Jail accused of trading in-person visits for profit
Family and CLEVELAND — friends of Cuyahoga County Jail inmates can no longer visit their loved ones in person, a move criticized by jail experts as a “dehumanizing” money-making endeavor.
The jail stopped in-person visitation Feb. 3 in favor of Skype-like video-sessions. The option is free for visitors who make the trek to the downtown jail.
The county is expected to roll out an off-site option for video visitation that will cost $12.99 for a maximum 20-minute session. That amount is among the highest in the country, according to Wanda Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative, a criminal justice think tank that published a 2015 study on video visitation.
Bertram said that charge puts Cuyahoga County in the top 15% of most expensive inmate video-visitations.
“It’s something that’s good for their bottom line,” Bertram said. “They don’t have to have officers escort the inmates and monitor the visits. That cuts down on staff time and it makes things cheaper for them.”
Cuyahoga County spokeswoman Mary Louise Madigan said “conversations have started” about lowering the cost of the off-site visitations but she could not provide additional details about any specific policy or proposal. She also could not say when the county would launch offsite visitation.
Chris Schwab, the lead pastor of the Gateway Church Downtown, said he learned about the elimination of in-person visitation after trying to visit a member of his church. Schwab said the lack of in-person visitation is troubling.
“I don’t see how taking away human contact helps anything,” Schwab said. “It’s human contact. It’s the closest thing that they have to someone who cares about them and knows them. They wanted that feeling of closeness to humanity. And that’s valuable.”
Bertram said between 600 and 700 county jails across the country use video visitation, which is usually introduced as a supplemental option to in-person visitation. Some 75% of the jails that have the technology eventually eliminate in-person visitation altogether, she said.
Madigan was unable to say when county officials made the decision to eliminate in-person visitation. She said the move is intended to give people increased access to jailed loved ones.
She said at-home video visitation allows for more than two people to be on a call at one time; previously only two people at a time were allowed to visit an inmate. She also said it will allow for more visitation hours, free up jail staff and increase safety.
Bertram, however, said in some cases video-only visitation makes inmates more prone to misbehavior because they have less incentives and less support from loved ones.
“You really take a way a lot from a someone when you take away in-person visits,” Bertram said. “You decrease safety. Jail is a pretty dehumanizing and isolating experience and taking away visits makes the conditions worse.”
The seemingly small difference between visiting with someone via video and through a thick glass window has a profound effect on inmates and their families, said Leon Digard of the Vera Institute of Justice, a jail and prison policy advocacy group that studies video visitation.
“There’s been a long history of research that show in-person visits are very beneficial,” Digard said. “It improves well-being and behavior while in custody and greatly improves the chances of maintaining meaningful relationships and finding jobs and housing after release. There’s a lot of really important benefits to in-person visits, but not a lot of benefits to video visitation.”
Both Digard and Bertram agree that while counties save money, the cost of remote video visitations places an undue burden on struggling families. Digard also said the lack of in-person visitation can have devastating effects on inmates mental well-being.
“Socialization and loneliness are strongly linked to depression and mental well-being, which are linked to risk of suicide. So you don’t want to do anything that disrupts the contact with family. Anytime you take away the visitation option, that’s what you’re doing.
Four of the eight inmates who died in the Cuyahoga County Jail in 2018 committed suicide and another took his own life in May 2019. The U.S. Marshals Service in 2018 found the jail lacked proper mental healthcare for inmates.
The spate of inmates death happened after county officials moved to regionalize the county’s jails in order to increase revenues by packing the jail with inmates and charging municipalities to house crime suspects.
The move to phase out in-person visitation began in 2016, about the same time as the county’s regionalization plan started to take shape.
Cuyahoga County contracted with Securus Technologies for the jail-telecommunications company to take over management of the jail’s phone calls, at a 42 percent increase in cost. The FCC in 2017 rolled back the amount companies could charge for jail phone calls.
Securus Technologies is one of the biggest private contractors providing services to U.S. jails and prisons. The company is behind efforts to eliminate paper mail, printed books and high-priced phone calls in hundreds of jails around the country, all under the auspice of cutting costs and passing the financial burden onto the families of the incarcerated.
It also owns JPay, which charges inmates in some jails, including Cuyahoga County, to make phone calls. JPay began its life as a means to wire money to inmates, but has morphed into a multipronged service that charges inmates for expensive tablets tied to JPay services that provide e-messaging, books and music for a price.
Cuyahoga County’s eightyear contract with Securus’s video conference guaranteed the county a $1 million signing bonus and at least $2 million over the first two years of the contract. The contract predicted the county would make about $1 million per year based on the jail’s average daily population, which at the time was set to explode because of the county’s plan to regionalize the county’s jails.
Another provision allowed for the use of the at-home video-conferencing option. The county gets 20 percent of the first call to an inmate each month, and 50 percent of each additional call to the inmate in the same month.
That means the county gets about $2.60 for the first 20-minute phone for each inmate call per month and $6.49 for each call in the same month.
Madigan said she was unsure how much the county is expected to make from that option and was unsure what they will do with the extra money. She said she believes the money will be re-invested into help paying for a new jail management system.
In Denton County, Texas, officials sought to make the video-calling option cheaper by eliminating the commission the county received. That dropped the cost for a 30-minute call from $5.99 to $3.