Background: A young person does a video call in the video room next to the St. Clair jail lobby. Photo provided in civil complaint against St. Clair County officials and Securus Technologies. Inset: Genesee County Sheriff Christopher Swanson. YouTube screengrab WSMH.
Children and families of inmates in Genesee County, Michigan, scored a massive victory this week when a sheriff at the center of a class-action lawsuit announced a change of heart, saying that he would reinstate in-person inmate visits that have long been banned and “reinvest” current prison revenues to drop the exorbitant costs families are forced to pay for video calls with their loved ones.
Law&Crime reported on that class action lawsuit and another near-identical one in-depth in April, and this week, NBC Nightly News host Lester Holt reported the reinstatement first when he sat down with Genesee County Sheriff Christopher Swanson for an interview.
More than a decade ago, Swanson was all for charging families for video call visits and pushed for the replacement of in-person visits with this option. Michigan is far from the only state where inmates are banned from seeing their family members in person and civil rights advocates have argued that video-only visits are inhumane, cruel and may violate constitutional rights. The county is currently in state court trying to keep the ban in place but even if they do, Swanson offered unequivocally that he would change the current policy.
“We are going to return to in-person visits and we’re going reinvest our revenues back to lowering costs to jail calls and video visitations,” Swanson said this week.
Swanson told Holt that when he became undersheriff in 2010, the reason for the policy was “money.”
Genesee County had to cut 10% of its budget when he first started, he said, so when officials were looking at how much revenue video calls would bring in, it was “very attractive,” he admitted.
“And it still is to sheriffs across the country. But we’re going to change that,” he said.
And that means now.
Swanson said he believes he made a mistake so many years ago and “regardless” of how the court rules on the current class action lawsuit naming him and the jail he oversees, he vowed to reinstate the in-person visits next month.
When Holt pressed Swanson about why it took litigation for the prison to come around, Swanson said “it didn’t have to.”
But it did, he acknowledged, and added that the money left “on the table” — they earned about $400,000 on video calls in the last year — was money he did not need.
“And it’s money that doesn’t come from the inmates, it comes from their families. And so, you’re penalizing people and I see that now,” Swanson said.
At present, a 25-minute video call for inmates in Genesee County can cost $10 and as Law&Crime reported in April, the call providers pay the county a commission. Families who sued the county said it was a 20% commission.
A report in 2021 from Business Insider found that the exceedingly high cost of prison phone calls has generated more than $1 billion in profits while driving women and people of color into debt.
The Genesee County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately reply to Law&Crime’s request for comment.
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