Prison Video Visits Are No Substitute for Face-to-Face, Especially at These Prices

Once a week for nine months in 2016, Barbara Hughes drove the 90 minutes from her home in Springfield, Ill., to visit her son at Tazewell County jail in Pekin, where he was awaiting trial. But she never got to see him in person. Instead, she had to enter a room with video phones lining two walls and sit down at her assigned station.

At Tazewell, inmates’ loved ones are allowed one free 20-minute session a week at the video phones. The stations are so cramped and narrow that Hughes and her ex-husband couldn’t sit side by side while they talked to their son. (Hughes declined to give her son’s name or specify his charges, wanting to protect his future employment prospects.) “It doesn’t seem real, even though you’re in the same building,” she says. The monitors were so high that Hughes, a petite 5-feet-4, had to crane her neck to see. And there was always the ticking clock. “It’s a hurry-up thing,” she says. “You have to know what you’re going to say, because you might get shut off.” She could have video-called from home as much as she wanted but would have had to pay $6.95 for 20 minutes.