USA: how prison visitation cuts devastate families

Buried in the New York state budget is a proposal to cut weekday visits for over 20,000 inmates. For families of incarcerated people, this could mean barely having any real contact with their loved ones.

Jenise Britt sees her husband at Sing Sing, one of New York’s 17 maximum-security prisons, at least twice a week. From her job in Bryant Park, it’s only a short walk to Grand Central and the 7:19 train to Ossining. She tries to visit on weekdays to avoid the more crowded weekends, when the noise and nearby bodies make intimate conversations nearly impossible. The twice-weekly visits help the couple remain close despite her husband’s 18-to-life sentence and the fact that his first parole hearing isn’t until 2024.

But New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s proposed budget means that Britt—and other family members—will have no choice but to contend with crowds, longer waits and the possibility of shorter visits to see their incarcerated loved ones. Buried in the governor’s budget is a proposal to reduce the number of visiting days in maximum-security prisons from seven to just Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, a move that he told Democrats would save the state $2.6 million by eliminating 39 staff positions. Family members and advocates say the cuts will discourage visiting with more crowded visiting rooms, longer waits, and shorter visits, impacting relationships already strained by lengthy prison sentences.

“I don’t think that’s fair,” said 16-year-old Margarita, whose father has been incarcerated since she was three or four years old. “If we have a vacation during the week, we want to see our parents.” She recalls going to visit her father two days before her 15th birthday. “Usually, if we talk on the phone, it’s like, ‘Happy birthday. Have fun,’” she recalled. But that day, they spent several hours together talking, walking around the outside visiting area and playing Monopoly. “Kids—they want to see their parents more,” she added. “[These cuts] are just taking away time from our parents.”

As of March 14, 2017, 50,476 people were incarcerated in New York state prisons. Similar to policing policies and practices across the country, incarceration disproportionately impacts communities of color, particularly African-American communities.
Almost half (49 percent) of people in the state’s prisons are Black; the other half are white (24.4 percent) and Latino (24 percent). Sixty percent are parents to living children, and the impact of parental incarceration, like incarceration itself, disproportionately affects families of color. African-American children are seven times more likely, and Latino children are twice as likely, to have a parent in prison as their white peers. Incarceration doesn’t affect just children and parents—other family members, such as spouses, non-married partners, parents and siblings, also feel the brunt of their loved ones’ absence. In-person visits allow families to maintain their relationships despite long periods of separation. But Cuomo’s cuts mean that the 21,525 people in maximum-security prisons face the possibility of fewer—and shorter—visits.

Jolene Russ relies on visits to stay connected to her husband, who has served 17 years of a 49-year sentence at the prison in Elmira. Russ works full-time and typically visits on the weekends, which she describes as “elbow-to-elbow. There’s no room to move.” But there have been times during her husband’s incarceration that her visit couldn’t wait. Last year, for instance, death hit her husband’s family hard—first his father died, followed by his brother and then his nephew.

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