VideoVisit is a pioneering, terminal based model for prisoner visitations via video conferencing. The new technology system helps to extensively simplify and straighten out the daily organisation of prisoner visitations that represent an extremely time-consuming and labour intensive sector of prison's everyday work.
And not just the prison staff, but prisoners and their families also benefit from the new visitation method being offered by VideoVisit: Both sides get the chance to see each other more frequently and longer than before. Visitors again save themselves long waiting lines and invasive security checks. And on top of all that, VideoVisit ensures them greater privacy for their visits than could have been granted so far.
For the corrections officers the switch-over to VideoVisit primarily means a huge workload relief: visitor registration and security checks, moving around visitors and prisoners and finally visitation supervision fall away - as well as the high risk of visitors smuggling contraband (drugs, weapons, cell phones etc.) into prison which is currently one of the major problems prison staff has to deal with. VideoVisit makes a clear and sustainable contribution to enhancing the public safety and order in prisons.
There is also available a VideoVisit expansion module for PrisonPhone. It incorporates a large-format colour display and the VideoVisit technology upgrade - and there it is ready for use.
Technical components:
The US has the highest, formally documented incarceration rate of the world with more than 2.3 million people, women, men and youths, currently serving their sentences in prisons or jails. This corrensponds to a 500% increase over the past 30 years.
These trends have resulted in prison overcrowding and numerous associated organisational problems. And broad efforts are now underway to solve these by using new technologies that ease and automate the day-to-day work processes in the facilities.
A much reduced workload for the prison staff accompanies the switch-over from in-person visits to video visitations. Too convincing are the advantages arising for everyone involved.
Jeremy Travis, past director of the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department's research arm, predicts video visitations an "enormous potential". He puts special emphasis on the positive effects that more frequent visits have, for instance, on children who have a parent in prison. They get the opportunity to enhance their relationship which is of enormous importance for the developmental processes of both sides and also for parent's later reintegration back into society. Travis and other experts are, therefore, forecasting that, in the long term, video visitations will become widespread throughout the US.