Video Visiting Is Latest Jail Trend

“I’ll be fine. I love you too.”

The 22-year-old, sentenced that day to a one- to three-year prison term, was trying valiantly to reassure his mother that he would be OK. Or rather, he was reassuring the darkened, sometimes blurry image of his mother’s face at the bottom of a 15-inch TV screen.

Forget those poignant scenes of teary-eyed jail visitors pressing their hands to glass partitions separating them from their loved ones.

Here in the new wing of the Washoe County Consolidated Jail, there’s a lot more than a sheet of reinforced glass between prisoners and visitors.

In this case, Josh Hubbard, convicted of grand larceny and drug use, was talking to his mother via a TV monitor with a tiny video camera atop it. His mother was doing the same thing, but she was in a different building within the complex. They could see each other’s heads and hear each other’s voices over a telephone hookup and that was about it.

This is video visitation, one of the latest bits of technology to transform life behind bars. It is slowly moving across the country, from Florida, where it is most popular, to California, where Santa Clara County is starting a video pilot project in its jail system this month.

“I think this kind of technology is going to be used more and more,” said Bryan Peretti, public information officer for Santa Clara County’s Department of Corrections.

Courts have employed video for routine arraignments for more than a decade. In the last three years video cameras also have begun to move into family visiting rooms in jails, reducing problems of security and contraband smuggling but prompting protests from inmates and prisoner rights advocates.

“It’s extremely isolating,” said Kara Gotsch, public policy coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. “It seems it hardly can qualify as a visit. It just continues the cycle of making conditions in prison as harsh as possible.”

At one point in his visit, Hubbard, who has a large cross tattooed on his arm, muttered to his mother, “I hate these screen TVs. When you move forward, I can’t see your face that well.”

Most of his fellow inmates who have used the system are of the same opinion. In a recent survey, two-thirds of them complained that the video visits, begun last year, were not personal enough and that small children could not fully grasp that it was their father on the screen rather than a TV character.

But that’s not going to change anything, said David Grey, a civilian supervisor at the Washoe County facility. “Our administration supports it a whole lot,” he said, because it is efficient and involves minimal personnel.

Over the next five to 10 years, jail officials hope to equip the entire 940-bed facility with video setups, eliminating face-to-face visits.

They foresee a time when visitors may not even come to the immaculately kept jail complex just outside Reno, but will instead simply drive to a sheriff’s substation for a live video tete-a-tete across the miles. The local public defender’s office recently installed a video hookup and is beginning to use it to consult with prisoners.

It’s easy to see why the Washoe administrators are enamored of video. The system cost $134,000 to install, but Grey said it would have cost considerably more to build a visiting lobby in the 256-bed jail expansion and then staff visiting hours.

When Hubbard walked to a video booth down the hall from his dorm unit, he did not even have to be escorted by a guard. He never left a secure area and his mother never left the visitors’ carpeted lobby in the main building.

She didn’t have to go through a metal detector, as she would have for a standard through-the-glass visit. Hubbard did not have to be patted down. And the video visits are 15 minutes longer than the half-hour, face-to-face sessions.

Yet such efficiency comes at a price, one that is not tallied in the lines of a county budget, but in the currency of relationships.

“I talked to the top of his head for a long time,” said Renee Whitfield, who had traveled from Oregon to visit a friend, detained on a parole violation that probably would return him to prison.

Because the small video cameras are fixed atop the TV screens and do not move, they sometimes show only part of a person’s head, depending on their height and position. And because each person is looking at the screen rather than the camera, there is no eye contact. It is as though one were watching the other have a telephone chat, rather than having a direct conversation.

“I like the old way,” said Angela Hiner, who visits her jailed friend twice a week. “It’s a lot more personal. You actually feel you’re communicating.” With the video system, she added, “You don’t even feel you’re here.”

Not everybody is bothered by the new system.

Lisa Herrera had brought her two sons, one an infant and one a toddler, along on her visit to their father. She held them up in front of the tiny camera so he could wave to them, though neither child’s attention was long held by their father’s clowning face on the screen.

Herrera nonetheless pronounced the video visits “OK” and appreciated the extra 15 minutes she got with her fiance. “We still get to see each other.”

Michael Black, a sales executive for Datapoint Corp., a leader in the field and the company that installed Washoe County’s system, estimated that about a dozen jails across the country are using video visitation to some extent.

He sees a booming future for the technology. Together with other management, he is buying Datapoint’s video division and plans to target the corrections industry. “I expect it will be very successful,” said Black, who will be president of the new firm.

So far, video visiting is being tried primarily in jails, rather than state or federal prison facilities.

Missouri’s state prison system just dropped a small-scale video project for lack of use. Under the system, friends and relatives had the option of going to commercial outlets with video broadcast equipment and buying time for a tele-visit. The state was averaging only one video visit a month at each of the three prisons participating in the project, according to a corrections spokesman.

In Hawaii, the state’s year-old video visiting program is much more popular. It is free to users. It is also the only way that many family members can see the 1,175 inmates imprisoned in far-off mainland facilities, which Hawaii uses because it doesn’t have enough prison cells of its own.

Additionally, Shari Kimoto of the Hawaii Department of Corrections said, people on outlying islands use it to visit with prisoners jailed on the main island of Oahu.

In California, state prison officials have yet to explore video visitation, said a spokeswoman, although video is being used at a number of facilities for medical consultations.

Prisoner rights activists take a dim view of the technology, while conceding that it would be difficult to mount a legal challenge because courts have given corrections officials considerable discretion over visiting conditions.

Video visitation may make sense in situations where families are distant from a jail or prison, “but making it a substitute for other forms of visiting is really headlong in the wrong direction,” said John Boston, a New York prisoner rights advocate.

He and others say inmates who maintain family ties during incarceration are less likely to return to prison after their release. “Anything that creates an obstacle--metaphorical or otherwise--is really stupid,” Boston said.

In Los Angeles County, some arraignments are conducted by live video from police holding facilities. Additionally, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. John Vander Horck said video conferencing systems are being installed in facilities for use by the public defender’s and district attorney’s offices.

While there is video visiting in some sheriff’s patrol station lockups where prisoners are held for brief periods, Vander Horck said, there are no plans to use video hookups for regular family visits in the county’s sprawling, 18,000-inmate jail system.

By contrast, in central Florida, Pinellas County officials are finding video irresistible.

Datapoint’s Black described the Pinellas program as the largest jail video visitation system in the world. All but minimum-security prisoners in the 3,000-inmate system use video. A couple of months ago, one inmate was married via the video hookup.

Visitors aren’t even allowed on jail grounds. They stay in a building across the street.

“This is pretty foolproof,” said Pinellas County sheriff’s spokesman Deputy Cal Dennie.