The city Department of Correction has canceled 15,129 jail detainee video visits since its online system launched department-wide in 2020, straining relationships among loved ones, according to records obtained by THE CITY.
The remote option for people to connect with those behind bars was launched during the pandemic, when in-person visits were blocked to prevent the spread of COVID.
Correction officials attributed the cancellations to a range of factors, from participants changing their mind to staff shortages, security concerns and tech issues.
The video conferences are seen as a digital emotional lifeline for many who are awaiting trial for months — or years. Some detainees during the peak of the pandemic were unable to see their kids born while they were locked up until the video visits began system wide.
“Video visits, and just regular visits, are a way to really connect with family and to learn new things and to be engaged,” said Aletha Taylor, executive director of Hour Children, a non-profit that provides support services for incarcerated women.
She called the 15,000 canceled visits a “significant number” of times that people were unable to touch base with family members or friends.
The visitation records — reluctantly provided via a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request — comes as a federal judge overseeing the department in June agreed to hear arguments next month in favor of an outside takeover of the city jails system.
The data also revealed that the number of in-person visits has drastically decreased compared to before the pandemic.
In 2019, there were 149,522 in-person visits, the records reveal. That figure dropped to 23,322 in 2020; 11,204 in 2021; and 28,756 in 2022, according to DOC figures. The number is up to 35,767 this year as of Sept. 30, the department said.
Hard to Get
The department did everything possible to block the release of the data.
Initially, the Department of Correction’s legal office ignored the Freedom of Information Law request filed by THE CITY. By law all city agencies must reply within five business days and give an estimated time when the information will be shared.
The data was only released after THE CITY threatened to sue.
Correction spokesperson Annais Morales then stressed that the department has conducted 124,000 video visits since 2020. She also claimed that 62% of the canceled visits were because the person in custody, or the visitor, decided against participating.
But jail advocates and family members questioned that statistic, saying it was not common for incarcerated people to reject a visit from family or friends.
“[The process of] getting a video visit was a nightmare,” Melissa Vergara, whose son was locked up on Rikers last year, told THE CITY. “They’d [DOC] always cancel them. They’d alway say we don’t have enough staff.”
In one instance while waiting for her visit to start, she said, a correction officer instead popped up on the screen and told her there weren’t enough officers to transport her son to the room with video hookups.
The DOC also blamed the canceled televisits on jail lockdowns after violence, tech issues, countervailing court dates and medical visits. Additionally, 12% were canceled due to a litany of “security concerns,” according to Morales.
Stanley Richards, the incoming head of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit that provides services to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, noted the DOC has frequently blamed canceled visits on the incarcerated person disobeying a direct order or staff feeling disrespected.
“Those are catchphrases for when the department — whether it’s New York City, New York State, or around the country — when people in authority use that kind of access as a way to leverage or respond to behavior,” said Richards, who served as a DOC deputy commissioner during the last few months of the administration of former Mayor de Blasio.
He noted the department didn’t list the lack of a correction officer escort to the video conference room as a reason for any of the cancellations.
That is covered in the “other” category, which accounted for 17% of the missed online visits, according to Morales, the DOC spokesperson.
A lack of a correction officer escort is one of the primary reasons the DOC says it has struggled for years to transport detainees to medical visits. In August, people incarcerated in city jails missed more than 16,000 medical appointments.
“When we talk to our clients about missed appointments, they frequently express surprise [at the reason given by officials] and tell us they are not refusing visits or other service,” said Veronica Vela, a supervising attorney for the Legal Aid Society’s Prisoners’ Rights Project.
She argued that the department should be required to videotape all refusals of services or visits and make those tapes available to their attorneys and advocates upon request.
It’s not just friends and family who have had video visits canceled — defense lawyers have run into the same problem.
“It’s definitely really frustrating for our clients when their legal visits get canceled,” said Emily Appel, a program coordinator with the Osborne Association’s Court Advocacy Services.
“We’ll hear from them after the fact,” she said, “most of the time they’re not told that they even had a visit.”
Jail experts also contend that visits are a good way to keep incarcerated people busy and reduce violence.
Morales, the DOC spokesperson, said “she can’t speak to” why there has been a major drop in face-to-face visits. She was also unable to detail how many lawyer visits have been canceled since 2020.
Moving On
The steep drop in physical visits — down 76% since 2019 — and thousands of video visit cancellations come as the city moves to close Rikers and replace the jails there with four borough-based lockups near courthouses in Brooklyn, The Bronx, Manhattan and Queens.
The new facilities would also be closer to public transportation, and advocates of the $10 billion plan say it will make it easier for people to visit their loved ones behind bars. Currently, an in-person visit at Rikers takes nearly all day, requiring multiple security checks and DOC bus transportation to one of the 10 facilities on the island.
Video visits only require people on the outside to register online and correction officers to transport detainees to designated rooms. Remote visits are only held on Fridays, however, and there is frequently a weeks-long backlog, according to multiple family members and jail insiders.
When the tele-visits are suddenly blocked with no explanation it forces people to reschedule and wait for weeks before the next available slot opens.
In April, THE CITY scheduled a televisit with a detainee who had been locked up since Oct. 27, 2012. The earliest date for the visit was three weeks away. But the online conference was blocked about a week before with no reason given in the email.
When Vincent Schiraldi served as de Blasio’s jails commissioner, Richards, his deputy, and others tried to expand the online program to allow detainees to use personal tablets for televisits.
“What we’ve seen is when families stay connected to their loved ones, when they know that they are okay … it provides a bond that transitions from the jail into the community,” Richards said. “So families play a vital role in offering support to people coming home and visitation is one of the ways of doing it.”
The tablet proposal was also set to be used as an incentive to reduce violence, according to Richards. Detainees would be allowed additional televisits if they stayed out of trouble and attended certain programs, he said.
“You could have multiple video visits in addition to your regular in-person visits,” he said.
The plan appears to have been nixed when Commissioner Louis Molina took over the department at the start of Mayor Eric Adams’ administration in January 2022.
Molina, in fact, yanked the tablets they already had from detainees and took months to find a new vendor for the digital devices.
Molina and his staff have never publicly said why they suddenly changed vendors.