M.M. v. King

In 2017, St. Clair County Jail—a facility in in Port Huron, Michigan—banned parents and children’s ability to visit their incarcerated loved ones in person. The facility now allows only recorded phone calls and on-site, glitchy video calls as a means of speaking with incarcerated loved ones. These virtual forms of communication are often prohibitively expensive and the on-site video calls still require families to come to the facility in person and sit in the lobby until the visit, although they can only then see their loved one through a small screen. Public Justice, Civil Rights Corps, and the law firm Pitt McGehee Palmer Bonanni & Rivers filed a lawsuit on behalf of family members with incarcerated loved ones to challenge the ban on in-person visits. The lawsuit alleged a violation of families’ constitutional rights and argued that the government cannot ban children and parents from visiting each other in person when such a policy serves no important purpose.

Juvenile Law Center, in collaboration with National Center for Youth Law and 11 national and Michigan focused youth advocacy organizations, filed an amicus brief in support of the families with incarcerated loved ones in the Michigan Court of Appeals. Our brief highlighted the unique and devastating harms that youth in the foster system suffer when they are banned from visiting their incarcerated parents in person, including the perspectives of Juvenile Law Center’s youth advocates with experience navigating these harms. We emphasized that children of incarcerated parents are at high risk of entering the foster system because of a variety of factors including increased economic instability and heightened surveillance by police and the foster system. Our brief further argued that in-person visits with incarcerated parents are critical to the wellbeing of children in the foster system, especially because visitation is crucial to the goal of family reunification. We explained that virtual visits between children and their incarcerated parents simply cannot substitute for in-person visits. Finally, we discussed the ways in which St. Clair County Jail’s ban on in-person family visits entrenches racial and economic disparities. Our brief details the foster system’s disproportionate separation of Black, Latine, and Indigenous families.