Contact Is a Right: Prioritizing and Protecting Family Connection in Prisons and Jails

Executive Summary 

Summary 

Visitation in prisons and jails should be protected as a right for incarcerated people’s families and not dispensed as an earned privilege for the incarcerated individuals. Drawing on ethnographic research with incarcerated people and their families in California, this brief shows how routinely revoking or restricting visits (as punishment, as a consequence of solitary confinement, or at administrative discretion) inflicts real psychological and social harm and erodes the very family bonds that support rehabilitation and reentry.

Why This Matters 

About half of incarcerated people are parents, and roughly 5 million American children will have a parent incarcerated at some point. Conditions of confinement and visitation rules therefore reach far beyond prison walls and into millions of households. Although California and many other states formally recognize a right to visitation, in practice that right is regularly denied, restricted, or suspended — leaving families to absorb the cost.

What You Need to Know

  • Visitation as a privilege, not a right: Many facilities treat in-person visits as a reward that can be withdrawn for disciplinary or administrative reasons — a practice that promotes isolation, discourages forward-looking behavior, and infringes on the rights of incarcerated people and, especially, their children.
  • Real human cost: Families described driving hours only to be turned away with no notice, and incarcerated parents who stopped requesting visits altogether rather than endure the repeated loss of contact with their children.
  • The evidence is clear: Decades of research link family contact during incarceration to better mental health, lower recidivism, stronger reentry and post-release employment, and reduced anxiety and violence inside.
  • Video is not a substitute: Facilities often eliminate in-person visits once “video visits” are introduced, despite technical failures, lack of privacy, and predatory pricing. Families value video as a supplement — never a replacement.
  • Policy is already moving: Colorado’s HB 25-1013 (limiting when staff can restrict visits) and California’s AB 1195 (guaranteeing visits for foster children with a parent in county jail) show how states can translate the right to contact into operational policy.

Conclusion

Families — particularly children — should not forfeit their right to contact because of a loved one’s sentence. When visitation is treated as a privilege, connection becomes a tool of coercive control, punishing people for seeking the very relationships that help them heal and grow. Reframing visitation as a right is a moral, legal, and practical imperative that benefits families, incarcerated people, and society alike.