HUNTSVILLE, Texas – Inmates in all Texas prisons and state jails will be allowed to resume in-person visits on Monday, March 15, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
All in-person visits were halted when the coronavirus pandemic swept the state last spring.
All visits must be scheduled in advance, and inmates will be allowed only two visits per month. Only one adult may visit at a time.
When asked whether inmates in the Bexar County Jail would be allowed in-person visits, Sheriff Javier Salazar said, “We haven’t really done in-person visits in several years.”
Instead, he said, inmates will be allowed to continue remote video visits through a system upgraded during the pandemic.
“We enabled the system to allow at-home visits from families of inmates to be able to do it in the comfort of their home, and that’s been very successful,” Salazar said.
He said the sheriff’s office has also provided just over 660,000 free phone calls from inmates during the pandemic.