There is growing interest from policymakers and the public to help incarcerated people succeed after release. One of the most effective ways to ensure a successful reentry into society is to encourage the inmates to remain in contact with their family and friends. Research confirms that visits and maintaining family ties are the best ways to reduce recidivism notwithstanding, the reality of having a loved one behind bars is that visits are unnecessarily grueling and frustrating. Almost by definition, incarceration separates individuals from their families, but for decades this country has also placed unnecessary burdens on the family members left behind. Certainly, in practice and perhaps by design, prisons are lonely places.
Visitation and communication require additional hardships on the support group. There are hard costs associated with remaining in touch with an inmate. If you are visiting, you have to have to find transportation to the facility, if it’s phone call the prison phone carriers have made it very expensive for a 15-minute call.
As a comprehensive 50-state study on prison visitation policies found, the only constant in prison rules between states is their differences. 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. Arkansas and Kentucky require prospective visitors to provide their social security numbers, and Arizona charges visitors a one-time $25 background check fee in order to visit.
Some rules are inherently subjective such as Washington State’s ban on “excessive emotion,” leaving families’ visiting experience to the whims of individual officers. With all of these unnecessary barriers, visitation policies and practices actively discourage family members from making the trip. For every inmate and their relatives, friends or loved ones, visiting is an issue of great importance. While most prison officials pay lip service to the idea that visiting is important and that they want to do everything to enable inmates to maintain ties to their families and the community, which lowers recidivism based on studies, the reality can oftentimes quite different. Not only are inmate's visitors treated as bad or worse than prisoners themselves, in many cases they are treated worse than people actually arrested on suspicion of having committed a crime. This serves to discourage visitation as well as degrade some visitors whose only "crime" is having a friend or relative in prison.
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