What is the Right 2 Hug?
The United States confines more people to jail cells per capita than any other country in the world. Right now, nearly 2 million people are caged in prisons, jails, and detention centers across the country. That’s more than the population of Phoenix or Philadelphia. Approximately 475,000 of those people are being detained pretrial, even though they should be presumed innocent in the eyes of the law. While these numbers are alarming, what is not captured in them is what incarceration does to their families. At its core, incarceration is family separation.
The harm incarceration causes to families goes beyond separation. Across the United States, thousands of jails have banned free visits and the comfort and connection they bring. Banning visits forces families to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for expensive phone and video calls, and completely disconnects families who can’t afford to pay. Because of this, millions of children every year can no longer look into the eyes of their parents, hold their hands, or hug them. Phone and video calls are not visits.
Why have jails ended visitation?
We believe that the answer is simple—money. For-profit prison telecom companies realized that they could earn more money from phone and video calls if free visits were eliminated. So, these companies offered sheriffs and jails across the country a deal—if you eliminate family visits, we’ll give you a cut of the massive profits that result from increased calls based on monopoly rates the companies and the jails negotiate to charge people.
It's a kickback scheme, plain and simple—jails end visits, families are forced to spend more money on calls to contact their loved ones, companies profit, and companies share the profits with the jail. This scheme led to a wave of policy changes across the country that eliminated family visits, as local sheriffs sought to expand their budgets through kickbacks.
The carceral telecom companies, which are mostly owned by a couple of private equity funds, profit from family separation, and government officials help them do it.
Children have a constitutional right to hug their parents.
This is the basis of the Right 2 Hug project. As part of this project, we are filing a series of simple lawsuits on behalf of children seeking to hug their incarcerated parents, with the aim of restoring family visits, reducing the size, power, and profit of telecom companies, and changing how our society understands jailing as family separation.
These cases are based on a simple, deeply-rooted legal theory: parents and children have a fundamental right to family integrity. On this basis, children in Flint and Port Huron, Michigan are fighting to prove that their right to family integrity is being violated. In March 2024, we filed two lawsuits on behalf of these children against jailers and telecom companies, asserting children’s right to visit their parents and arguing that the jails’ family visitation bans violate the Michigan Constitution.
Banning visits not only violates people’s rights, it’s also bad policy. There is a scientific consensus that in-person visitation is essential to soothe the trauma of family separation caused by jailing someone. Letting children and their parents see each other helps minimize the isolation that comes from pretrial incarceration, reduces crime, and increases safety in the short, medium, and long term. It also profoundly increases child emotional and psychological well-being which manifests in better outcomes in school and public health for years to come.
“Parenting from a jail cell is impossible. It has destroyed our relationships.”
– Mother of three incarcerated in the St. Clair County Jail
Families belong together
Family separation became part of the national conversation in 2017 after the Trump administration implemented its “zero-tolerance” border policy. People took to the streets with a simple and powerful demand—families belong together. Upholding the right to hug is a step towards making that demand apply to all families, no matter which government bureaucracy attempts to separate them. Because at its core, incarceration is family separation.