On Televisiting

This essay appeared in the Perspective section of the San Jose Mercury-News.

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It was Christmastime 1992, and I was 3000 miles from home. I was imprisoned at Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, locked in my cell for 23 hours a day. That’s when I first conceived of video-visits: an incarcerated man in the prison chaplain’s office, watching a videotape that his family made for him. Mom laughing on the screen. Dad fixing the car and cracking jokes. A girlfriend blowing a kiss.

Next month, the Santa Clara County jail will introduce a slightly different version of the video-greeting card I dreamt of in solitary confinement. On-screen visits will occur in real-time.

Instead of a Momma talking to her son face-to-face through a glass divider, she will sit in the jail lobby and have a thirty-minute visit with her son on a small television screen. Her boy will be in his cellblock also talking on a phone to the television image of his mother.

For the first year, the Tele-visit pilot program will be mandatory for a quarter of the male jail population (one unit of the Elmwood Facility), and optional for the rest. In two states, Nevada and Florida, they already have Tele-visits in their jails hope to completely phase out traditional visits within five years.

Some citizens love the idea of cost-saving Tele-visits (no need to build visiting centers), and others fear that Tele-visits will further alienate prisoners.

But there is an irony to the fear that Tele-visiting would make communication impersonal: While some resist forcing prisoners to communicate with an image on a screen, computer buffs are waiting for the universal advance in software that will allow for every Internet user to talk to e-mailers, or telephone callers, face-to-face on the computer screen.

Today, visits in Santa Clara County jail are conducted only on weekends. Visits are half an hour long, and each prisoner is restricted to one visit a week. Families often arrive at 6:00 AM, two hours before visiting starts.

Many guards are required to escort prisoners to and from the cells during the rushed weekend visiting hours. Fewer guards would be required to run the Tele-visiting operation, so Tele-visiting theoretically could expand visiting hours beyond their weekend restriction.

In some county courthouses across the country, Tele-visiting already occurs, but for strictly legal “visits.” Jailed inmates’ conference with their public defender that is often too busy to visit clients at the jail. A prisoner can even be present in the judge’s court without ever leaving the jail.

Many prisoners I knew never received visits. It was too difficult for the mostly mothers and wives who visit jails and prisons to arrange for transportation or babysitting, or to wake up early on the weekend and get three or four kids dressed and fed, only to wait several hours when they finally arrived at the jail.

To alleviate some hassles, a mobile trailer with Tele-visiting screens could be parked at a community center where appointments could be made to make the visiting experience, if not peachy, then at least, less hectic.

Over time, Tele-visiting could mean more visits, not less, especially around the holidays.

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I don’t mean to suggest that the entire Tele-visiting thing is one flawless, hunky-dory idea. The threat of concealment of abuse by jailers is a legitimate concern.

If a man complains to his family that he is being physically mistreated by staff, the small screen could easily blur the hard red-colored truth of a bruise. Or the Tele-visiting contraption could suddenly become “out of order.”

One morning when I was in the LA County jail, a prisoner complained about tight handcuffs as we were being shackled for court. A guard pretended like he was going to be reasonable and help, only to laugh when he squeezed them tighter on the man’s wrists. The inmate began cussing. That’s when he was beat viciously by several guards in front of me and dragged away.

An obnoxious guard yelled out to the guard in charge of transportation to tell the court bailiff that the inmate had been “lost” in the system and wouldn’t be in court that day. Evidence of the abuse was concealed for four or five days. No one guarding the guardians meant they had no incentive to reveal the truth.

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Civil libertarians aren’t the only ones who think Tele-visiting is a bad idea. Whenever I mentioned Tele-visiting to friends, they instantly thought the concept was one more way to dehumanize prisoners. But they were only thinking of the Santa Clara County inmates.

There are nearly 2 million prisoners incarcerated across the country. Some of them in county jails, only ten or twenty miles from their families. But others, the vast majority of them, are locked in state or federal prisons, hundreds and even thousands of miles away from home.

So whether or not Tele-visiting in the long run is a good thing or not may be a matter of perspective. Some federal prisoners, for instance, had their visiting privileges stripped for life. (They ordered gangland hits or smuggled large quantities of drugs into the prison.) The only chance these men—some in their late fifties—could see their mother before she died would be through the gift of Tele-visiting.

One woman at the Santa Clara county jail didn’t like the idea of Tele-visits because she wouldn’t be able to notice through the small screen whether or not her man is getting a gut. Is this type of superficial gaze the reason to preserve the face-to-face visit through glass, rather than go to the Tele-visiting?

For true change to occur with the confined person, the most valuable personal visit isn’t ever with a girlfriend or mother. We need to gaze into our interior world and visit with ourselves.

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The typical modes of communication available between a prisoner and his/her family is firstly, the telephone; secondly, the mail; and thirdly, visits.

In this new world of cable connections and digital cameras, what constitutes intimacy is changing at superhighway speeds. In an AT&T world, which resembles a lot the incarcerated world, the phone is already understood metaphorically as a way to “reach out and touch someone.”

It is cliché to say technological change is scary. But the advent of the telephone was met, by some, with suspicion and resistance because folks thought that the fine art of intimate correspondence would become passé. Ironically, those same phone lines that once supposedly threatened the intimacy of communication are now the rapid vehicles for composed letters again, this time via e-mail.

One friend last week told me that her e-mail correspondence with friends around the world has intensified these days at a time when she can’t seem to connect with her local friends. Feeling alone and confined, e-mail saved her, allowing her to have day long, back and forth, conversations with friends in Berlin or Rio de Janeiro, all without ever seeing them or hearing their voice. She is having more, not less, communication.

Confinement makes us innovate; improvise in a way that actually increases the frequency and quality of our communication.

There’s one good thing about distancing prisoners from their visitors. Men without visits, without even the chance to awkwardly coo at someone in a visit behind glass, will usually turn to more complicated forms of communication.

In my case, I was deprived family visits (by the sheer distance between me and my family) so I was forced inward to try and bridge the distance with a new more intimate language.

Writing takes a man to the page, where he must express himself in untypical ways. When I was incarcerated, I charged a pack of cigarettes for editing prisoner’s rough draft letters, or writing what they told me to say. I was never without smokes.

Many men more regularly sent birthday cards to their children, or holiday letters to their mothers and wives, than they did when they were free. One recently confined friend is writing articulate 16 page letters to his sisters. His communication with them was previously restricted to elaborate drunken grunts and the odd outburst of rage.

I’m not convinced that it is inhumane or inherently abusive to have a man visit his family via TV screen. But when more advanced methods to subjugate men are placed in the hands of law enforcement, it isn’t careless to ask ourselves how the technology can be abused.

A balance must be struck between the legitimate security concerns of both the jailers, who want to stem the flow of drugs into their jails, and those concerned with the welfare of prisoners. We needn’t be far-out conspiracy theorist to imagine abuse of prisoners, especially since ex-NYPD officer Justin Volpe just received a thirty-year sentence for shoving a toilet plunger in Abner Louima’s rectum.

But Tele-visiting is upon us. Hopefully, one day we’ll be able to send e-mail to prisoners across the country or visit with them on a prison’s web site—Tele-visits dot.com. Tele-visiting is just another thread in the ever expanding world wide web. Part of an (Inter)net cast out beyond our local lives, capable of reaching out and touching a prisoner far from home, in a virtually realistic way.

Desperately alone in the solitude of my cell, 3000 miles from home, I was prepared to enjoy an intimacy with an impersonal VCR at Christmastime. So I would have been grateful for the chance to Tele-visit with any friendly gray face on the other side of a small blurry screen.

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