Oklahoma Jails Ditched In-Person Visits for Profitable Video Calls

Two-thirds of Oklahoma’s county jails have eliminated face-to-face visitation. What replaced it tells you everything about who bears the cost of incarceration—and it’s not the system.

A comprehensive survey of all 77 county jails in Oklahoma found that only 25 still allow in-person visits, and even those come with steep restrictions: no-contact visits through glass, limited hours, or both. The rest have gone digital. Families now connect with their loved ones through tablets and video calls—at a premium. At the Oklahoma County Detention Center, video visitation costs 20 cents per minute. At Cleveland County, it’s 14 cents per minute. Meanwhile, the jails themselves are cashing in. The Oklahoma County Detention Center pulled in $575,450 from phone calls and video messages combined in the second half of 2025 alone.

The official justifications sound reasonable on the surface: staffing shortages and security concerns about contraband. But the financial incentive is hard to ignore. Private companies like NCIC, which manages visitation systems for multiple Oklahoma jails, keep 70 percent of video visitation revenue and 16 percent of phone call revenue. Families desperate to see a loved one—most of whom are people awaiting trial who couldn’t post bail—end up subsidizing the system with their own money.

Here’s what gets lost in that transaction: research shows in-person visits matter. Children whose parents can hug them in jail have fewer behavioral problems and do better in school. Detainees behave better when they have tangible reasons to stay out of trouble—namely, protecting their visitation privileges. A 2018 study from Knox County Jail in Tennessee found that assaults increased after the facility eliminated in-person visitation. David McLeod, director of the University of Oklahoma’s Anne and Henry Zarrow School of Social Work, is clear: both options should exist. Video calls can’t replicate the emotional and physical connection that keeps families intact.

Some jails are starting to get it. Five state prison systems—California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York—have eliminated fees for virtual communication, and the results are striking: average call times jumped from 27 minutes to 57 minutes when calls became free. The new Oklahoma County jail, set to open by the end of 2026, is being designed with in-person visitation in mind, though whether it actually happens depends on decisions made by the Oklahoma County Jail Trust—the same board that eliminated in-person visits at the original facility back in 2010.

The question isn’t whether jails can afford to provide visits. It’s whether they’re willing to prioritize human connection over revenue.