Prison Conditions
This same lack of accountability helps explain other prison policies that have the effect of undermining public safety. Consider the physical location of prisons. Individuals are often locked away far from their homes with more than 75% of people incarcerated more than 50 miles away from home and the average person 100 miles away These distances make it difficult for family and friends to visit, particularly those who struggle to afford transportation to the facilities. One study found that fewer than half of all people imprisoned less than 50 miles away receive visits at least once a month, and the number declines as the distances increases, with only about one-quarter of the people incarcerated more than 100 miles away receiving monthly visits. In Florida, for example, the majority of people are never visited while they are in prison; 58% were never visited in the year prior to their release. Those who do receive visits are much less likely to recidivate when they are released. People incarcerated in state prisons in Florida who had visitors had a 30.7% lower incidence of recidivism than those who did not. Significantly, for each additional visit an individual received, the odds of recidivism declined by 3.8%.
It is not just distance that matters for visits. It is up to each state whether it wants to impose restrictions on prison visits, and the states can consider any penological goal, not just the effect on public safety. Courts usually defer to prison administrators in making these determinations. The result is that many correctional facilities have limited visits as disciplinary measures or for other cost-saving or administrative reasons, such as preventing the transfer of contraband. Visitation policies in maximum-security prisons are often the most restrictive, even though the individuals housed there are likely the ones who need the most help and support for successful reentry. In North Carolina, for instance, prisoners in maximum security can have only one visit per week for two hours. In Oklahoma maximum-security prisoners have up to four hours a week of visitation, while minimum-security prisons allow eight hours. While tightening visitation might aid the administration of the facility, it is a terrible policy if the goal is to reduce crime because maintaining connections with loved ones is critical for an individual's successful reentry. Studies consistently show that visitation reduces and delays recidivism.
Visits should be in-person to have the greatest benefit, but many states are now turning to video visits instead to save administrative costs. To be sure, virtual visitation programs are useful when an individual is incarcerated far from their loved ones or when in-person visitation may be dangerous. But video calls should not replace in-person visits in most cases because virtual visitation does not produce the same strong communal and familial ties that are demonstrated to change individuals' behavior both in and out of prison. Video calls are often interrupted by technical difficulties, and prisoners do not have the same privacy and intimacy that in-person visits afford. Video visitation can also have negative effects on the prisoner's loved ones. Seeing someone on a screen does not provide the same reassurance about his or her well-being as does an in-person visit.106 Despite these negative effects on reentry and ultimately public safety, some jail and prison administrators are nevertheless replacing in-person visits with video visits because it makes their jobs easier, even if the general public pays the price in terms of inferior reentry outcomes.
Facilities often adopt similarly counterproductive telephone policies. The rates for phone calls are often exorbitant because pay phone companies have a monopoly on calls to and from the facilities, and the fees are split between those companies and the prisons and jails. A 4-minute call costs as much as $56. Prisons and jails go along because they reap revenue from this setup, collectively making around $460 million per year in concession fees from the companies. The people incarcerated and their families bear a crushing burden as a result. A retired nurse who spent $100 per month just to talk to her grandson who was in prison in another state brought a civil rights challenge to this structure and pointed out how hard it was on families and the people in prison, many of whom are living in poverty. In 20I5, the FCC implemented rate caps for interstate and intrastate prison calls, but in June 20I7, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the intrastate caps as beyond the agency's legal authority. Roughly 80% of prison phone calls are intrastate, so without FCC regulation, states would have to regulate the rates to keep costs down. But all too often that does not happen, and the result is that calls remain prohibitively expensive. It is not just those in prison and their loved ones who suffer. The public loses out as well because a valuable tool for reentry goes underutilized because the financial interests of the phone companies and the prisons cut against the public interest in getting better post-incarceration outcomes.
There is a similar tension - or at least a perceived tension - in the use of solitary confinement. Many prison administrators believe it is critical to be able to use it to maintain control of difficult individuals in their facilities and to keep their employees and other incarcerated individuals safe. Almost 20% of people in prisons and 18% of people in jails reported spending time in solitary, and the figures are even higher for individuals with a history of mental health problems. President Obama noted that "as many as 100,000 inmates in U.S. prisons are currently held in solitary confinement" and that "as many as 25,000 are in long-term solitary confinement, which involves months if not years with almost no human contact." The effects of solitary confinement on individuals when they are released from prison are devastating. Solitary confinement can produce psychological consequences that outlast the period of confinement and increase the risk of violent recidivism.
Even if separation is necessary to maintain order in some cases, the use of solitary confinement goes well beyond necessity. Many people are placed in solitary because of relatively minor disruptive behavior, such as talking back or failing to obey an order! Before a policy change, corrections officers sent people in South Carolina to solitary confinement for an average of 12 days for violating prison protocol by posting on social-media sites. in 2013, a person was sent to solitary for 37 1/2 years for posting on Facebook 38 times. The conditions of separation also often go far beyond a safety rationale. There is no safety reason, for example, for rules that prevent individuals in solitary confinement from having pictures of their family members or newspapers. Nor is there a prison management reason for facilities to be designed such that individuals in isolation have no access to windows. One former warden of the nation's only supermax facility, ADX Florence, admitted as much in an interview, noting, "This place is not designed for humanity .... When it's 23 hours a day in a room with a slit of a window where you can't even see the Rocky Mountains - let's be candid here. It's not designed for rehabilitation. Period. End of story."
Rachel Barkow " Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration" (2019)
