Perryville staff keep forgetting one important fact…..visitors are not criminals. Visitors are taxpayers who fund employees’ paychecks. The people that go to the trouble to visit someone in prison, do so because they love them, not because it’s easy. The prison never makes it easy.
There are lots of examples, but let’s just take the weekend of Feb 22-23 food visit. The hard coolers of the correct size have been purchased by the public for food visit transport, they were approved with the little wheels on them to make it easier to carry all that food. On Feb 22 there was no problem with these containers. Suddenly, on Feb 23d, a new person was in charge of food visit inspection and she decided that NO WHEELED containers would be allowed. That forced all the visitors to go back to their car, put the cooler away, and stow all that food in garbage bags (issued by the prison). They came into the food visit looking like refugees from Gaza! What about the elderly and disabled? What if the food was too heavy to be carried, but not too heavy to be wheeled?
A disabled woman was denied entry that same day because her “bra strap was showing”. We looked up the policy, it says a visitor’s ” collarbone shall not be showing “, not bra strap. This poor woman needed to use a portable oxygen tank, and that made one side of her shirt pull more than the other, but it revealed no collarbone…. only a small part of her bra. She is a fighter though and wanted to visit her sister, so she stood outside asking visitors if they had a spare shirt in their car she could borrow. One person helped her out with a shirt, so she went back in with an extra shirt covering her bra strap. The tyrant in charge finally allowed her to visit her sister, albeit late.
Most visitation rules are ambiguous and enforced erratically. This lack of clarity and predictability contributes to both residents and visitors feelings of uncertainty and stress.