Opinion: For incarcerated parents, video visits can’t replace hugging your child
Despite shortcomings, jails across the country are rolling out video visitation technology
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In 2017, St. Clair County Jail completely banned people from visiting their incarcerated loved ones, forcing families to pay steep fees for low-quality phone and video calls. Children and parents of individuals detained in the jail sued the County and Securus Technologies — the contractor providing call and video visitation technology — alleging that the ban violates the families’ fundamental rights under the Michigan Constitution.
While a local court granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case, the plaintiffs maintain that the County’s complete ban on in-person visitation violates their constitutional right to family integrity. The case is currently on appeal before the Michigan Court of Appeals. The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project joined the ACLU of Michigan, alongside seventeen other organizations and advocates from across the political spectrum — ranging from the Cato Institute, to Black Lives Matter Port Huron, to academicians, to the Criminal Law Section of the State Bar of Michigan — in filing an amicus brief with the Court emphasizing the harm bans on in-person visitation inflict on incarcerated people and their loved ones.
Kickback agreements like the contract between Securus and the County turn essential channels of communication between incarcerated people and their families into increasingly exploitative revenue generators. According to the plaintiffs, under the 2017 contract, the County receives 50% of revenue from video calls (at a rate of $12.99 per twenty minutes) and 78% of revenue from phone calls (at a rate of $0.21 per minute). The agreement quickly paid dividends: the lawsuit alleges that County revenues from Securus kickbacks increased from $154,130 in 2017, to $404,752 in 2018, to $448,033.18 in 2023.
Video visitation increases the scope of state surveillance of not only incarcerated people, but also every person that they communicate with. A New Yorker investigation found that Securus at one point boasted that its surveillance product, Threads, “included the names and addresses of more than six hundred thousand people” who contacted their loved ones behind bars. Communications companies maintain a façade that users “opt-in” to data collection, but this “consent” is meaningless when people have no other way to see their loved ones’ faces.
Prison communication companies are experimenting with pseudoscientific tools to identify “criminal behavior”: word clouds showing phrases commonly used during video visitation, tone analysis allowing “an investigator to look for calls that start or end at a threshold of emotion,” integrated cell phone forensic analysis using Cellebrite and XRY, live monitoring of calls, among many others. Securus has gone so far as to secure a patent for a system that would display pop up advertisements based on the “characteristics of the callers and the interests of the advertiser.” These tools can falsely flag incarcerated people as “aggressive,” expose incarcerated people to retaliation by prison officials for perceived misbehavior, be used to justify denial of access to communications services, and chill speech.
As emphasized in the ACLU of Michigan’s amicus brief, bans on in-person visitation also cause long-lasting psychological harm to both incarcerated parents and their children. Such disruptions to parent-child relationships can make children less likely to trust and feel connected to their caregivers, cause feelings of abandonment and rejection, and make it more difficult to reestablish a parent-child bond upon release. Trauma caused by parental incarceration is a risk factor for a host of negative mental health and life outcomes, including antisocial behavior, poor school performance, and heightened risk of future interactions with the criminal justice system.
In-person visitation, especially where family members can physically touch, hold hands, and hug, is the most effective way to maintain the parent-child bond. In-person visits preserve a semblance of normalcy and let the child know that their parent is OK and that they are loved. Empirical studies show that “frequent, high-quality visitation” can “break the intergenerational cycle of incarceration.”
Bans on in-person visits cause harm not only to the children of incarcerated parents, but to those parents themselves. In-person visits can reduce prison violence and decrease recidivism risk. Research indicates that visits with children, in particular, can motivate people to comply with facility rules and participate in correctional programming.
Maintaining connections with loved ones on the outside also smooths the reentry process, as families can provide support in finding housing, employment, healthcare, and transportation. A stable support structure reduces recidivism risk; a 2013 study by the Minnesota Department of Corrections found people who had received visits were 13% less likely to be convicted of a felony after release, and 25% less likely to have their probation or parole revoked.
Video visits are no substitute for in-person contact. Poor connections, distorted images, lack of meaningful eye contact due to the placement of cameras, lack of reassurance from physical touch and attention, and constant dropped calls make video visitation technology difficult to use and plainly inferior to in-person visits. Video calls are “shorter, on average, than in-person visits and can end abruptly with no warning before families have a chance to say goodbye.”
Despite these shortcomings, jails across the country are rolling out video visitation technology. This technology can help improve access to communications in prisons in remote areas where in-person visits involve long travel times. But it cannot be a substitute for in-person visits. Bans on in-person visitation exacerbate harms to incarcerated people and their families, subject incarcerated people and their correspondents to increased state surveillance, rupture community networks, increase recidivism risk, and undermine the very penological interests that the St. Clair County Jail implemented them to pursue. For these reasons, the Michigan ALCU and fellow amici ask the Michigan Court of Appeals to overturn dismissal of this case and give the plaintiffs their day in court.
Phil Mayor is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Michigan. Alissa Johnson is a legal intern at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) and recent graduate from Yale Law School.
