The Importance of Visitation
For six years, I visited Lovelock Correctional Center about twice a month. Each visit carried both joy and sorrow: the joy of seeing the person I loved, and the ache of leaving them behind. In between those emotions, there was another kind of pain — the discomfort of the surroundings and the quiet stigma woven into the details, even down to the tables where we sat.
The tables were large wooden squares, each one marked with the word INMATE in black marker across the side where the incarcerated person was required to sit. That word stared at everyone at the table, reinforcing stigma in ways that families could not ignore. I remember overhearing a young girl, about five years old, ask her mother what the word meant. Watching her mother struggle to answer reflected the weight of shame, confusion, and the limits of what parents can shield their children from in these spaces.
For families separated by incarceration, visits are one of the few opportunities to maintain connection, to remind loved ones that they remain part of a family and a community. Yet each visit comes with its own challenges: worrying whether clothing will be deemed inappropriate, ensuring there is enough gas for a long drive if you're lucky enough to live driving distance to the facility your loved one is at, or budgeting for vending machine food that is marked up. Each visit requires planning, patience, and emotional energy — but families consistently describe these efforts as essential to sustaining connection.
Visits are equally important for the incarcerated person. For a few hours, a couple of times a month, they can step outside the routines of prison life and engage in something familiar and human. They can hear about what is happening with their family, play a game, make eye contact with their partner, or simply receive a hug from someone who deemed them important enough to make the effort to be there. These are experiences that 15 minute phone calls cannot provide. Those moments are grounding, affirming, and central to a person’s sense of identity and belonging.
Strong family bonds are more than emotional lifelines — research shows they significantly reduce recidivism and support successful reintegration into our communities. Every word, every interaction during these visits matters. Yet the spaces meant to foster connection too often do the opposite. Stigma, discomfort, and dehumanizing details — even something as simple as a labeled table — can undermine the very purpose of these visits. Families and incarcerated people deserve visitation spaces that reflect the dignity, hope, and love that the time together is meant to preserve.
For those who have never been touched by incarceration, it may be easy to say,
“Can’t do the time? Don’t do the crime.”
But that mindset is not only simplistic — it is steeped in privilege. It assumes that no systemic barriers, poverty, trauma, or circumstance could ever put someone behind bars. It ignores the millions of people and families whose lives are directly impacted by the justice system every day.
Remaining willfully ignorant about incarceration is a choice — one that allows people to avoid seeing the human cost, the broken families, and the communities left behind. It’s time we call that out. People in prison are still human beings. The majority will return to our communities, and we should care that they come back whole, connected to their families, and ready to contribute as neighbors and citizens.
Visitation is never just about passing time in a prison visiting room. It is about holding onto family ties in the face of separation, finding moments of normalcy in an environment designed to strip them away, and showing children that love persists even under the harshest conditions. These visits carry the weight of stigma, but also the power of connection that sustains both families and those incarcerated.
