Family contact is a great help to prisoners and prevents them reoffending. But funding and approval for new modes of communication to overcome access problems are in short supply
Desistance is the hot subject in criminology. This is the study of the factors that prevent reoffending over the long term. The government thinks that employment is the biggest factor. In fact, really long-term studies show that the most powerful factors which encourage desistance from crime are family relationships, both partners and children. The Home Office’s own research in 2003 showed that prisoners who received family visits were far more likely to have somewhere to live and to get a job when they left prison. Also, prisoners who did not receive family visits were more likely to reoffend than those who did.Encouraging family visits is obviously enormously important, so it’s a shame that booking a visit can take a family member up to three hours, according to a survey by Action for Prisoners’ Families. Moving people around to cope with overcrowding makes visits much harder. Prisoners end up where there is a bed, regardless of whether it’s near their family. Voluntary agencies, such as Pact, are doing great work running visitors’ centres. But perhaps visits will always be hard to organise, expensive in time and money for the family and inevitably raise concerns about security.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2009/feb/23/email-text-in-prison