The research is clear: visitation, mail, phone, and other forms of contact between incarcerated people and their families have positive impacts for everyone — including better health, reduced recidivism, and improvement in school. Here’s a roundup of over 50 years of empirical study, and a reminder that prisons and jails often pay little more than lip service to the benefits of family contact.

To incarcerated people and their families, it’s glaringly obvious that staying in touch by any means necessary — primarily through visits, phone calls, and mail — is tremendously important and beneficial to everyone involved. Yet prisons and jails are notorious for making communication difficult or impossible. People are incarcerated far from home and visitation access is limited, phone calls are expensive and sometimes taken away as punishment, mail is censored and delayed, and video calls and emerging technologies are all too often used as an expensive (and inferior) replacement for in-person visits.

Prison- and jail-imposed barriers to family contact fly in the face of decades of social science research showing associations between family contact and outcomes including in-prison behavior, measures of health, and reconviction after release. Advocates and families fighting for better, easier communication behind bars can turn to this research, which demonstrates that encouraging family contact is not only humane, but contributes to public safety.

  • In-person visitation is incredibly beneficial, reducing recidivism and improving health and behavior
  • Consistent phone calls to family improve relationships
  • Mail correspondence is a lifeline, and taking it away only hurts families
  • Video calling and emerging technologies could enhance carceral contact if they weren’t prohibitively expensive
  • Families endure tremendous hardship due to incarceration, but staying in touch can mitigate negative impacts
  • Making family contact readily available should be a no-brainer for prisons and jails

Read the full article about family contact for incarcerated individuals by Leah Wang at Prison Policy Initiative.