Bucks Prison to Add Visit Barriers

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By Allentown Morning Call

Published: 08/19/2002

A new drug smuggling case uncovered at Bucks County, Pa., Prison has prompted corrections officials to erect partitions in the visitation room, ending a long tradition of permitting at least minimal contact between inmates and their families.
For months there has been no kissing, hugging or other form of touching permitted in the visitation room between inmates and family members, but they were at least able to sit across an aisle from one another in the same room with no physical barrier between them.
That policy will end as soon as the Corrections Department gets the partitions and has them put up, according to Corrections Director Harris Gubernick.
A year ago, inmates and their families were permitted to kiss, embrace and mill about virtually unsupervised in the visitation room.
A grand jury report suggested that prisoners were receiving drugs smuggled into the prison by wives and girlfriends, often through kisses in the visitation room.
Security in the visitation room was stepped up following the release of the report. First, inmates and their families were permitted to have brief contact only at the beginning and end of each visit, but when the drug smuggling continued officials decided to permit no physical contact.
For months, the inmates have been required to sit in rows of seats separated from their visitors by an aisle while corrections officers paced up and down between them.
Gubernick said the latest incident happened during the visitation period last week. He said a woman visitor greeted her boyfriend with a kiss. Corrections officers quickly separated them, he said, but by then the woman had passed the drugs to her boyfriend, who swallowed them.
In this case, the condom burst in the inmate's stomach causing his death.

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