Pete Souza / The White House
President Barack Obama greets inmates during a visit to El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma in 2015.
After financier Jeffrey Epstein, newly charged with sex trafficking, was found dead from an apparent suicide at the federal facility where he was jailed without bail ahead of trial, questions swirled over how this could have happened.
As many pointed out, suicide is common in prisons and jails nationwide, and the facility where Epstein was housed, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, has been notorious for decades. Torturous conditions at the jail included prevalent solitary confinement, extreme heat and cold, and failure to treat medical problems—serious dysfunction that extends to many other facilities across the country.
For many members of the public, prisons exist out of sight and out of mind. Even some key criminal justice decision-makers, including legislators and prosecutors, have never seen the inside of a jail or prison, or spoken with incarcerated people.
In response, criminal justice advocates have called for policymakers to visit prisons and jails. This, they argue, lets policymakers better understand what it’s like to be incarcerated, and raises the level of accountability for how people are treated there.
A recent example is the challenge, issued in early July to all federal and state legislators, to visit a prison within the year—an initiative of the nonprofit Families Against Mandatory Minimums. FAMM was founded in 1991 to oppose mandatory minimum sentences and now advocates broadly for a fairer justice system. (It has received funding from foundations including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s and wife Priscilla Chan’s Chan Zuckerberg foundation).
Many advocates have echoed FAMM’s call, often on Twitter using the hashtag #visitaprison. In response, about 100 policymakers from thirteen states have taken the challenge as of late August, FAMM president Kevin Ring tells The Progressive, with some sharing videos on Twitter about their visits.
In mid-August, two Florida state representatives, Carlos Smith and Dianne Hart, shared a video they recorded at Central Florida Reception Center, a state prison in Orlando.
“We are here because we want to see what the conditions are for ourselves,” Smith says in the video.
Smith and Hart reported seeing 2,000 people in dorms with no air-conditioning despite temperatures in the 90s. (According to the Prison Policy Initiative, many prisons in the hottest parts of the country lack air-conditioning). Dozens of prisoners, the representatives added, said they are given just three to four minutes to eat their meals.
Summer Lee, a state representative in Pennsylvania, has visited three prisons since taking office last year. For Lee, these encounters are a way to gather critical information to help do her job.
“If we’re going to demand changes in our prison system,” Lee says, “then it’s important that people know what’s going on in those systems.”
There’s a disturbing tendency, Lee says, to send people off to prison and forget about them. But she notes that lawmakers have a special obligation to educate themselves about an area in which they play a key oversight role.
“Most prosecutors have never stepped foot in the buildings that they sentence people to spend years in. That needs to change.”
“It’s our job. We represent them, too. So whether or not they’re enfranchised or disenfranchised, we are still their representative,” Lee says. “To not pay any attention, to not come and listen to and speak to such a huge portion of our population in some of these districts, is egregious and unacceptable.”
In 2015, President Barack Obama was the first sitting President to visit a federal prison. And recently Sarah George, a state’s attorney in Vermont, wrote, “Most prosecutors have never stepped foot in the buildings that they sentence people to spend years in. That needs to change.”
In mid-August, she instructed prosecutors in her office to visit a prison within the next month.
But advocates warn that merely scheduling a tour hosted by corrections officers can give lawmakers a skewed view.
Kristen Laschober, who was incarcerated in a federal prison in Texas for two and a half years, tells The Progressive that when government officials scheduled visits, correctional officers at the facility would say, “OK, we have a few weeks to prepare for this dog-and-pony show.” They’d then bring out new bedding, hide boxes of food in the kitchen that said “not for human consumption,” and otherwise clean up the facility.
Laschober, who after release went back to college at Southern Oregon University and is on track to graduate next year, encourages policymakers to make unscheduled visits if possible, and to ask to see particular programs in action such as educational and re-entry programs. In her experience, prison “educational” programs often consisted of things like watching movies on sharks or national parks.
When Laschober tried enrolling in re-entry programs, she says she was instead offered a “safe sex” class in which she was told, “Don’t have unprotected sex,” then asked to sign a form saying she’d taken the class. By visiting unannounced and asking to sit in on programs, she says, policymakers might witness some of these serious shortcomings.
Other advocates warn that it can be daunting and dangerous for inmates to speak one-on-one with policymakers about prison conditions. Jose Saldana, director of the nonprofit Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), who was himself incarcerated in New York for thirty-eight years, says there can be serious repercussions from correctional staff for prisoners who speak openly about abuses.
By visiting unannounced and asking to sit in on programs, she says, policymakers might witness serious shortcomings.
Instead, Saldana suggests holding a hearing with representatives of groups within the prison. Saldana says that while he was incarcerated at a state prison, Daniel O’Donnell—a New York state representative who was then chairman of the state assembly’s Correction Committee—organized such a hearing at the prison. He invited representatives of groups such as the prison’s inmate liaison committee and lifer’s committee (consisting of people, including Saldana, serving life sentences). After O’Donnell heard the issues raised, Saldana says, several were immediately addressed, including improved access to the law library and to the family reunion program, which enables extended family visits at the facility.
In Pennsylvania, Lee and her colleagues recently held a similar hearing. In August, they held a policy hearing during a visit to Cambridge Springs, a state prison, at which seven incarcerated women spoke. (Corrections staff were present but did not speak.) An eighty-year-old woman serving a life sentence talked about the lack of education and other opportunities for personal growth, especially for those with life sentences. Women who had given birth in the facility talked about not being able to see their children, and two other women at the hearing were pregnant and had returned after parole violations.
Lee has sponsored a bill on alternative sentences for pregnant women that keep families together. “I left Cambridge Springs understanding how important it is that we move forward on that bill,” she says.
Another issue that jumped out at her: There was only one social worker in place in a prison with more than 1,200 people. “That is something that I’m looking at and working on immediately,” she says.
Besides making prison visits, policymakers are being urged to engage with local groups that work with incarcerated people and their families.
Advocate Andrea Davis started volunteering with Florida Cares—a nonprofit that has collaborated with FAMM—when her brother was incarcerated for eight years in the Florida state system. “We have a spreadsheet of all the facilities where family members have expressed concerns,” Davis says, “like buildings that are known to have mold growing through them.”
Over eight years, Davis’s brother spent time in twenty-three facilities, including at a prison ten hours drive from home—not an uncommon experience among incarcerated people. Beyond learning about abuses, Davis says it’s important that lawmakers talk with families to understand the hardships they endure to support loved ones.
Other issues stem from treatment by corrections officers. In July, Florida Cares and FAMM raised serious concerns after officers were shown in a video beating a person incarcerated at a prison in Clermont, Florida.
Mere awareness isn’t a panacea, but advocates say prison visits are an important step towards closing the distance between the millions of people incarcerated each year and the rest of society.
“I knew nothing about prisons until my first visit in the ’80s,” anti-death penalty advocate Sister Helen Prejean said, weighing in on the #visitaprison call on Twitter in July. “Each visit is a reminder of what most of us try to ignore: the humanity of the incarcerated and the inhumanity of what we do to them. Insist that your lawmakers visit!”