Adam* has been incarcerated in Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) facilities for somewhere around 40 years. His wife Ruth* has been coming to prison visit rooms so long she remembers when they had smoking sections.
“In the [maximum-security] visitation there was a wall of thick wire mesh separating us. I would press my fingers against it and not be able to feel his,” Ruth told Filter. “There was a time we visited in a box like two phone booths, with a metal and glass wall between us. A tiny grill to speak through.”
They did this for 20 years.
Then Adam was moved to his first medium-security facility, and they began the next 20 years of holding their marriage together in multi-purpose rooms. There, very briefly and very chastely, while an officer watches them, they may hug and kiss at the beginning of each visit before sitting down.
“Rows of plastic chairs facing across tiny tables that allow us to sit practically knee to knee,” Ruth said. “We’re not allowed to close that gap, except briefly after a guard walks past us.”
An equally reserved hug and kiss is allowed at the end of the visit. Per GDC policy, “any other behavior that can be considered to be intimate physical contact” is banned. Even touching fingertips could get Adam sent to solitary confinement, pending transfer to a new facility. Ruth, meanwhile, gets the following reminder via registration paperwork each time she arrives at the facility.
I understand that my authorization to enter a correctional institution is conditional on my agreement not to engage in sexual activity with any offender and to report such contact to a correctional employee when I learn of it. I also understand that if I violate this agreement I may be permanently banned from entering all Georgia Department of Corrections correctional institutions and that the Department of Corrections may pursue criminal prosecution.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, in many cases visitors could stay most of the day on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. Post-COVID, the days are the same but visits are limited to two-hour blocks—9 am to 11 am for example, or 1 pm to 3 pm. Visitors have to reserve ahead of time through an online portal.
“On the good side,” Ruth said, “I get to sit and share space with Adam. To watch his mannerisms, hear his voice without electronics involved. See his eyes spark or cloud, depending on subject matter.”
The time between visits, Adam is preparing for the next visit. Washing and ironing his most presentable uniform; scheduling a fresh trim at the barbershop; working out Saturday morning so as to be looking his buffed best; mentally banking a list of topics to discuss.
“Visits are my highlight of doing time,” Adam told Filter. “Seriously, I want that two hours.”
Adam has always been housed at facilities far from home, so gas money is only the beginning of the costs of those two hours. If he’s at a facility on the other side of the state, then a motel is involved. And the visit room vending machines are not discount-priced out of consideration of hardship, but quite the opposite.
“I hate to complain,” Ruth said, “but it is expensive to visit prisons.”
Visitors may bring debit cards or coins to use in the vending machines. The spending limit is the supply. Even if the machines are full when visitation opens Saturday morning, there’s never enough for the whole weekend. Sunday afternoon the machines are empty.
Visitation is considered a privilege, not a right.
GDC, like every other prison system in the United States, considers visitation a privilege—not a right. Usually for security-related reasons.
In addition to being cleared in advance by national and state-level criminal record databases, having their clothing approved by staff and going through a standard security check, visitors always face the possibility that they’ll be flagged for a more invasive search. They have the right to decline, but there will be no visits if they do. Prisoners, who do not have the right to decline, are strip-searched before and after each visit.
Our visitor lists are capped at 12 people (only five with whom we’re allowed to exchange money) and can only be updated twice a year. The people on them are also the only people we’re allowed to send electronic messages through JPay, or call on the GDC wall phones.
Those phones are often broken, and when they do work the calls are still time-limited and still too expensive. JPay messages must be sent through kiosks that are also frequently broken, and cost $0.30 each. Video visits are $6.50. Mail arrives weeks late. Newspaper clippings or similar announcements of graduations, weddings, births and funerals are denied. And internet is a risk.
In Colorado, a bill that has crossed from the House to the Senate would make the state the first to establish “social visitation as a right for a person confined in a correctional facility.” Which is crucial because as a privilege visitation is so readily taken away from us, and because without it we have a dwindling number of ways to connect with loved ones at all.
*Names have been changed for sources’ protection.
Top image via Georgia Department of Corrections. Inset image via Racine County, Wisconsin.
Show Comments