A recently published report includes detailed state-by-state information related to visitation policies and identifies commonalities and variation in visitation policies, including accessibility of visiting policies online, availability of written policies, and information on specific procedures and rules for visiting (Boudin, Stutz, & Littman, 2012). To date, this is the most comprehensive and accurate review of visitation policies within state corrections systems across the country.

We built on this work by reviewing visitation types for individual state prisons. Because policies and visitation types can vary by facility even within the same state’s department of corrections (Boudin et al., 2012), we restricted our search to the prison with the largest inmate population (based on available data, such as daily inmate reports) in each state. Our process for ascertaining information about visiting types in state prisons was similar to our approach with jails. We started by recording information publically available on the facilities’ or states’ department of corrections websites. If information was not available on the websites, an undergraduate research assistant contacted the facilities by phone using the number that was listed on the facilities’ public webpage. Results are summarized in Table 1.2 and Fig. 1.1.