News
Page 4
Street Roots • January 23-29, 2015
Revisiting
visitation
P la n s to replace inperson visits with
video screens in M ultnom ah County
ja ils draws the scrutiny o f county
commissioners who want the
face-to-face option preserved
BY EMILY GREEN
STAFF W R IT E R
ultnomah County Sheriff Dan
Staton’s plan to replace in-person
visits with video visiting has caught
the attention of county commissioners, who
want to see it preserved.
Both County Chair Deborah Kafoury and
Commissioner Loretta Smith asked the
sheriff to consider keeping in-person
visitation as an option in the county’s jails
during a meeting Wednesday morning.
County spokesman David Austin says the
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c o m m iss io n e rs w e re s u r p r is e d w h en th e y
le a rn e d of S ta to n ’s n e w a p p ro ach to visiting,
and there will be further discussions.
As an independently elected official,
Staton is free to sign contracts and make
policy changes within his department
without oversight from the Multnomah
County Commissioners. According to
Austin, Staton didn’t consult with or notify
the Board of County Commissioners before
signing this contract.
While the commissioners can’t tell the
sheriff what to do, they do have some
control over budget allocations for his
department. Should the board decide to
compel a change in Staton’s position,
squeezing the budget has traditionally been
its only recourse.
As reported by Street Roots earlier this
month (“Captive Consumers,” Street Roots,
Jan. 2), in 2013, Staton signed a contract
with Securus Technologies Inc., agreeing to
replace all family and friend in-person visits
at county jails with Securus video-visiting
service. Once installation is complete, the
only way to visit an inmate in county jail will
be through a video terminal in the jails’
lobbies or a computer screen from a remote
location. Securus’ terminals have attached
phones for audio and small display screens
for visual. The camera’s positioning above
the display screen makes it impossible for
the inmate and visitor to make eye contact
during a video visit.
Staton told Street Roots that just because
he signed a contract agreeing to the
elimination of in-person visitation, doesn’t
mean it’s set in stone.
“Yes, we have a contract, but amend
ments to the contract can be made,” he
says. The sheriff’s office might move away
from eliminating in-person visits if “the
video visitation is something that’s not
P H O T O BY STEVE BRASE
This Securus video visiting terminal is sim ilar to the terminals going into M ultnomah County jails. Pictured here are
Steve Brase’s two teenage children visiting with their mother from the lobby o f Las Colinas Detention and Reentry
Facitiliy in Santee, C a lif, where she is incarcerated. Brase says that during visits there is no privacy, the image o f his
wife on the screen is grainy, and there's a three- to four-second audio and visual delay. “We had to learn to ju st keep
talking so there was no break. It was terrible,” he says.
being adjusted to by our inmates, and it’s
something that’s causing difficulties for our
staff, and it’s not cost efficient,” he says, but
“what we want to do is we want to try to
eliminate as much of the visitations as
possible.”
A new study on video visiting may point
to ethical issues with the elimination of
in-person visitation. The study, released last
week by the nonprofit organization Prison
Policy Initiative(PPI), found the technology
has many benefits when used as an
additional means of visitation. But when it
replaces in-person visits altogether, it goes
against correctional best practices and is so
impersonal in nature that it calls into
question whether video visiting can really
be called visiting at all.
The PPI study examines video visiting in
state prisons and county jails across the
country. It documents many glitches in the
technology and highlights Securus’
particularly demanding contractual
requirements. For one, Securus requires
that facilities abolish in-person visitation in
order to boost its video visiting sales. Dallas
County, Texas, was able to negotiate out of
this requirement, but it did so before the
contract was signed. Bernadette Rabuy, one
of the study’s authors, says she is not aware
of any facility negotiating out of eliminating
in-person visitation after signing the
contract.
Securus did not respond by press time to
Street Roots’ inquiry about whether this
was a possibility.
Staton is also allowing Securus to control
at least one policy matter that would
normally be handled by elected and
See VIDEO page 5