Stephanie Patterson’s son was arrested in March 2022 and booked into Boulder County Jail when he was just 20 years old.
She immediately began making calls to find out how she could visit her son. In the wake of the pandemic, the only option for the entirety of his stay at the jail was phone and video calls.
“The whole time, I was like ‘I just want to hold my kid,’” she said. “I just want to give him a hug.”
It was over a year before Patterson was able to do that, after her son was sentenced to life and transferred to the prison in Sterling. Today, there’s still no in-person visitation for those incarcerated at the Boulder County Jail aside from professional visits like those with attorneys.
Jails and prisons across the county shut down in-person visitation in 2020 due to COVID protocols. Prisons have returned to offering in-person visitation across the board, according to Wanda Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit research organization with a focus on mass incarceration and reform.
But many jails, including Boulder County’s, have yet to restore that option. Currently, about 85% of the jail’s population is still awaiting a sentence.
“It’s like, how does he go from jail in Boulder County, where he’s not even convicted, to a prison with way more rights, way more availability, and being treated like a human instead of a caged animal,” Patterson said.
The average stay in the Boulder County Jail is 22 days, but that number gets skewed by many who are there just one night. Some are there for years, according to Boulder County Sheriff Curtis Johnson, with one person currently approaching six years.
Since the pandemic, the jail has doubled its space for in-person visitation to allow for 10 partition-separated, no-contact slots at once. But each day, it sits empty, not yet open to visitors. Johnson says he wants to change that but lacks the manpower to do so.
“What we have struggled with is getting back to having appropriate staffing numbers, because it is a staff-intensive piece,” Johnson told Boulder Weekly.
“There are certain positions that have to be staffed every day,” he said. “Somebody has to be in each module monitoring what’s going on in the jail, and those positions come first. They are a priority because we have to guarantee the safety and security of the people who are living there.”
In 2015, the county budgeted for 147 full-time equivalent employees (FTE) at the jail. By 2019 — the last full year the jail offered in-person visitation — that number was 170. For 2025, commissioners budgeted for 243 FTEs for the jail.
Johnson said the majority of those staffing increases are due to support positions such as mental health and medical staff, while deputies are needed to supervise visitation. The number of deputies, he said, “have not really increased.”
The sheriff’s office made a $2.3 million budget request in March for 25 more employees, including 12 deputies, which it said would help make the return to in-person visitation, along with staffing the new 60-bed wing of the jail, but the request was denied. Commissioners said at the time their goals were ultimately in alignment with the sheriff’s, but they wanted to find other options that did not involve additional employees.
Johnson said he plans to re-submit the request in the next quarterly budget amendment process, when commissioners can decide to reallocate money, which will be finalized June 26.
About five or six of those 25 requested employees, Johnson said, would be needed to get back to in-person visitation, though he said that number could fluctuate based on how popular in-person visitation is and how often the jail wants to offer it. Pre-pandemic, visitation was offered weekdays during the first half of the day. Johnson said the long-term goal would be to offer a “flexible schedule” for visitation that includes evening hours.
For Bertram, in-person visitation needs to be a priority for jails.
“When it comes down to it, this is not something that should be on the chopping block for jail budgets,” Bertram said. “There’s so many ways jails use their money … while the critical needs of incarcerated people go unmet.”
Convenience and cost
Video visits first became an option for Boulder County Jail inmates about a decade ago. At the time, they were just that — an option, not a replacement for in-person visitation.
Used as a supplement, video visits can eliminate some of the barriers to in-person visitation, according to a report from the Prison Policy Initiative.
“For a lot of people, that is really a convenient way to visit someone, like if you live far away and want to see your loved one,” Johnson said. “I have a family member who was in the La Plata County Jail in Durango, and being able to schedule a video visit on a Saturday morning on my iPad, at least I got to see his face and talk to him without going all the way to Durango.”
The total number of video visits in 2024 was more than five times the combined number of in-person and video visits in 2019, according to data provided by the Boulder County sheriff’s office. Jake Stenzel, a commander at the jail, attributes that sharp rise to advances in the technology, a reduced cost for video visits since in-person was eliminated, and more comfort with using video chats.
While in-person visitation was previously only offered Monday through Friday in the first half of the day, video visitation is available any time folks are out of their cells; for many of the housing units in the jail, that means video calls can be scheduled in the morning, afternoon or evening.
“There’s a huge convenience factor and the ability to have a little more frequency, because it takes minimal effort on our part to make that happen,” Johnson said.
But for some families, the cost of video visitation may prove to be too much.
Patterson estimates her family spent hundreds of dollars on video and phone calls over the course of her son’s incarceration in the Boulder County Jail. The current advertised price of calls is 5 cents per minute, a reduced rate while video visitation is the only option. Previously, calls were 20 cents per minute, a cost the sheriff’s office website says will return with in-person visitation.
The true cost of calls is even higher. A log of Patterson’s video visitations through Combined Public Communications shows that for every $4.50 she spent on visitation, there was an additional $4.43 fee.
“I know for a fact, there’s people who can’t afford that,” Patterson said. “There’s no contact with their loved ones at all. In-person visitation is free.”
Quality of video visits can be a challenge, too.
“These video calls are not top-of-the-line quality,” Bertram said. “We’re not talking about the quality of the Zoom call that you and I would experience. The connection is often bad. Calls frequently get dropped.”
That tracks with Patterson’s experience. Sometimes, she said, the audio would work but not the video, or vice versa. At one point, she said, the kiosk on the jail’s end was broken — something she said took a major toll on her son’s mental health.
“It really hit him hard when he couldn’t even have that consistency and that routine,” she said. “That’s when he was like, ‘I just want to give up.’”
Video visitation also makes it more difficult for families to get a sense of the state of their incarcerated loved one.
“You can’t get a very clear picture if you’re on a video call of the shape that your loved one is in,” Bertram said. “That makes it very different from seeing this person face-to-face. You don’t have the same kind of feeling of closeness and proximity.”
Patterson was hospitalized twice while her son was in jail.
“One of the video visits I did from the hospital,” she said. “I think an in-person afterward to see like, ‘Hey, mom’s OK,’ would have been a lot easier for him.”
Losing connection
The American Correctional Institute’s 2024 policy recommends offering a range of different options for visitation, but as an “enhancement” to in-person visitation. A few states — like Massachusetts, California and Connecticut — have passed laws and policies requiring in-person visitation in jails as an option.
A 2015 report from Prison Policy Initiative found that 74% of jails that had started offering video visitation had done away with in-person visits, but Bertram said that more and more jails are returning to in-person visits as a result of strong advocacy from families.
One of two Denver County jails reinstated in-person visitation in 2024 after nearly 20 years following a 2017 recommendation from the city’s independent monitor, who said depriving inmates of in-person visits “isn’t humane.”
Not only are in-person visits important for those who are incarcerated and their families, they can also be beneficial to jails and the communities they’re in, Bertram said.
“As people lose their connection to their family or as that connection becomes less tangible and less meaningful, because the in-person visits are taken away, people start to get really stressed, and it has an effect on their mental health,” Bertram said. “It can actually lead to security problems for the facility.”
In Knox County, Tennessee, for example, the number of assaults between inmates increased by about 10 incidents per month after in-person visitation was banned.
“Common sense would tell you that if you allow someone to see their loved ones in-person, that may have a positive impact on their behavior and their ability to cope with the conditions of living in jail,” Johnson said. “No matter how nice we make a jail setting, it’s still jail. Any opportunity that someone can have to have a good day is good for everyone who works in that facility.”
Patterson says her son’s mental health has improved since being able to visit with his family in-person; he now heads up the kitchen in the Sterling prison and is on track to get his paralegal certification.
She has no words for the moment when she was finally able to see her son in-person, talk to him face-to-face and give him a hug.
“It’s indescribable,” she said with tears in her eyes. “It was just like the love that I had for him, I was able to finally show it.”