Salon.Com has a disturbing article about a change in prison visitation rules being proposed by the California Department of Corrections. The change would forbid people convicted of drug-related crimes other than simple possession of having any direct contact with visitors for their first year of imprisonment.
The CDC wants to keep down the amount of drugs smuggled into its prisons and keep drug offenders off of drugs. But is this really the best approach?
Probably not. As writer Nell Bernstein reports, prison officials tend to think that most drugs come in through such visits, but there does not seem to be a lot of evidence for this claim. Florida recently completed a study of contraband incidents that according to Bernstein, found that “While 46 percent of corrections officers surveyed believed that most contraband came from visitors, only 2.5 percent of contraband incidents statwide in fiscal year 1997-1998 were actually attributable to visitors.”
Even California, CDC spokespoerson Russ Heimerich tells Bernstein that of 800 documented drug-related contrapand incidnets in its system last year, only 150 involved visitors (though those incidents did account for half of the total amount of drugs coming into the prisons).
Offset that with the fact that what the CDC is proposing is that the 43 percent of women in the correctional system due to drug-related offenses will not be able to so much as hold an infant or child on their lap for the first year of their prison term.
Even law-and-order types should be concerned about that since a 1972 study of California prisoners found that those inmates who had regular, ongoing visits with family members were six times less likely to reoffend during the first year after their release.
Source:
Punishment for the whole family. Nell Bernstein, Salon.Com, May 8, 2002.