unreliable reflection of visitation today, in 2015.

For this report, we used the Survey of Inmates in Country Correctional Facilities'southward questions about the location of pre-incarceration homes as a proxy for where family unit and customs ties are located. We used the post-obit questions from the Survey:

• S7Q6c. How far from this prison is … where you were living at the fourth dimension of your arrest? Is it less than 50 miles, between 50 miles and 100 miles, betwixt 101 and 500 miles, betwixt 501 and 1,000 miles, or more than than ane,000 miles?
• S10Q7a. Are you lot immune to talk on the phone with friends and family?
• S10Q7b. In the past week, how many telephone calls take you lot made or received? Do not include calls to or from a lawyer.
• S10Q8a. In the past month, have yous had any visits, not counting visits from lawyers?
• S10Q8c. Were you allowed to have any visits?

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Elydah Joyce for the illustrations depicting the emotional toll acquired by incarceration.

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Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/prisonvisits.html

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