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Taurean “Tray” Proch walked out of St. Clair County Jail in Michigan one day in January 2023 to the parked car where his partner and children were waiting for him. When his 3-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son saw him, they jumped up, hugged him, and wouldn’t let go.
“They just literally would not let me go,” Proch said. “[My son] was on my lap, just touching me. It took forever for him to even be able to sit in his car seat. We had to keep convincing them that I was leaving with them, I wasn’t going to go back inside where I was at.”
Proch was shocked by how tall the children had gotten and how much better they were talking. It was the first time they saw him since he had gone to jail seven months earlier, during which time the jail didn’t allow any in-person visits.
St. Clair County Jail is one of the thousands of jails around the country that have banned in-person visiting, leaving families to pay for costly phone and video calls that charge by the minute as the only way to stay in touch. Due to such policies, families like Proch’s have gone months without seeing each other and missed various milestones, holidays, and other special moments in their lives. Recognizing the toll that the absence of visits takes, several families sued jails with bans on in-person visits as part of the “Right to Hug” campaign.
A lawsuit against the jail in St. Clair County is pending an appeal after a lower court ruled against the families. In January, a separate lawsuit against the Genesee County Jail in Michigan was dismissed not long after the jail reinstated in-person visits, and is also pending in the Michigan Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, a lawsuit in Adams County, Colorado, filed last fall, is seeking financial compensation for damages for people who weren’t able to visit their loved ones in the Adams County Detention Facility over the last two years.
St. Clair County did not respond to Prism’s requests for comment, and Adams County declined to comment pending litigation.
The Genesee County jail ended in-person family visits in September 2014. Sheriff Christopher Swanson, who was elected in 2020, said in a statement to Prism that the jail reinstated visits after being served with the lawsuit because “it made sense.”
“In-person visits play a vital role in the restoration and recovery of the incarcerated population,” Swanson wrote. “In-person visits have and will remain at the Genesee County Jail. I am hopeful and trust Sheriffs around the state and nation will see the value of in-person visits and afford the same opportunity for the incarcerated population and their families.”
There are about 2.7 million U.S. children who have a parent in prison or jail on any given day, and parental incarceration is often linked to health problems, emotional difficulties, behavioral problems, low school engagement, and other issues. However, research has also shown that children who do maintain ties with their incarcerated parents have better mental health than those who don’t, and it helps to reduce the parents’ likelihood of reoffending as well.
“In-person visitation, that’s about the only way that young children can communicate,” Proch said. “They can’t write letters, they don’t know words, they don’t know how to work the mail. … Even trying to talk to them on the phone, kids’ brains can’t conceptualize why you’re always on the other end of the line.”
Proch said that his children have post-traumatic stress disorder and separation anxiety from not being able to see him. He said that every time he needs to leave the house, even just to go to the store, his children cling to him and cry.
“They went through a great deal of torment,” Proch said. “I’m not saying that I didn’t do anything to go to jail, but it’s just being decent humans, we have to create some type of policies where it’s beneficial to society.”
Jails have increasingly been restricting visits around the country since at least 2010, according to Bianca Tylek, executive director of abolitionist nonprofit Worth Rises. She said that when the only method to contact a loved one in jail is through phone or video calls that cost by the minute, prison communications companies such as ConnectNetwork and Securus make profit and give the jails a commission from their sales.
Tylek said she has seen contracts between jails and communications companies that explicitly required that the facilities either limit or eliminate visits. She said that while most of those contracts don’t quite exist the same way anymore, a lot of the damage has already been done because now the communication kiosks are already installed. She also said that starting in April, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is going to make it illegal for jails to take commissions from communication profiteer companies, in large part due to the organizing of advocates and organizations.
“A lot of these things, the industry will argue, are no longer issues because these contracts no longer exist,” Tylek said, “but all of the infrastructure that they put in place is now there, and it’s hard to uproot.”
Autumn Ray’s son with his father, before he was incarcerated. Credit: Courtesy of Public Justice
When Autumn Ray’s husband was in Adams County Jail in Colorado last summer, the jail did not allow visits, so she and her son went six months without seeing him. During that time, they would have to pay 12 cents a minute for phone calls and 20 cents a minute for video calls to stay in touch. Ray said the prices were exorbitant and doubled during the time her husband was in jail.
“It would be like your grocery bill during the month, that’s about how much this cost,” Ray said. “In a perfect month, that’s how much I’d be able to spend. And then other times you’re trying to cut costs, and this is obviously the first place that you start.”
She said her internet bill also doubled in order to get access to the service.
Not having the visits hit their 9-year-old the most.
“When we would do a video call when we were at Adams, my son would be like, ‘I just really wish I could be there,’” Ray said. “Sometimes we’d get off the phone, and my son would just cry because either the time would cut off or it would cut out, and he just wouldn’t get to say goodbye properly. It was just really hard for us.”
When the jail doubled the phone call fees, Ray went online to learn more about the FCC and how jail calls were regulated. That led her to meeting lawyers and getting involved in the lawsuit led by families against the jail in Adams County.
Alexandra Jordan, an attorney with Public Justice on the case, said the jail has not given a clear justification for why it banned visits. A 1978 lawsuit in Colorado, _Wesson v. Johnson_, ruled that it was unconstitutional to ban in-person visits. However, by the early 2000s, the jail had replaced contact visits with visits through a glass. Then that got replaced with video calls, which Tylek said are sometimes dubbed “video visits” because they are meant to replace visits.
“We asked for any documentation about why that change was made, whether the jail has ever studied the viability of offering in-person visits, the costs and benefits of using the current system they have versus another in-person visiting system, and we were denied the ability to get that information,” Jordan said.
In Genesee County, meanwhile, a former jail captain admitted to making decisions about telecom companies based on profits, according to the lawsuit complaint, which also states that under their contract, GTL pays the jails $180,000 per year from the company’s phone call revenue and 20% of the cost of every video call, which is $10 for 25 minutes.
Swanson, the county sheriff, told Prism, “We have worked aggressively since 2020 to build pathways of success at multiple levels to include education.”
Swanson said that the jail will continue to facilitate in-person visits along with video visitation. He added that each inmate is offered two free 25-minute video visitation sessions per week.
The lawsuit complaint states that in 2018, under then-Undersheriff Swanson’s direction, “The jail’s captain told an account executive for Global Tel*Link Corporation (GTL)—the other major jail telecommunication company in the country—that the County Defendants wanted to make more money from phone and video calls than the cash-incentive arrangement with Securus.” “We need the best deal you can do,” Swanson said, according to the complaint.
If the court rules in the plaintiffs’ favor, the families hope the cases could make it unconstitutional to permanently ban in-person jail visits and could only limit in-person visits to a degree that is reasonable and tailored to meet concerns that can’t be addressed in other ways.
Cody Cutting, an attorney with Civil Rights Corps, said it is telling that the two jails in Michigan have not been able to show any problem with security or contraband that required initiating the ban, yet the day that visits ended was also the day they started offering video calls.
“You can see from the timing that this was much more about the start of the video calls, the agreement with this private company to force people to use them by limiting in-person visits,” Cutting said. “That was the real reason, this ability to generate revenue for the county and for the jail, that they put the policy in place.”
_Editorial Team:_
_Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor_
_Lara Witt, Top Editor_
_Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor_
### _Related_ https://prismreports.org/2026/03/05/jails-visits-families/
