California May Deny Families Right to See Locked-Up Loved Ones

By teleSUR

26 September 16

Families may be forced to pay for a video service to see inmates.

ounty jails are substituting in-person visitations with expensive video calls, and a bill has made it to California Governor Jerry Brown’s desk to stop that from happening—but he might not sign it. After sitting almost a month on his desk, he has less than a week left to sign.

The video technology has mostly made inroads into county jails—others may catch on but had to be written out of the bill because of politics around public funds—and is already a hit nationwide. This week, Cleveland, Ohio announced it would gain US$3 million a year after introducing the video option, almost four times as much as it currently pockets from Global Tel Link from phone bills.

Mothers, sons and daughters of inmates skipped school and work Tuesday to drive to Sacramento and deliver their petitions for the bill to pass, but they were stood up by Brown without warning. No rescheduling, no referral to anyone in his office, no explanation.

Anita Wills, whose son is serving 66 years to life—on a wrongful conviction, she told teleSUR—, said the silence is “foreboding.” The Sheriff’s Union has been lobbying against the bill, since maintenance for in-person visitation rooms costs money and video calls, operated by for-profit prison communications companies Securus Technologies and Global Tel Link, make money. In two years, 18 counties have adopted the video system and six have entirely replaced them with in-person visitations—three jails built since the bill was introduced eliminated in-person visitation rooms altogether.

Wills already has to save up to make the eight-hour drive to visit her son, and she occasionally calls—though she cannot always afford the full call—but if US$1.50-a-minute video calls were the only option, it would not be an option at all.

“I’d be thinking more about the bill than I would about his voice,” she said. Beyond the cost of the call, Wills said that elders like her have do not always have internet or the tech savvy to operate the camera.

Not only is the image quality poor, her friends tell her, but with video, without being there physically and looking them in the eyes, “you really don’t know they’re doing.”

Going on their sixteenth year of long-distance visits, her son told her that he would ditch the video calls for snail mail. Already, he is locked up eight hours away from the closest relative and can only see them through a glass barrier when they do come—after routine harassment by the guards, and considering the prison isn’t on lockdown.

“The children are traumatized—it’s like a videogame or something,” she said of her grandchildren. The eldest, who was ten when his father was thrown behind bars, was killed ten years later. Wills had to tell her son over the phone and could only hear him weep.

The Sheriff’s Union argues that family visits are a threat to security since connections with the outside could instigate and help organize criminal behavior. A video call could at least be tracked closely by guards—on top of 24-hour monitoring.

“That’s incredibly offensive,” said Zoe Willmott, a fellow at the Women’s Policy Institute who pushed for the bill’s creation and passage with the Essie Justice Group. She told teleSUR that on the contrary, multiple studies show that in-person visits both increase security and save money since the contact with loved ones helps improve behavior inside the jail and outside once they’re released. A recent bill to reduce prison overpopulation acknowledged that fact by sending inmates closer to their own communities.

Yet Brown’s biggest bone to pick, said Zoe, is less over security or revenue and more over disturbing the status quo. The jails that anticipated the lucrative trend don’t want to build new in-person visitation rooms, even though the bill gives them five years to find rooms and repurpose them. That’s more time than it takes to build an entire jail, said Willmott.

Wills admitted that she’s not opposed to the option of seeing her son on video, but she’s opposed to not being able to choose. Of all the jails with video visits, 74 percent end up eliminating the in-person option. Texas anticipated the trend and passed a similar bill last year, but California, which has a prison population on the level of the top 10 countries in the world, may lose its chance on Friday.