State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Governors Pay Prisoners Face-to-Face Visits

Governing: In 2015, Barack Obama became the first sitting president to visit a prison. Since then, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, a former district attorney, has walked the halls of his state's prisons 21 times.

"We’ve got to turn [prisons] from these very dark places that we try to push out of our thought process and have them foremost in our thought process," Malloy said at a conference last week.

He was talking about "Face to Face," a new initiative that encourages elected state officials to meet the people affected by their criminal justice policies. Malloy and seven other governors have so far opted to sit down for conversations with inmates, corrections officers and crime victims as part of Face to Face.

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