In California, the prison must contract with a private agency to provide services, including child care, for visiting children and transportation from local transit centers to the prison.
In North Carolina, there is a Children’s Visiting Area with playground at the Orange Correctional Center. Inmates installed playground equipment funded by community grants and provided the labor for landscaping and building tables and benches.
In Kentucky, the jail rules provide:
Children shall be supervised at all times and shall remain at their assigned table in the visiting area. Children may be allowed to use the designated playground equipment when visiting outside.
Here's what some jails provide:
Some facilities may have outdoor visiting areas with picnic tables and playground equipment—often purchased with inmate funds for the benefit of visiting children. Some prisons may offer special events, including outdoor Family Day Picnics, Christmas parties and even summer camping programs. Inmates usually need a good conduct record and a lower risk classification to attend these events.
...children’s visiting centers can provide a nurturing, child-oriented environment and a wide range of age-appropriate books, games, and activities to help parents and children communicate more naturally.
And finally, take a look at From Playgrounds to Prisons, an inspirational article about a group of volunteers who brought a playground and children's visiting center to the low security federal prison in Butner, NC:
We call ourselves the Legacy Group, invoking the maxim of Spinoza that "everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare." By completing a difficult project--and certainly a child-friendly room in this grim prison looks tough--we stand to free ourselves of doubts and limitations. "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate," said Nelson Mandela. "Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."
Our goal is to help break the cycle of one-parent families, where fathers are isolated in prison, and often live to see their own children incarcerated. We have given ourselves three months to build a place of joy in a facility of menace.
They did it.
My role is to facilitate a group discussion with the inmates about what the visitation room will become, but I am anxious. From television and the newspapers, I imagine prison is a brutal, violent place. But these inmates, now sitting with the rest of us, look like people at a faculty meeting--except they're all wearing khaki. "
...With no hesitation, the inmates tell us what their children need. "Our kids can be in here for six hours on a Saturday afternoon, and without something to do, they go out of their gourds," one man says. They discuss books they'd like to share with their children, games to play, music. "With children you have to have a medium to talk," says another inmate. Federal prison budgets don't include toys.
By 10 p.m., we've worked out a concept to create a playground in the visitation-room courtyard, with playhouses and climbing structures, and for the inside we plan comfy seating areas for families, like a living room, and a toy and game library for the kids. ....There's nothing in our prison sentence that says to separate families," an inmate declares.
The warden approved the plan with some slight changes.
Over the next few weeks our group enrolls more than 50 people--librarians, shop owners, carpenters, doctors--to donate toys, books, leafy plants and carpets. Kate Freiman, a psychologist at LSCI and a member of our team, collects ladders, paintbrushes and tarps from the prison workshop. "None of the inmates got here by being good," she tells us, "but maybe people in the worst situation can still find ways of doing good."
At 4 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon in late February, 16 of us show up in the prison parking lot with cans of paint, children's books in Spanish and plants. Six hours later, we've painted the walls in bright green, yellow and blue, and started a children's mural.
A 200-pound inmate with arms like mahogany pillars paints a snake on the mural. He sways to Master P on his Walkman........In the courtyard, inmates plant azaleas and jasmine vines donated by a Raleigh nursery. "Man, we keep up the prison grounds all the time, but this we're doing for the children!" says one man. There's a lot of discussion about how to keep the smoking area away from children. Another group paints a hopscotch game on the pavement. "We'll paint another coat during the week, boss. This is where we're going to be at anyway."
....Late in April, we hold a dedication ceremony for the visitation room. An inmate sings a song he has composed...Two Saturdays ago I went back to the visitation room to see how it worked. Families chatted in the seating areas we created, kids played with their fathers on the playground....
Shame on Blair County Sheriff Larry Field. I hope you will let him know how unacceptable you find his $50 visiting fee. And tell him to spend some of his budget creating an inviting children's visiting area at his jail.
Blair County Sheriff's Department
Larry Field,
423 Allegheny Street
Hollidaysburg, PA 16648
(814)695-5541
lfield@blairco.org (probable e-mail address)
