More than two-thirds of Oklahoma county jails no longer allow families or friends to visit in-person, making costly phone calls and video messages the only way to stay in touch with detainees.
Oklahoma Watch surveyed all 77 county jails and found just 25 still offer face-to-face visits. Among those are further restrictions: no-contact rules, with visitation conducted through glass, or limited visitation hours.
The majority of jails now only conduct visitation via video calls, shifting the cost to detainees and their families and creating a revenue stream for the jails, even though some argue that visitation is a human right.
Some jail operators said they lack the manpower to staff visitation or don’t want to risk visitors bringing in contraband. And video calls do alleviate some burdens of traveling to a jail and can be conducted at more convenient times.
But advocates said in-person visits incentivize good behavior and rehabilitation among detainees, most of whom are in jail awaiting trial and have not been convicted. Children who can visit a parent in jail have fewer behavior problems and do better in school, said David McLeod, director of the University of Oklahoma’s Anne and Henry Zarrow School of Social Work.
McLeod said it’s best for jails to provide both options.
Some advocates, such as Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, a nonprofit advocating to abolish prisons, draw a straight line between the rise and fall of virtual and physical visitation, respectively.
“The reality is that they got rid of visits to introduce video calls,” she said.
And while the high cost of phone calls in jail has long been an issue, video calls are even more expensive — 14 cents a minute compared to 30 cents a minute in the Cleveland County jail, as one example. Families desperate to see a loved one may be more willing to pay when an in-person visit isn’t an option.
“When you visit somebody, you can hug them, you can kiss them, you can see physically who they are, where they are, how they're doing,” Tylek said.
Video calls don’t allow for the same physical or emotional intimacy.
“That's a phone call, that was a video call, that's a video conference,” she said. “It's not a visit.”
In-person is better for families and detainees
The Cleveland County Detention Center is one of the county jails that no longer allows visitation, except on tablets that each detainee receives from 7 a.m. until lights out every night. It’s a significant shift from a few years ago, when the facility held visits between incarcerated mothers and their children.
The detainees were able to hug their children, play board games and share snacks with them.
The visits were as important for the children as the mothers, recalled Todd Gibson, who was the Cleveland County sheriff at the time. Children may think jail is a dark, scary place, so to see that their mother was safe had a big effect.
It also motivated the mothers to turn their lives around, said Gibson, who left Cleveland County in 2020 and is now the police chief in Moore.
“When you have people in jail, oftentimes they're at some of the lowest points of their life where they're really ripe for wanting to make a change,” he said. “Part of that is reconnecting families and making sure that they stay connected to their families.”
Gibson said he understands, personally, how inadequate video chats are. He has a son in the military, and while he’s grateful for the opportunity to FaceTime, he said it’s a lot better when he gets to wrap his arms around his son’s neck when he comes home.
There were 8,900 people in local jails in Oklahoma in March, according to the latest data available from the Prison Policy Institute.
Of those awaiting trial, most remain in jail after their initial booking, sometimes for days, sometimes for months, because they did not or could not post bail. It’s those families, who couldn’t post bail and have long-term needs for connection, that county jails and private virtual visitation companies such as NCIC derive profit from, said Matt Garcia, an attorney at Civil Rights Corps, a non-profit organization that has sued to restore contact visits in county jails.
“We are systematically depriving human contact, depriving family contact, depriving parent-child contact to people who are already disadvantaged in our society in so many other ways,” Garcia said.
Garcia said detainees are more apt to behave in jail to avoid losing visitation privileges. A 2018 study found that assaults went up after the Knox County Jail in Tennessee eliminated in-person visitation in favor of video chats.
Some of the parents that OK Messages Project Executive Director Denise Daniels works with are excited to be in prison because it’s the first time they have the chance to see their children after contactless time in jail. Oklahoma prisons offer in-person visitation across the board.
Stronger family connections improve safety inside the jail and the general public once those people are released, said Mark Faulk, co-founder of the People's Council for Justice Reform. The Council, which advocates for better conditions in the Oklahoma County jail.
“You've created this kind of a snowball effect where eventually the entire public is affected by it,” he said.
Even the clergy are finding it hard to visit jails. Oklahoma Jail and Prison Ministries operates in 18 counties. The number was higher a few years ago, before jails started limiting visitation, Executive Chaplain Christopher Hendrix said.
The group’s mission has taken a hit; online ministry just isn’t the same. Their chaplains often deliver difficult news, and Hendrix said he can’t stomach having to tell somebody that their parent passed away over the phone.
“Even though the technology is there, it still lacks the human touch,” Hendrix said.
Video is a moneymaker for counties
Through deals with private companies, counties have turned visitation into revenue.
At the Oklahoma County Detention Center, all visits are conducted via video on tablets or kiosks inside the jail through a contract with NCIC, a private company based in Texas. Phone calls cost 11 cents per minute, and remote visitation is 20 cents per minute.
The jail’s portion was $575,450 from phone calls and video messages combined for the second half of 2025, records show, but it came nearly entirely from phone calls, a spokesman said.
Cleveland County contracts with NCIC, too, and received hundreds of tablets and all the infrastructure at no cost to the county as part of the deal. On the devices, detainees can take classes, read books, listen to music and call or video chat with family for a fee.
NCIC keeps 70% of video visitation revenue and 16% of phone call revenue, according to the contract.
Families can avoid the charges by making a video call from a kiosk in the jail’s lobby.
Brittney Madden, jail administrator, said the lack of manpower and the risk of contraband being brought into the jail are the main reasons the facility is video only. And before the deal with NCIC, the facility didn’t have any visitation at all — just wall phones, she said.
Most advocates and sheriffs agreed there are legitimate concerns about security and staffing with in-person visitation, though some are skeptical about the financial motivation.
Either way, poor staffing isn’t sufficient justification for jails to deny visitation, said Garcia of Civil Rights Corps, one of a handful of groups suing counties across Michigan and Colorado to reinstate in-person visitation, alleging state and federal constitutional violations.
“If that were the case,” Garcia said of poor staffing or funding being an excuse for contactless jails, “you could imagine a county saying, ‘well, it's really costly for us to feed the folks detained in our jail, so we're just going to give them one meal a day, or we're just going to give them a meal every other day because it's too costly.’”
Some jails don’t want to use their staff to facilitate in-person visitation, said Wanda Bertram, a spokeswoman for the Prison Policy Initiative.
“And to that, I say, ‘tough luck,’ she said. “This is something that people are entitled to having, a relationship with folks on the outside.”
Some facilities are transitioning back
Jails in some states are reinstating face-to-face visits or reducing, if not entirely eliminating, virtual visitation fees.
Five state prison systems — California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York — eliminated fees for virtual communication. Some jails across the country have, too. In those jails, the average call time jumped from 27 minutes to 57 minutes after calls were made free, according to estimates from Worth Rises.
The new Oklahoma County jail may signal a return to in-person visits.
The Oklahoma County Detention Center eliminated in-person visits in 2010, though they have exceptions for attorneys and the consulate.
“We don’t have enough staff to facilitate that kind of undertaking,” said Mark Opgrande, communications director for the Oklahoma County Detention Center.
The new, wildly contentious Oklahoma County jail, set to open by the end of 2026, is being built in Commissioner Brian Maughan’s district.
It’s certainly the plan, Maughan said, for the new facility to have in-person visitation. The new building will feature minimum, medium and maximum security cells and more elevators. The existing jail lacks sufficient elevators, making in-person visitation logistically difficult, he said.
But visitation is ultimately under the jurisdiction of the Oklahoma County Jail Trust, the same board that curtailed in-person visitation at the original Oklahoma County jail in 2010.
Community activists, such as Faulk, are considerably less optimistic about the new jail than Maughan.
“A new facility doesn't take care of the staffing issues,” Fulk said. “It just doesn't. And if you move the same people over to the new jail, you are going to take the same problems you have now with you to the new jail.”
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
