VIRGINIA BEACH — For those who need to visit their loved ones at the Virginia Beach Correctional Center, visitation hours have been restored.
When the Correctional Center’s video system broke March 31, “we could no longer accommodate visits because we don’t have the capabilities to allow face-to-face visits due to the number of inmates we have, the size of our facility and our staffing,” said Kathy Hieatt, spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office.
“Except for some attorney visits, we have had video visitation exclusively since 2005,” Hieatt said.
According to a news release, the existing system broke to a point where it was not suitable for repair.
Related Article: Norfolk is providing yoga classes to inmates in its jail. Here’s why
As a solution, Sheriff Ken Stolle and the Virginia Beach Sheriff’s Office made plans for a replacement system but that also meant cutting off months of the normal visiting hours.
During the outage, inmates were allowed one free five-minute phone call per day.
The system was replaced with a new one and visitation resumed 9.a.m. Tuesday.
“I understand that three months is a long time to go without seeing your loved ones and I appreciate everyone’s patience as we’ve worked to restore visitation here at the Virginia Beach Correctional Center,” Stoll said. “While it’s unfortunate that the visitation system broke when it did, I am grateful that we were ahead of the game and had been proactive in obtaining funding and starting the process of procuring a new system nine months before the outage occurred.”
