Do Children Have a “Right to Hug” Their Parents?

quote:

---

Hundreds of counties around the country have ended in-person jail visits, replacing them with video calls and earning a cut of the profits.

---

quote:

---

In 2012, a company called Securus Technologies struck a deal with the county, offering financial incentives to replace jail visits with video calls. Families would pay fees that could exceed a dollar a minute to see their loved ones on an often grainy video feed; the county would earn a cut of the profits. “A lot of people will swipe that Mastercard and visit their grandkids,” a county official told the press at the time.

A few years later, the county went after an even steeper commission. In the sheriff’s office, a captain named Jason Gould helped negotiate a deal with a Securus competitor called Global Tel*Link (or GTL, now known as ViaPath), which included a fixed commission of a hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year, plus a sixty-thousand-dollar annual “technology grant,” and twenty per cent of the revenue from video calls. The jail chose not to restore families’ access to in-person visits. To celebrate the deal, an undersheriff joked to Gould, by e-mail, “You are not Captain Gold for nothing!”

County sheriffs across the country were making similar deals with Securus and GTL, which resulted in millions of dollars in commissions. Many of those counties replaced in-person visits with the companies’ video calls. I first encountered such an arrangement in 2019, when I joined a family friend on a visit to the Skagit County Jail, in Washington State, where her son had recently awaited trial. Instead of holding her son’s hand or sharing a meal with him, she’d deposited funds at a Securus kiosk, using a screen that read, across the top, “Send money here.” (The jail, like most others, also offers the option of conducting video calls at home, from a personal device. Some jails provide a small number of free video visits, although families described those as hard to schedule.) At the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab, I worked with my colleague Eliza Fawcett to identify more than a hundred jails in thirty-six states which have replaced in-person visits with video calls. The Prison Policy Initiative calculates that hundreds more jails have done the same.

---