A Colorado Jail Has Banned In-Person Visits Since the Pandemic
For more than four years, beginning during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Boulder County Jail in Boulder, Colorado has remained closed to in-person visitations. Although prisons have returned to allowing visitors, many jails have yet to re-instate in-person access. At Boulder County Jail, 85% of the jail’s population is awaiting a sentence and the average time being locked up there is 22 days, although that number is skewed by some who are only caged for one night.
Video visitation is available at the jail, but detainees and their friends and families have found it to be a poor replacement for in-person visits. For one, the calls can be expensive. What’s more, the quality is often low, with users reporting calls frequently being dropped. As Wanda Bertram, of the Prison Policy Initiative, told The Boulder Weekly, lacking a consistent means to interact with individuals on the outside can take its toll on mental health. “You can’t get a very clear picture if you’re on a video call of the shape that your loved one is in,” Bertram said. “That makes it very different from seeing this person face-to-face.”
A study on jail visitation policies conducted by the Prison Policy Initiative in 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, found that 74% of jails that implemented video calls also banned in-person visits. Private telecom companies such as Securus Technologies and ViaPath (formerly Global Tel*Link) have been accused of colluding with county governments to make their platforms the only option. “The theory behind these contracts seems to be if you stop kids from visiting their parents in person,” civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis told NBC, “these desperate families will be forced to spend more money on phone and video calls.”
Sources: The Boulder Weekly, Prison Policy Initiative, NBC