The District of Columbia made the switch on July 25 to video visitation, a growing trend in the corrections field. To proponents, the video systems provide a more convenient, safer, thriftier alternative to in-person visits. Some jurisdictions even make money, by charging for the video visits. Critics, including prisoner advocates and corrections officers concerned with how prisoners fare once they are released, fear that the video visits allow less meaningful contact with family and could hurt inmates’ morale.
The District of Columbia Department of Corrections installed 108 video stations, half in jail housing units and half in the new Video Visitation Center at the District of Columbia General Hospital complex.
On any given day, the District of Columbia jail has about 1,800 inmates, all men. Most are in custody for less than a year. Many are awaiting trials. Others have been convicted and are waiting to be sentenced and sent to other facilities to serve their time.
Angela Davis, 41, had her second video visit Friday with her son, who has been held in the jail here for 14 months awaiting trial on charges of armed robbery.
She said she misses watching her son, who is 21, walk into the visitation room and take a seat in front of her. She would observe him to make sure he had no scratches or scars while examining his body language and gestures. “He doesn’t know that, but that’s what I’d be doing,” Ms. Davis said. “I can’t really do that if he’s just sitting there and all I see is his face. You can’t really do that on a monitor.”
What is more troubling than seeing only his face, she said, is everything else she sees — guards and inmates walking about behind him and on the upper tiers of his cellblock. Her son has also complained to her about missing the extra time out of his cell that he gained on his way to and from visits.
Still, Ms. Davis said there are benefits to video visits compared with the in-person ones. She remembers waiting as long as two hours in hot weather, and then undergoing uncomfortable frisking before entering the jail. Sylvia Lane, a spokeswoman for the District of Columbia corrections department, said that the video system would double the number of visits possible each day to 400, while eliminating long lines and invasive security checks and also lowering staff costs.
She said the new system should save $420,000 a year, about 64 percent of the $660,000 budgeted for visiting costs in 2012. She also said it would keep the jail more secure because inmates do not have to be moved around as much, and the risk of visitors smuggling contraband into jail is drastically reduced.
The department now runs the video visits from its own buildings but hopes to eventually offer them from libraries, churches, recreational centers and even from homes.
The system was set up at no charge to the district by Global Tel*Link, which receives money from phone calls made by inmates. The software came from Renovo Software, whose products are used at about 100 correctional facilities nationwide.
Video systems surfaced in United States jails in the late 1990s. While there is no centralized data on how many places are using them, interviews with system vendors, criminal justice officials and legal experts, as well as news reports, suggest hundreds of jails in at least 20 states already have the systems or have plans to adopt the technology.
Many agencies charge as much as $15 for a 30-minute visit and $30 for a 60-minute visit. In-person visits typically remain an option.
Correctional and sociological research indicates that visits help maintain inmates’ social bonds with the world outside the jail, aids reintegration and reduces recidivism. A Justice Department spokeswoman said the department this year solicited proposals for studies to look into the topic of video visits.
Ivy Finkenstadt, a staff lawyer at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee’s DC Prisoners’ Project, said the video visit poses another barrier to the families of inmates here who are later transferred into the federal prison system because the District of Columbia does not have a federal prison. “There’s something more tangible about sitting in a room, visiting a loved one,” she said.
And Arthur M. Wallenstein, director of the Department of Correction and Rehabilitation in Montgomery County, Md., does not believe that prisoners should be limited to video visits, which is now the only option in the District of Columbia. “I believe real family contact is essential,” he said. “But a younger generation of correctional administrators much more focused on technology may see this new approach as more than acceptable.”
But Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College and a past director of the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department’s research arm, said the video systems have “enormous potential.”
“We have placed many more people in prison over the last generation,” he said. “We have created many more children who have a parent in prison, and that has consequences for their developmental processes. Why not use this technology to enhance the relationship between incarcerated parents and their children?”
In Florida, Broward County adopted a video system in 2007. Lt. Col. Kim Spadaro, the director of the county Department of Detention and president of the American Jail Association, which represents more than 3,200 jails, does not see the decreased intimacy of video visits as a significant issue.
“Either way, they’re not able to have physical contact with their family members,” she said. “They stay right in their cell, they’re on their video screen, they have their privacy, and they’re still having basically the same visit as the one they had when they’re separated by glass.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 9, 2012
An article on Tuesday about the growing use of video systems for visits with jail inmates misspelled the surname of a staff attorney with the Washington Lawyers’ Committee DC Prisoners’ Project who is concerned that the District of Columbia jail is now using a video system. She is Ivy Finkenstadt, not Finkenstatdt.
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