Weekend Worriers

Potential D.C. Jail inmates may want to consider some scheduling pointers: First and foremost, don’t get cuffed on a weekend if you want to see your family before Monday at noon.

Saturday visiting hours have been canceled since August, and Department of Corrections Director Devon Brown confirmed to the D.C. Council last week that the policy is permanent. There’ve long been no Sunday visits—leaving friends and family to follow the alphabet rule: Inmates with last names starting with A through H on Tuesday and Thursday, J through P on Wednesday and Friday, Q through Z on Monday.

Plenty of folks are still complaining, though. Inmate advocate Pauline Sullivan, of Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants, brought her concerns about visitation rules to the oversight hearing for the Department of Corrections last Thursday. “I was very disappointed,” she told public-safety committee chair Phil Mendelson. “I really do not know the reason why it’s been discontinued.”

The cutback, Brown said, was necessary to maintain “safety, security, and order,” and he added that the jail was harder to staff on weekends.

Mendelson was not pleased. “Long-term, it does not sound agreeable,” he said.

Brown replied, “It’s gonna get worse.” An upcoming construction project at the jail, he said, will further curtail visitation rights.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Bureaucracy, D.C. Jail, Phil Mendelson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.