20 years is enough: Time to repeal the Prison Litigation Reform Act

Professor Margo Schlanger's data shows how the Prison Litigation Reform Act closed the courthouse door on incarcerated people seeking protection of their civil rights.

by Meredith Booker, May 5, 2016

This article was updated in 2021 in a major report with more recent data about the impact of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. That version should be used instead of this one.

The Prison Litigation Reform Act, which made it much harder for incarcerated people to file and win civil rights lawsuits in federal court, was a key part of the Clinton-era prison boom. It turned 20 years old last week.

Law Professor Margo Schlanger has an important article using 40 years of court and imprisonment data to explore the impact of the Prison Litigation Reform Act on incarcerated people’s access to the courts:

The filing rate by incarcerated people dropped significantly after the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. And ironically, despite Congress’ fears of a prison lawsuits flooding the courts, this data that controls for the size of the prison population shows that in 1996, when the Prison Litigation Reform Act was passed, fewer lawsuits per 1,000 incarcerated people were being filed than during the ten year period of 1979-1988.

After the passage of the law, court filings by incarcerated people plummeted. This drop is largely attributed to several key provisions in the Prison Litigation Reform Act:

1. Incarcerated people must exhaust all internal administrative grievance processes available to them within the correctional facility before taking their case to court. Working through these administrative processes can be complicated, have difficult deadlines, and often be fruitless.
2. Suits alleging only mental or emotional harm are restricted. (Suits about physical injury are still allowed.)
3. Courts are no longer allowed to waive court fees for incarcerated people, instead requiring installment payments. Additionally, an incarcerated plaintiff who has had three previous lawsuits dismissed can be required to pay in advance.
4. When a lawsuit succeeds, the statute sharply limits the amount of litigation costs that the court can order the facility to pay the incarcerated person’s attorney. This reduces the number of lawyers willing to take good winnable cases on behalf of incarcerated people. In 2012, just over 5% of incarcerated people’s civil rights cases were represented by attorneys. (By contrast, 65% of non-incarcerated civil rights plaintiffs and 97% of labor and employment cases plaintiffs were represented by attorneys.)
5. Places limits on the ability of the courts to change prison or jail policy.

These provisions shut incarcerated people out of the courts, to lasting effect. As Schlanger explains:

Since the 1970s, court orders have been a major source of regulation and oversight for American jails and prisons–whether those orders entailed active judicial supervision, intense involvement of plaintiffs’ counsel or other monitors, or simply a court-enforceable set of constraints on corrections officials’ discretion.

And her data illustrates that effect:

As existing orders expired, the portion of the incarcerated population that was covered by court ordered protection dropped sharply a few years after the Prison Litigation Reform Act. By the end of 2006, only 7 states had system-wide court order coverage in their jails or prisons.

The drafters of the Prison Litigation Reform Act argued that the goal was to limit frivolous lawsuits, which they claimed where rapidly increasing. While the number of prison lawsuits was rising in the 1990s, so too was the prison population. In fact, as Schlanger’s data in the first graph above reveals, court filings were – controlled for the size of the prison and jail population – actually lower than in the previous decade.

Now, at a time when the public and many elected officials are questioning the wisdom of mass incarceration, it’s time to reconsider the Prison Litigation Reform Act and the very idea of closing the courthouse doors to cries for justice.

Additional work about the Prison Litigation Reform Act by Margo Schlanger includes Civil Rights Injunctions Over Time: A Case Study of Jail and Prison Court Orders and Inmate Litigation.

The wealth of incarcerated versus non-incarcerated men over a lifetime, visualized

We make two graphs from Zaw, Hamilton, and Darity's groundbreaking dataset to illustrate the racial, ethnic and wealth disparities in incarceration.

by Meredith Booker, April 26, 2016

The wealth disparity between young men who experience prison and those who never do is staggering. A fascinating study in Race and Social Problems makes this clear. The authors Khaing Zaw, Darrick Hamilton, and William Darity, Jr. use the National Longitudinal Study of Youth to examine the personal wealth of a group of young men, following them for 27 years. When the young men are divided into two groups – those who experience incarceration at some point in their lives and those who never do – a striking disparity emerges.

When it comes to the economic impacts of incarceration, one point becomes very clear: men who experience incarceration maintain lower levels of wealth throughout their lifetimes compared to men who are never incarcerated. This disparity is present before, during, and after a person is incarcerated. (The data stops in 2000 because of small numbers of survey respondents for some subgroups; the authors note that the wealth trends remain in the years that followed.)

Once an individual is incarcerated, they often lose what little wealth they have and are left with little to no wealth accumulation. Once released, that individual may make gains in wealth accumulation, but they will always remain at significantly lower levels of wealth compared to those who are never incarcerated in their lifetime.

This is consistent with our previous conclusions about differences in pre-incarceration incomes in our report Prisons of Poverty: Uncovering the pre-incarceration incomes of the imprisoned, where we use a little-used government dataset to find that pre-incarceration incomes of incarcerated people are 41% lower than those of people of similar ages on the outside.

Looking at the same trend disaggregated by race adds another layer of detail to the story. In a press release, author Khaing Zaw says, “When it comes to wealth and incarceration outcomes, the disadvantages of being black or Hispanic compound the disadvantages of poverty.” White men that never experience incarceration will accumulate the most wealth compared to Black and Hispanic men regardless of incarceration status. At the other end of the spectrum, Black men that are incarcerated at some point in their lifetime accumulate less wealth compared to all other groups regardless of incarceration status. Later in life, this disparity endures. As the survey respondents got older, white men who experienced incarceration reported higher levels of wealth compared to Black men who had never experienced incarceration.

Previous research in Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality highlights the gap between the wealth of white people and that of Black people. This graph shows that even white men who experienced incarceration have greater wealth than Black men who never experienced incarceration.

This striking racial disparity, where even white men who have experienced incarceration accumulate wealth faster than Black men who have never experienced incarceration, brings to mind Devah Pager’s research about the impact of a criminal record on gaining employment. Pager found that between white men and Black men, white men who had a record of incarceration were more likely to be called back for a job interview compared to Black men with no history of incarceration. The “mark” of incarceration is harsh for everyone, but for Black men, it can be financially crippling for a lifetime.

The study, “Race, Wealth and Incarceration: Results from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth” follows a cohort of youth over 27 years and presents wealth data in relation to race, sex, and incarceration status. For the graph entitled “Wealth accumulation and incarceration,” I used the tables in the article to calculate the average median wealth, weighted by the number of respondents in each racial category, for those that never experienced incarceration and those that experienced incarceration at some point, and I extrapolated the data for years 1991, 1995, 1997, and 1999.

2015’s Criminal Justice Victories

2015 was a year of big victories for the Prison Policy Initiative. Beyond a record number of ground-breaking reports, our campaigns won major policy changes.

by Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, December 29, 2015

2015 was a year of big victories for the Prison Policy Initiative. Beyond a record number of ground-breaking reports, our campaigns took some very big steps forward and, in some cases, those victories culminated in major policy changes.

Here are some of the biggest wins in our campaigns this year:

Telephone justice

• The Federal Communications Commission extended their regulation of inter-state calls to also apply to in-state calls, and further lowered the maximum rates and fees that can be charged. The FCC is also now requesting comments on closing the last of the loopholes, which include video visitation, email, etc.

Video visitation industry

• Our report Screening Out Family Time: The for-profit video visitation industry in prisons and jails exposed county jails and private companies working together to replace traditional in-person visits with expensive video chats and grainy computer images.
• Our report, combined with investigative reporting by Portland, Oregon’s Street Roots, led the Multnomah County Sheriff to announce that he would amend the county’s Securus video visitation contract to bring back in-person visits. This was the first time that a video visitation contract was ever amended to bring back in-person visits.
• We collaborated with comedians to produce four hilarious short videos that take on the video visitation industry’s offensive claim that expensive, glitchy video visitation is just like Skype.
• We shamed the largest provider of video visitation, Securus, into changing its policy of explicitly requiring, right in its contracts, that correctional facilities using its service ban in-person visitation. Because Securus has shifted responsibility for this repugnant decision to elected sheriffs, we now have more political leverage to encourage the use of video visitation as a supplement to in-person visitation and never as a replacement.
• Thanks in part to our research and advocacy, a new law in Texas recognizes that virtual visits are not the same as in-person visits and mandates that each county jail provide a minimum of two in-person visits each week.
• The Federal Communications Commission has requested comments on video visitation, due January 19, 2016.

Prison gerrymandering

• Legislation to end prison gerrymandering unanimously passed the Rhode Island Senate.

Sentencing enhancement zones

• Media outlets such as Fox used the maps from our report, Reaching too far: How Connecticut’s large sentencing enhancement zones miss the mark, in order to show how these zones simply can’t work when they blanket entire urban areas.
• In July 2015, armed with our research, Connecticut removed the mandatory minimum sentence from the state’s 1,500-feet sentencing enhancement zones.

Driver’s Licenses

• Supported by our Suspending Common Sense report, the Massachusetts Senate unanimously voted to repeal a law which automatically suspends the driver’s licenses of people convicted of drug offenses unrelated to driving. This law, a relic of the War on Drugs, makes it harder for people with drug convictions to rebuild their lives. The unanimous support of the Senate and the strong state-wide editorial support from the Boston Herald to the Boston Globe to the Berkshire Eagle has us feeling good about our chances in the House.

Thank you for helping us do all of this work. Here’s to an even more successful 2016!

For more on these and other victories, be sure to see our most recent annual report.

Our best data visualizations in 2015

2015 was another big year for ground-breaking data visualizations from the Prison Policy Initiative. These are our 10 favorites.

by Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, December 29, 2015

2015 was another big year for ground-breaking data visualizations from the Prison Policy Initiative. These are our 10 favorites:

From: Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2015 where we offer some much needed clarity on the size and scope of mass incarceration by piecing together this country’s disparate systems of confinement.

We made this graph comparing the United States’ use of prisons and jails for women with its international peers for our report States of Women’s Incarceration: The Global Context.

We made this interactive graphic of “World Women’s Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country” for our collaboration States of Women’s Incarceration: The Global Context with Russ Immarigeon. See also, in the full report, our graph of the growth in women’s incarceration in prisons and jails from 1910 to last year.

As part of our collaboration with the Justice Policy Institute on The Right Investment? Corrections Spending in Baltimore City we made an interactive map showing how much the state of Maryland spends each year to lock up residents of each community in Baltimore and suggesting better investments.

That price-gouging of families of incarcerated people reduces use of video visitation is just one of the findings from Screening Out Family Time: The for-profit video visitation industry in prisons and jails. (And don’t miss the full report for graphical illustrations of how video visitation works and why grainy video chats are not the same as in-person visitation.)

These two graphs were produced for our report uncovering the pre-incarceration incomes of the imprisoned by gender, race, and ethnicity and comparing them to people of similar ages of people on the outside. For the whole report, see Prisons of Poverty: Uncovering the pre-incarceration incomes of the imprisoned

So how large is 1,500 feet? That distance isn’t just a number; it’s taller than the Eiffel Tower, longer than 5 football fields, and it’s more than enough to blanket all of Connecticut’s urban areas in overlapping sentencing enhancement zones. With the help of two of our interns, Elydah Joyce and Arielle Sharma, and a member of our Young Professionals Network, Jacob Mitchell, we produced an animation that we expect will help other states follow Connecticut’s lead in rolling back the worst laws passed at the height of the anti-drug hysteria of the 1980s.

This chart from The Racial Geography of Mass Incarceration shows that in many counties Black people in prison are overrepresented compared to the portion of Black people in the free population. Notably, many of these counties are concentrated in the far left of the graph, where Blacks make up 20% to 60% of the prison populations yet less than 5% of the free population.

These maps from In prisons, Blacks and Latinos do the time while Whites get the jobs show that most correctional facilities with more than 100 incarcerated Blacks or Latinos are located in places where hiring Black and Latino staff in proportional numbers to the incarcerated population is extremely difficult. The small number of facilities that have such parity are, unsurprisingly, located in parts of the country with large populations of Black or Latino residents.
 

Are private prisons driving mass incarceration?

Private prisons are more like a parasite on the publicly-owned prison system, not the root cause of mass incarceration.

by Peter Wagner, October 7, 2015

In a word: No.

Private prison companies have found ways to profit on America’s experiment with mass imprisonment, but they are, to build on Ruthie Gilmore’s analogy, less the seed or the fertilizer fueling mass incarceration and more like a parasite on the publicly-owned prison system.

The vast majority of people incarcerated in this country are incarcerated in publicly-owned prisons. Only a small minority is in facilities operated by private companies under contract with states or the federal government. (And things get a little complicated because some “outsourcing” of incarcerated people goes not to private companies but to other governments. For example, almost half of the state prison population in Louisiana is actually housed under contract with local parish governments.)

This graph illustrates the late origin and limited impact of private prisons on the national landscape of state and federal prisons:

Note that the federal government didn’t even bother to track the size of private prisons until 1999 and that we calculated the size of the government-run prisons by subtracting the private prisons from the total. The data from 1987 to 2001 was collected and published by an academic in Florida with a uniquely close relationship with the industry. Due to different methodologies, the data aren’t entirely compatible but together they show the birth and initial growth of the industry follows rather than leads the prison boom. The industry’s long plateau in the last decade makes it clear that the private prison industry has largely been locked out of sizable growth.

Now, of course, the influence of private prisons will vary from state to state and they have in fact lobbied to keep mass incarceration going; but far more influential are political benefits that elected officials of both political parties harvested over the decades by being tough on crime as well as the billions of dollars earned by government-run prisons’ employees and private contractors and vendors.

The beneficiaries of public prison largess love it when private prisons get all of the attention. The more the public stays focused on the owners of private prisons, the less the public is questioning what would happen if the government nationalized the private prisons and ran every facility itself: Either way, we’d still have the largest prison system in the world.

But if private prisons aren’t at the root of mass incarceration, that doesn’t mean that private investors haven’t found ways to make our criminal justice system worse. The sins of the prison and jail telephone industry trying to charge families $1 a minute for simple telephone calls are well-documented. And the private bail industry keeps legislatures from passing sensible bail reforms that would allow poor, unconvicted people who pose no public safety threat to wait for their trial at home rather than in jail.

What I find most worrisome is the rush of private money to fuel the development of “alternatives” to incarceration like electronic monitoring or private probation services that ensnare people who previously would never have been under criminal justice system control. And worse, because many of these services are paid for by the person being monitored, they remove any fiscal barriers to large-scale unnecessary use.

In-person family visits will return to Austin, Texas

Travis County, Texas will bring back in-person visits that were replaced with video visits in 2013

by Bernadette Rabuy, September 30, 2015

We are excited to share another victory in the struggle to protect traditional in-person visits from the exploitative video visitation industry. Yesterday, thanks to the hard work of families of incarcerated people, Grassroots Leadership, and other allies, Travis County, Texas legislators voted to bring back in-person visits that were completely eliminated from Austin jails in 2013.

Our January 2015 report, Screening Out Family Time: The for-profit video visitation industry in prisons and jails, found that not only did visits decrease by 28% after the sheriff banned in-person visits, but also that most families could not afford the high cost of remote video chats:

Through an open records request, we collected the video visitation usage data of Travis County, Texas from September 2013 to September 2014, finding that when Securus and the county charged the typical rate of $1 per minute, families barely used remote video visits. When promotional rates were offered, usage went up. But overall video visitation remained unpopular even when offered at approximately $0.20 per minute.

Our research found that Texas is one of the states with the greatest use of video visitation in the country, but fortunately families and advocates have been quick to stand up for the right of families to keep in touch and support their incarcerated loved ones. Last fall, thanks to community pressure, Dallas County, Texas rejected a Securus video visitation contract that would have required the elimination of in-person visits. And just last month a statewide law went into effect that protects in-person family visits by clarifying that the Texas Commission on Jail Standard’s requirement of at least two visits per week refers to in-person visits, not computer chats.

While the Texas law is a major step forward in rejecting the use of video as a replacement to in-person visits, more than 30 counties have applied to be exempted. We hope that these counties will follow in the footsteps of Travis County and listen to families who have long been saying video chats are simply not the same as in-person visits.

Jails matter. But who is listening?

Most of the people who go to prison or jail in a year go to jail, so why don't policymakers pay more attention to jails?

by Peter Wagner, August 14, 2015

One out of every three people who are locked up tonight are sitting in a local jail, not a state or federal prison. There are 3,283 jails in America, yet jails receive scant attention. The legislative, judicial and executive decisions that have fueled the explosion of our state prison populations are becoming well-known; but the myriad of subtle policy decisions that have sent our jail populations upwards are off the public’s radar.

Jails need to be a policy focus, as the Vera Institute of Justice recently argued in its aptly-titled report Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America.

Jails matter because a staggering 11 million people cycle through them each year. As we explained last year:

Jail churn is particularly high because at any given moment most of the 722,000 people in local jails have not been convicted and are in jail because they are either too poor to make bail and are being held before trial, or because they’ve just been arrested and will make bail in the next few hours or days. The remainder of the people in jail — almost 300,000 — are serving time for minor offenses, generally misdemeanors with sentences under a year.

So when we talk about jails we have to keep our eye on two numbers: the number of people in jail on a given day and the sheer volume of people who cycle through them as shown in this analysis of Bureau of Justice Statistics data:

Addressing the problem of jails means grappling with the tremendous churn through jails. How can we lessen the numbers who enter jails and reduce the time that 11 million people spend there each year?

This “pre-trial” or “unconvicted” population is driving the growth in jail populations. In fact, 99% of the growth in jails over the last 15 years has been a result of increases in the pre-trial population:

Virtually all of the growth in the jail population has been in the number of legally innocent people who are detained in jails.

These people are legally considered innocent until proven otherwise in court. But if they don’t have the money to post bail, the principle that they are legally innocent is not enough to keep them from being locked up until trial. A recent New York Times feature found that poverty is a frequent cause of pre-trial detention: in New York City even when bail is set at $500 or less, 85% of defendants were unable to afford bail.

Besides the injustice of our jails resembling modern day debtor’s prisons, excessive bail can have other harmful effects. Family life is disrupted, jobs and housing can be lost, and the combined effects can literally be fatal. Pre-trial detention also coerces people to plead guilty to minor offenses, including people who are factually innocent like the man featured in the New York Times article. Studies have also shown that people who are detained pretrial are more likely to be convicted than those who are able to afford bail.

Fortunately, the movement for bail reform is growing in places like New York City and the state of Massachusetts. But at the same time as we work to fix bail, we really should admit that the problem starts even before a bail hearing.

As Peter Goldberg, executive director of the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund put it in the New York Times article:

And the truth is, even meaningful bail reform is just the beginning. The real work is asking why we’re arresting so many people on low-level offenses in the first place, and why so many of them come from poor black and brown communities. Bail is easy.

Or to be more precise: fixing bail should be easy. Why it’s taking so long is a good question and getting to the bottom of this country’s jail problem is going to depend on both reducing the number of people we send to jail each year and making it far easier for those who have been arrested to resume their lives while the judicial process proceeds.

Probation: The nicest sounding way to grease the skids of mass incarceration

Probation shouldn't be ignored: It's used too often and sets up too many people to fail.

by Peter Wagner, August 11, 2015

Last week, Shaila Dewan had a brilliant story in the New York Times about how probation sentences set people up to fail: Probation May Sound Light, but Punishments Can Land Hard. The article follows a woman who was arrested for drunk driving, her first offense of any kind, and whose life entered a very expensive spiral, including the loss of two jobs and having to pay almost $4,000 in fees, fines, and court costs and $2,000 to post bail. In addition, she was forced to spend 34 days in the dirty, dank, dangerous and disgraceful Baltimore jail simply because she was unable to find attendance slips from her required A.A. meetings, and she could not afford another $2,500 bail bond to get out of jail time.

Because many people on probation fail to meet the conditions of their community supervision, probation often isn’t the alternative to incarceration it’s made out to be. The harm of probation would be important even if probation were rare; but more than half the people under correctional control are on probation.

Since the beginning of the statistics almost 40 years ago, the probation population has grown much more quickly than either the number of people on parole or the number of people in federal, state and local prisons and jails. While about 2.3 million U.S. residents were behind bars in 2012, almost 4 million residents were under probation.

Like imprisonment, there is tremendous variation between the states on the use of probation, but these differences aren’t parallel. For example, Rhode Island has the 48th highest incarceration rate, but the third highest rate of probation.

As the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center has shown, Rhode Island’s probation sentences are 53% longer than the U.S. average, and it’s one of 14 states that doesn’t cap how long probation sentences can be. (Thirty-two states have limited probation sentences to no more than 5 years.) Further, the Justice Center says that they have anecdotal evidence that probation isn’t being used as an alternative because “a large portion of felonies receive split sentences” that include both prison and probation.

Last month, Rhode Island’s governor created the Justice Reinvestment Working Group in order to get to the bottom of the state’s use of probation. One answer I hope the group will uncover as they develop a path to more reasonable uses of correctional control is exactly why Rhode Island decided to leave its neighbors behind in the use of probation:

The rate of probation in Rhode Island is more than twice as high as the rate of probation in most other New England states. (Massachusetts was not included in the graph above because the state changed its reporting methods multiple times during the previous decade. However, in the most current available data, Massachusetts reported a rate of 1,033 adults on probation per 100,000 residents, less than half Rhode Island’s rate of 2,268 per 100,000 residents.)

Securus ends its ban on in-person visits, shifts responsibility to sheriffs

Securus will no longer require that jails ban in-person visits, shifting moral responsibility to the sheriffs

May 6, 2015

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 6, 2015

Contact:
Bernadette Rabuy
(413) 527-0845

Easthampton, MA — On Monday, Securus, the video visitation industry leader, announced that it will no longer explicitly require county jails and state prisons to replace traditional family visits with video visits. Securus CEO Richard A. Smith stated that the billion-dollar phone and video visitation company “found that in ‘a handful’ of cases,” Securus was including a clause that “could be perceived as restricting onsite and/or person-to-person contact.”

But Securus’s new policy is much more significant than Securus’s announcement implies, says Bernadette Rabuy of the Prison Policy Initiative. “There is clear language banning in-person visits in 70% of the Securus contracts we examined for our report, Screening Out Family Time: The for-profit video visitation industry in prisons and jails.” The contracts plainly read: “For non-professional visitors, Customer will eliminate all face to face visitation through glass or otherwise at the Facility.”

This offensive clause was brilliantly challenged by comedians Ted Alexandro and Ben Rosen, arguing about whether video visitation lives up to the industry’s claims that it’s “just like Skype:”

While many of Securus’s competitors have worked with sheriffs to replace in-person visits with video visits, Securus was the only video visitation company that dictated correctional visitation policy in the contract. This clause has been controversial. After public protest, the Portland, Oregon Sheriff was the first to successfully amend an existing Securus video visitation contract, and in Dallas County, Texas county legislators were able to eliminate the clause before signing a contract with Securus.

Video visitation is a promising technology that could make it easier and more affordable for families to stay in touch despite the challenges of incarceration. But as it is too often implemented, going high-tech has been a step in the wrong direction.

“This announcement won’t necessarily bring back in-person visitation,” said the Prison Policy Initiative’s Bernadette Rabuy. “Traditionally, video visitation companies and sheriffs have played the blame game, neither has been willing to take responsibility for banning in-person visits. Now that Securus is shifting moral responsibility to the sheriffs, the Prison Policy Initiative will be working with concerned families across the country to ensure that sheriffs reverse these draconian policies.”

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Multnomah County Sheriff reverses ban on in-person visits in Portland jails!

Portland jails will now let families visit via video or in-person

by Bernadette Rabuy, January 29, 2015

Yesterday we received some very exciting news! Multnomah County Sheriff Dan Staton is reversing the ban on in-person visits in Portland jails and announced that families will now have the opportunity to visit incarcerated loved ones via video or in-person.

This is a tremendous victory that was made possible by powerful and consistent investigative reporting done by Street Roots — which first broke the story about video visitation in Portland earlier this month — as well as pressure from the public and county legislators who asked the sheriff to reconsider the elimination of in-person visits.

As we explain in our new report, Screening Out Family Time: The for-profit video visitation industry in prisons and jails, families have been extremely unhappy when video visits are implemented to take away traditional visits. Unfortunately, some of the biggest companies in the industry like Securus claim that they must ban in-person visits in order to be profitable. In our report, we found that another company TurnKey Corrections has actually had the opposite experience: if facilities give families more visitation options, they will be more likely to use the paid, remote video visits. Preserving in-person visits can be better for not only incarcerated people and their families, but also for facilities and companies.

The Portland victory is so important because:

• Multnomah County is amending a contract it had already signed with Securus that explicitly banned in-person visits. According to the sheriff’s press release, “The contract amendment has been verbally agreed to and will be completed by the end of the week.” Apparently, correctional facilities can bring back in-person visits if they really want to.
• Just like we saw in Dallas County, we have further proof that if the public is activated, we can protect families by beating back harmful visitation policies!

Hopefully, the following Oregon counties will follow Multnomah County’s lead and reverse their bans on in-person visits:

• Clackamas County
• Deschutes County
• Josephine County
• Lincoln County
• Northern Oregon Regional Correctional (NORCOR) Facility (serves Gilliam, Hood River, Sherman, and Wasco counties)

Other facilities that have Securus video visitation should also take note and reconsider whether restricting traditional visits is necessary or, rather, unnecessarily punitive.