Dutchess County houses almost 5,000 prisoners in its two correctional facilities, with thousands more family members hoping to visit them. Visitation, though, proves to be a great financial strain. An estimated one in three families of incarcerated people go into debt due to communication and visitation costs alone. Seeing their loved ones requires a pricey train ticket and a potential overnight hotel stay. Due to the lack of public transportation from Hudson Valley train stations to nearby prisons, they often have to add an expensive taxi ride to their bills as well. It’s a heavy burden to carry, considering many families of the incarcerated are financially strained to begin with. In 2017, a group of volunteers saw these issues and sprung into action, forming the Beacon Prison Rides Project (BPRP)—a program that provides free rides from the Beacon Metro-North Station to nearby prisons.
The Beacon Prison Rides Project grew out of Beacon Prison Action, a group of community members in Beacon and Fishkill who fight to reform the criminal justice system. The organizers of BPRP first spread the word by posting flyers in prisons, appearing on a radio show, and through word-of-mouth.
“Some of us noticed that there were a lot of women at the Beacon Train Station who had to come through there and take a taxi in order to visit their partners and sons and brothers incarcerated at one of the many state prisons nearby,” says Laurie Dick, one of the organizers and drivers at BPRP. “So we organized a system for getting out the word to people who could benefit from not having to pay for that taxi.”
To schedule a free ride, passengers call or text the phone number provided anywhere from three days to a week in advance of their visit in order to schedule a ride. Drivers pick visitors up from the Beacon station and drive them to one of the nearby prisons. It’s an entirely volunteer-run process. Those volunteers are carefully vetted, with proof of car insurance, an up-to-date car inspection, and a full DMV record being required in the application.
Studies show that family visits create a 25 to 26 percent drop in recidivism rates, in addition to improving the emotional well-being of the incarcerated. “I hope that our project allows people to make visits more often than they would be able to otherwise,” says Dick. “And that’s obviously good for them, because they get to see their loved ones, and it’s exponentially good for their incarcerated loved one.”
For those with family and loved ones in prison, BPRP has quickly become a lifeline. Selena Bronson is a Schenectady resident whose husband is incarcerated at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville. Her journey to see her husband is arduous. She takes a two-hour-long train ride from Schenectady to Poughkeepsie, stays in a hotel room overnight, and gets a 30-minute ride to Green Haven. The expenses quickly add up, but BPRP relieves part of them.
“A cab is $50 or $60, and that’s one way,” says Bronson. “For somebody like me, that’s on a fixed income, I would love to visit my husband as much as possible, so I definitely appreciate Beacon Prison Rides because without them, I don’t know how I would do it.”
More than just offering a free ride service, the drivers and dispatchers at BPRP hope to be a shoulder to lean on for the families and friends of the incarcerated.
“[Prisons] do harm to the people they incarcerate, and their families are helping keep them together,” Dick says. “I hope we relieve a little of the stress that not just the trip and the logistics and difficulty and expense of the trip cause, but the stress of the disrespect and abuse that are so common by prison staff, not just to incarcerated people, but to their visitors.”
Drivers and riders often form close connections with each other. Some riders have stayed in touch with their drivers and dispatchers long after requiring their services, just because of the genuine kinship they developed.
“It’s been very helpful, like an extended family or a support system,” says Bronson.
Since BPRP began in November 2017, they’ve given more than 2,600 rides to over 200 visitors. On average, they provide around 10 to 12 rides a week. What brings the volunteers together is a united front against poverty, family separation, and the carceral system.
“I believe that in late-stage capitalist society, we’re forced to be against each other, which I don’t think is our natural state as humans,” says Martin Fowler, who has been a BPRP volunteer since 2020. “So I believe that the work that we’re doing is important because it is directly at odds with a consumerist, capitalist ideal. It helps connect people.”
Fowler also sees it as a form of reparations; Black and brown people in America are disproportionately incarcerated, and Black and brown families of the incarcerated face more financial hardship on average than their white counterparts.
Overall, the volunteers at BPRP want to inject as much humanity as possible into a carceral system that is notoriously dehumanizing. “Just doing this work puts you in contact with people who you maybe never would have met before, and who you don’t have maybe a whole lot in common with. It reminds you that we all have a shared humanity,” says Dick.
The BPRP has been so successful that activists in other regions have reached out to the organization trying to learn from their model in order to implement it in their own communities. However, the organization is always bound by its number of volunteers. It has to deny ride requests at least once a week because it doesn’t have enough drivers. “We always need more drivers,” says Dick. “We are always at capacity and always needing more volunteers.”
Those interested in volunteering for BPRP can learn more here or email BeaconPrisonRides@gmail.com.
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