A handful of Colorado families sued the Adams County Sheriff’s Office this week for refusing to allow in-person jail visits and instead requiring inmates and family members to pay for phone and video calls through a system that has, in five years, put $3.1 million into the sheriff’s coffers.
The lawsuit is focused on visits between parents and children, and argues that prohibiting in-person contact between parents and their kids is both a violation of their constitutional rights and likely to cause long-term harm to everyone involved. The proposed class-action case includes both minor children who want to visit their incarcerated fathers, and mothers who want to visit their incarcerated sons.
“They’ve denied children the right to have contact visits with their parents, to be hugged by them, to look them in the eyes, to have the in-person relationship that is so necessary, especially for a child’s healthy development,” said Dan Meyer, litigation and policy director at Spero Justice Center, one of several organizations involved in the lawsuit.
The Colorado case is the third lawsuit filed as part of a recent nationwide effort to force jails to allow in-person family visits.
Adams County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sgt. Shea Haney declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs include 4- and 6-year-old siblings in Adams County who have not been able to visit their father since he was jailed in February, as well as a 9-year-old boy whose stepfather was jailed from June to October.
“To have to tell my child he wasn’t allowed to go see his dad, it was just really painful,” said Autumn Ray, mother of the 9-year-old boy.
She spent as much as $400 a month on calls to the jail during her husband’s incarceration, she said. A phone call to the jail currently costs 15 cents a minute, while video calls cost 20 cents a minute, according to the lawsuit.
Ray’s calls to the jail routinely stretched over an hour, she said, in part because the system for making calls often did not work, so she and her husband, whom she declined to name, would have more to catch up on when they could connect. The parents decided that spending the money on the phone calls was necessary as their son struggled with his dad’s absence, she said.
“His dad and I talked and decided it was worth using some of our savings for him to still be able to talk to his dad on the phone, because otherwise the full brunt of parenting a neurodivergent, grief-stricken child was fully on me,” she said.
The lawsuit alleges that the sheriff’s office is denying in-person visits to ramp up profits from the video and phone calls, and notes that the Colorado Supreme Court ordered the Adams County sheriff to allow in-person jail visits in 1978 — an order they say still stands. The jail has rooms dedicated to such visits that are going unused, the lawsuit alleges.
The jail has not allowed in-person visits for family and friends since at least 2006, and stopped offering free video calls at kiosks in its lobby in 2020, according to the complaint.
The jail now uses a company called HomeWAV to allow video and phone calls between inmates and their friends and family. The arrangement calls for the sheriff’s office to receive at least 40% of video call money and 80% of phone call money, according to the lawsuit.
The sheriff’s office has received $3.1 million under the contract since 2020, while HomeWAV has earned about $1.7 million, according to the complaint.
Colorado sheriffs have in the past cited staffing shortages and concerns about contraband as reasons not to allow in-person family visits. Meyer said those concerns can be overcome, and noted that in-person visits are allowed in one of Denver’s jails.
“We are confident this can be done safely and affordably,” Meyer said.
Colorado lawmakers this year passed a new law that made in-person visitation a right for prisoners, and specified that it could not be replaced with video calls. The state’s prisons are run separately from county jails.
Alexandra Jordan, an attorney at Public Justice, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization also involved in the lawsuit, said the visitation policy is entirely within the control of Adams County officials.
“They could choose to change their policy tomorrow, and we hope that they do,” she said.
Ray, whose husband was recently transferred to a state prison, is now going through a 60-day waiting period before she and her son can visit in person. She marked the date — in the first week of December — on the calendar for her son, so he could see the first time in six months they’ll be able to visit his dad face to face.
“He is so excited,” she said.
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