Jails around Wisconsin forgo in-person visits for video calls. How is this affecting those incarcerated?

HOBART – From her dining room table on an evening in February, Stacie Bryant logged onto her tablet to see her son for the first time in nearly four weeks.

Tyler Bryant, 23, is currently serving 90 days at Oconto County Jail for violating his probation.

Holding Tyler's 15-month-old son, Milo, Stacie Bryant gave her son a smile and asked how he was doing. Tyler filled her in on his schedule, recent happenings and when he would get clippers to shave his facial hair.

"I missed seeing him," Stacie Bryant said after the video call. "He was coming over here almost every day."

Virtual visitation, for many families of people in jail, is a helpful tool for its flexibility and accessibility. But as it is becoming commonplace, more and more jails in Wisconsin are making video visits the only option, entirely eliminating traditional in-person visits.

The Post-Crescent contacted every jail in the state to gather information about their visitation policies. An analysis of the data found 46 out of the state's 72 jails — about 64% — have no option for people to do visits with friends and family in person, instead only offering contact through a video screen. And more jail administrators plan to follow this trend, with many stating that the pandemic expedited their decision to go all-virtual.

While video visitation has its benefits, formerly incarcerated people, experts and people who have visited friends and family in jail say the inability to be within physical proximity of loved ones takes a toll on mental health.

The American Bar Association's standards state that video visitation should not be a replacement for in-person visits with people confined for more than 30 days — around the average length of stay in a county jail.

But depending on court proceedings, people can be held in jail for years. In Brown County Jail, the longest stay of a recent prisoner was close to seven years — from May 2016 to February 2023, according to Brown County Jail Administrator Heidi Michel.

And unlike in prisons, most people in jail are there for a crime for which they have not been convicted.

Jennifer Verderami, a housing advocate with ESTHER, an interfaith social justice organization that is the Fox Valley affiliate of WISDOM, said it's more challenging to assess the emotions of a person through a video screen than when sitting across from them — even through a glass partition.

Her first experience with video visits was when the pandemic struck while she was incarcerated at Robert E. Ellsworth Correctional Center, a minimum-security women's prison in Racine County.

“There's a different quality even when there's a partition separating you, knowing there's only inches between you and your loved one," she said.

Video visits lack physical support, formerly incarcerated people say

Visitation is extremely important for the mental health of people who are incarcerated, particularly those serving lengthy sentences. According to the DOC's website, "research shows maintaining strong family ties can have a positive impact on an offender's success in completing treatment and other programs during incarceration, as well as their chances for success after they are released."

In-person contact visitation, where incarcerated people are allowed to talk to, play games with and hug their loved ones is offered in most of Wisconsin's prisons. But in county jails, where state statutes include fewer guidelines for how visitation should take place, non-contact visits are the norm, either behind a glass partition or by video.

Still, people who have been on both ends say there is a difference between a visit through a glass divider and a visit through a computer screen.

"You can sense the proximity. On a video screen, that does not exist," said Roy Rogers, who was incarcerated for 28 years until his parole in 2021.

Since his release, Rogers has become an advocate for jail and prison reform, working as a pre-entry liaison for The Community and serving on the board of directors for the Wisconsin Justice Initiative.

"With the divider behind a window thing, at least you can see the full human expression — you know, the nuances of emotion that you cannot catch through a video visit," he said.

Wanda Bertram, a communication strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative, a national nonprofit criminal justice think tank, said it's also harder for loved ones to assess the health and well-being of a prisoner through a video screen, as opposed to sitting a few feet away.

"Families have found that this really diminishes the quality of connection that they're able to get," she said.

A spokesperson for the company that owns Securus Technologies, the video visitation system used at Brown County Jail and a dozen other Wisconsin jails, said the video service "acts as a supplement for in person-visits" but is not intended to replace them.

Despite this, most jails in Wisconsin that have eliminated in-person visiting options have no plans to bring that option back, various county jail administrators said.

Meanwhile, some jails around the country have entirely eliminated the infrastructure needed for in-person jail visits after adding video visits. In Brown County, for example, Michel said the jail switched to all-virtual visits because there were no in-person visitation booths included in a jail renovation project.

Video visits can be expensive and low quality

Wisconsin jails offer video visits free to people who use the jail's on-site video kiosks. But those who choose to visit through a remote device are charged a fee.

Prices differ based on what company the jail contracts with. For example, remote visits with jails that use Securus range from $5.95 to $12.95 for a 20-minute remote visit, according to the spokesperson for Aventiv, the parent company of Securus. In Brown County Jail, visits are on the lowest end of that price range. Other telecommunications companies charge by the minute. In Outagamie County Jail, which uses ViaPath Technologies, a remote video visit costs 25 cents a minute.

Tyler Bryant served time at both Brown County Jail and Oconto County Jail. The Bryants said the two jails' visitation services were a night-and-day difference.

The first time Tyler's girlfriend used Brown County Jail's free on-site video kiosks to visit Tyler, she had issues logging on and could not find anyone around to help her.

When she came back to try again another day, she was able to get the video to work, but the quality on both ends was poor, Tyler Bryant said.

"That sucks. You can't even see the background — like, it's all pixelated," he said. "They completely blur everything out, unless you're two inches away, and then you can see like half of the face."

That was with Securus. Video visits at Oconto County Jail, which uses the company CIDNET, were much clearer, Stacie Bryant said.

Securus and CIDNET are the two most widely utilized video visitation systems in Wisconsin's jails. A handful of others systems are also common, including ViaPath, the system in place at Outagamie County Jail.

Autumn Cross, a Combined Locks resident who visited a friend in Outagamie County Jail about once a week for three months before he went to prison, said the remote video calls she did often had blurry video, delayed audio and unreliable connection.

"Video visits always have a lot of the connection issues where you can't hear them, or they can't hear you," Cross said. "It's not always guaranteed that you're going to have your video visit, because you can get disconnected and then sometimes you're not able to call back."

For Verderami, who served nearly five years in prison before her release last year, video visitation was free, due to the pandemic. But the visits were emotionally challenging, particularly those with her teenage son or her grandchildren.

"It actually got to the point where I didn't want to even do the video visits anymore because it made me so sad," she said.

Verderami said if video visits were not free and her only access to video visits was by paying, she would not have had any visits during that time.

Proponents say virtual jail visitation offers flexibility and savings for families

Many jails that only offer virtual visitation point to its benefits, like the flexibility to visit from home and increased opportunities for visits.

Outagamie County Jail switched to virtual visitation in 2020 and never went back. Jail Administrator Dave Kiesner said the jail had already been planning to transition to video visits only, but the pandemic expedited that process.

People in jail "have much more ability to see and talk to people now with this new system than they've had before," Kiesner said. "When we had in-house visits, it was just twice a week. ... It was like on a Tuesday at 10 o'clock and maybe a Saturday at 4 o'clock, and that was only time you could come visit. Now you can set up for whatever works for you at home."

Many county jails in the state also say video visits reduce the risk of contraband getting into the jail. However, it's not clear if there is data to back this up. Kiesner said Outagamie County Jail does not track contraband incidents specifically tied to visitation.

Michel, the administrator at Brown County Jail, said video visitation is beneficial for people who live too far to regularly visit with loved ones. By paying $7.50 for a 20-minute visit from home, they can save money on gas and time.

But for about a quarter of Wisconsin's jails, it doesn't need to be one or the other.

Lt. Brad McCoy of the Waushara County Sheriff's Office said that when Waushara County Jail added a video visit option in 2023, it did not eliminate its in-person option. McCoy said he does not think a video call has the same impact on a prisoner's mental health as actually seeing a loved one in-person — even behind a glass partition.

"I still see benefits in having in-person visits," he said.

And 16 other Wisconsin jails, including Madison's Dane County Jail, offer both types of visitation.

"We still like to do the in-person, because it’s in-person. It’s different than looking through a camera at someone," said Lt. Gary Vandivier of the Dane County Sheriff's Office.

Jails sometimes have incentives to eliminate in-person visiting options

The Prison Policy Initiative has published multiple studies about telecommunications-related issues in jails and prisons across the country. Betram said their research found that jails have financial motivations to eliminate in-person visitation.

For one, video visitation requires fewer staff members to supervise, a major benefit for jails with a shortage of staff.

Additionally, Bertram said that in many contracts between video providers and jails, the county receives either a lump sum payment or a percentage of the total revenue from video calls.

Both Brown County Jail and Outagamie County Jail receive a commission from telecommunications services. However, Michel said that in Brown County, none of the profit made off of video visitation goes to the county; it goes into an "inmate welfare account," which is used to fund items and programs for people in jail, like new mattresses or the county's canteen ministry program.

"This is not a product that jails and prisons have necessarily gone hunting for. It's something that the companies, which tend to already have relationships with jails and prisons by providing phone calls or other services like that, will advertise pretty aggressively," Bertram said.

Bertram said some of these contracts have in the past stipulated that county jails must eliminate or restrict the in-person visiting option. She said she has seen those stipulations less often in recent years. Neither Brown County Jail's nor Outagamie County Jail's most recent contracts give requirements for jails on in-person visits.

According to a 2015 report from the Prison Policy Initiative, Securus was the only company of those studied that explicitly required jails to stop offering an in-person visitation option. But the spokesperson for Aventiv, the parent company of Securus, told the Post-Crescent that Securus "never impose(s) any prohibition on in-person visits."

No other telecommunications companies in Wisconsin jails — including ViaPath, CIDNET, ICSolutions, Reliance Telephone or Turnkey Corrections — responded to questions about their contracts' visitation guidelines.

The transition to video visits as the norm is a fairly recent shift in Wisconsin; most county jails began implementing the new technology just in the last few years. Four in the state, however — including Milwaukee County Jail — stopped video visit services as early as 2003 and 2004.

Rogers said he believes the transition to video visitation in jails is another step of what he sees as decreasing outside contact in Wisconsin's jails and prisons in recent years.

As another example, he pointed to the Department of Correction's switch in 2021 to providing people in prison with photocopies of mail rather than the original papers — a move intended to decrease drugs sneaking into prisons.

"The smell and the scent of the envelope to come from moms or a girlfriend, they'll never be able to smell that anymore, you know? Just to see, your kid drew this picture, and you know, it's smelling like jelly, or those Jolly Ranchers that he likes, you know, and some of that got on the envelope or the letter. You'll never be able to experience that again in Wisconsin (prisons)," he said.

For people in jails and prisons, Rogers said, any connection to their support system is essential for rehabilitation and a future reintegration into society. He said he worries about a total shift to video visits in jails.

"When you're in a county jail, for the most part, if you turn out to not be found innocent of what you've been held for, the last memory you will have of touching and holding your loved one will be that moment before you were arrested," he said. "And, like, even though you're sitting in that county jail and you're innocent until you're proven guilty, you've already been deprived of your human relationship, and you have not been convicted of a crime."

Green Bay Press-Gazette reporter Danielle DuClos contributed to this report.

Kelli Arseneau can be reached at 920-213-3721 or karseneau@gannett.com. Follow her on X at @ArseneauKelli.

This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: In-person jail visits in Wisconsin give way to video visits