Our friend pointed out that there were only eight visitor groups — or about 25 people — in a visiting room that once held 100. Many family members and friends cannot visit their loved ones anymore.

A number of the incarcerated people are from Philadelphia and are shipped to prisons far away in Western Pennsylvania. Scheduling a visit takes too long, is too expensive and is too complicated (impossible if you don’t have a computer).

Most of these Western Pennsylvania communities are extremely right-wing and racist and know nothing of the culture of the cities where a lot of the incarcerees come from — but all that is for another story.

The bureaucratic practices the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections employs are used to deprive incarcerated people of the most basic right to a visit from a loved one.