This past Monday, July 17th, Assemblywoman Stacey Pheffer Amato (D-Far Rockaway) did a walk-through of CCNY's video-visitation site for children with incarcerated parents at the Beach 41st Street Community Center, called A Vision for Tele-Visiting. The program is set up to allow children with mothers incarcerated at Bedford Hills and Taconic Correctional Facilities to hold video conferences with them, which Pheffer Amato called "an innovative, brilliant assist to families who need it most, and which has been proven to improve outcomes for everyone.

"The children of incarcerated parents did nothing wrong," said Pheffer Amato. "But, for many reasons, the time and expense of traveling hundreds of miles to visit their parents is often beyond their reach, which is a double tragedy. If they can get that face-time with parents, child outcomes improve – they get closer to a real childhood - and recidivism goes down among their parents. So tele-visitation is a brilliant and absolutely vital solution, successful in New York's other boroughs, whose time has come in Queens."

CCNY provides tele-visitation services at three sites in Queens: one in South Jamaica, one at the Far Rockaway Community Center, and another in Long Island City, opening in December. But while CCNY's program has been sponsored by state legislators, they are currently navigating the New York State Department of Corrections bureaucracy to get the proper cameras turned on at the prison end.

"What I saw last Monday is primed and ready to go, a cheap, humane and obvious solution to help kids grow up knowing their parents and help parents reintegrate with society," said Pheffer Amato. "This is a truly wonderful program, I appreciate the CCNY for placing a site in our community, and I look forward to supporting their efforts and helping get the word out however I can."

Parents and guardians can go to the CCNY Web site to get information about the program, including how to participate.