I was in the federal system, not the Arizona DOC. But I have talked with enough families who lived through Arizona summers with a parent inside to know that the heat there is not a metaphor. It is a physical condition that the children of incarcerated parents in Arizona encounter directly: when they drive out to Lewis on a July Saturday and walk across a parking lot that is already over a hundred degrees, when they sit in a visiting room that may or may not have working air conditioning, when they see a parent who looks different than they remembered because the desert has a particular way of wearing on the body. The system's conditions become the child's experience. That is true everywhere, but in Arizona, it is visible.
I went in when my kids were 9, 11, 12, 15, 18, and 20. I know what those years look like from the inside of a sentence. What I want to talk about before anything else is the thing that matters more than the visiting room temperature, more than the phone rates, more than the mail policy. It is the choice both parents make about what kind of parents they are going to be during the years they spend on opposite sides of a fence.
What the heat means, and what it doesn't
Arizona runs its prison system across one of the harshest climates in the country. Some units at Perryville Women's Prison, at Tucson, at Yuma, at Lewis, have been without full air conditioning. In the summer, when Maricopa County regularly hits 115 degrees, inmates in those units live in heat that the rest of us drive through in air-conditioned cars. The ADCRR has been installing HVAC systems and providing misting stations, free ice, and cooling areas, but the process has been uneven and contested.
When a child makes the trip out to visit a parent in one of those facilities on a summer weekend, they are not insulated from that reality. They feel the heat of the parking lot, the visiting room, the bus ride if they took one. For some children, that physical experience becomes associated with their parent in a complicated way. The misery of the environment and the person they love become fused in a memory they carry.
I say this not to focus on the heat itself, but because Arizona parents reading this need to understand that their children are taking in the whole picture of what incarceration looks like in this state. It is not abstract to them. The question is what you do with that, as the parent they came to see.
The decision that determines everything else
My wife never said a word against me to our six children during 66 months of incarceration. She had every reason to. She had six kids to raise in a situation I had created, a household I had financially disrupted, and a community that knew exactly what had happened. The truth about what I did was available and would have been entirely reasonable to share with my older children. She kept it from all of them. She let them love me without penalty attached.
What that decision preserved is what I have now. My relationship with my adult children is intact. The 9-year-old who grew up without her father for her middle school years still has a father she talks to. That is not an accident. That is the direct result of a choice my wife made every single day for years.
The parent inside the fence in Arizona carries the same obligation from the inside. A 10-minute phone call in a system where calls must now come from a list of 20 approved contacts is not something to spend complaining about the heat, about the facility conditions, about what the outside parent is or is not handling correctly at home. Those 10 minutes are the most expensive resource the relationship has. The parent who uses them to genuinely connect, to ask about the child's specific life, to listen to the answer and respond to it, is building something. The parent who drifts through them, or who turns them into something the child dreads, is spending down an account they may not be able to refill.
What Arizona's size means for children
The ADCRR operates 10 state facilities and contracts 6 private facilities across a state that is geographically enormous. Lewis Correctional Complex sits west of Phoenix. Eyman is in Florence. Yuma sits near the Mexican border in San Luis, 172 miles from Phoenix. Douglas is near the New Mexico border. A family in Flagstaff with someone at Yuma is looking at a four-hour drive each way in summer heat.
For children, that drive is not just miles. It is the entire morning and afternoon of a day. It is car sickness in heat. It is the anticipation that builds in the back seat and the complicated feelings on the way home. It is asking the child to invest a full day's emotional energy in a visit that lasts a few hours and ends at a gate.
In Arizona, where the ADCRR allows children to sit on a parent's lap during visits, where hugs and appropriate affection are permitted, those contact visits carry weight precisely because they are rare. The child who makes that four-hour drive and gets to sit close to their parent, to feel physically that the parent is still real, still there, still capable of warmth, takes something home from that visit that a phone call cannot give. That is why the visit is worth the drive. And that is why the incarcerated parent's job during the visit is to be fully present, not distracted by the facility, not performing for staff, but actually with the child.
What the ages mean in Arizona's context
My children were 9, 11, 12, 15, 18, and 20 when I went in. Each of those ages landed differently.
The 9-year-old needs to know it is not her fault. Arizona summers or not, a facility two hours away or four, the youngest children have one primary need from the incarcerated parent: to hear that they are loved and that what happened has nothing to do with them. Children under 10 frequently develop a private, unspoken belief that a parent's absence is their fault. It is the most damaging false conclusion a child can reach, and it can settle in silently while the adults around them assume everything is fine. Say it directly. Say it every time. This is not about you. I love you. I am coming back.
The 11 and 12-year-old is in the hardest stretch. Middle school in Arizona, like middle school everywhere, is when identity formation picks up speed, when the peer group starts to dominate, when a child who is different from their classmates in any visible way feels that difference acutely. A parent in prison is a visible difference. At this age, the child is old enough to understand more of the truth and young enough to still be absorbing it as a defining fact about themselves. The incarcerated parent who calls a 12-year-old and asks real questions, who remembers what the kid said last time and asks about it this time, is maintaining a presence that the distance and the system are trying to eliminate. That maintenance is the work of the sentence.
The 15-year-old has a built-in radar for authenticity. A teenager in Arizona whose parent is at Perryville or Lewis does not want to hear lectures from the other side of a phone call. They want to know if the person calling them is real. The incarcerated parent who calls a 15-year-old to instruct them, to push them, to manage them from a distance, will get a teenager who starts finding reasons the call went to voicemail. The parent who calls to listen, to ask what is actually happening in the teenager's life, to respond to the specific answer without turning it into a lesson, will keep that teenager in the conversation.
The 18 and 20-year-old is forming a view of the incarcerated parent as a person, not just as a parent. They are deciding, consciously or not, what kind of relationship they want to carry into their adult lives. That decision will be based on what they experience during this period. Show up in a way that is worth deciding to keep.
What the outside parent carries in Arizona
If you are the parent holding things together in Tucson or Phoenix or Yuma while someone you love is inside an Arizona prison, you are doing the work of two people in one of the country's most expensive states to live. You are managing children who are watching their parent endure conditions that make the news. You are answering questions about the heat, about the facility, about whether their parent is okay, while managing your own fear about the same things.
What the outside parent in Arizona needs from the parent inside is not direction. It is acknowledgment. A phone call where the person inside says specifically: I see what you are carrying. I know how much you are doing. I am working on being someone worth the effort. That acknowledgment, said directly and meant genuinely, is one of the most stabilizing things an incarcerated parent can offer. It does not cost phone minutes to say. It costs honesty.
And for the parent outside: the children will carry what they hear you say about the parent who is gone. The children of Arizona families who go through a parent's incarceration with both adults refusing to weaponize the situation come out the other side of it intact. The children whose caregiver spent those years telling them the version of events that was most damaging come out with a wound that takes years to identify, let alone heal.
How communication works in Arizona: the practical piece
The ADCRR uses Securus Technologies for phone service across state facilities. As of February 15, 2026, the Department reestablished a Personal Allowed Number list: inmates may call up to 20 people, and those 20 must be on the inmate's approved visitation list. People who want phone-call access only, without in-person visitation, can request phone-only approval and are not required to pay the standard visitor background check fee.
For in-person and video visits, all adult visitors must pay a one-time, non-refundable $25 background check fee and submit an application. Allow 60 days for processing. Children 16 and under must be accompanied by a legal guardian. During contact visits, children may sit on the inmate's lap and the inmate may show appropriate affection including hugs and kisses. A maximum of 6 visitors at one time is permitted.
The ADCRR provides Securus eMessaging for electronic messages and JPay for additional messaging services. Physical mail is still accepted. Books and publications must come from approved vendors listed on the ADCRR publication vendors page at corrections.az.gov.
The Family and Friends Liaison can be reached at familyfriendsliaison@azadc.gov or by calling (602) 364-3945 or toll-free at (866) 333-2039. The ADCRR Constituent Services Informational Handbook 2025-2026 is available at corrections.az.gov and covers all processes in detail.
FCC rate caps effective April 6, 2026, limit calls to $0.11 per minute at prisons and large jails plus a facility fee. Federal inmates in Arizona housed at federal facilities use BOP systems: TRULINCS for email via CORRLINKS, TRUFONE for phone, standard BOP mail rules.
Where this leaves you
Arizona makes the conditions of incarceration visible to children in ways that other states do not. A child who has sat in a hot visiting room at Lewis or driven four hours to Yuma has experienced something of what their parent's daily life looks like. What you do with that, as the incarcerated parent, matters. The visit where you show up fully, where the child feels found and not just seen, is the visit that offsets the drive and the heat and the gate. The call where you ask the right question and actually listen is the call that carries. Both parents protecting the children from the war between two adults is the structure inside which all of that contact becomes worth something. That choice is available from inside any facility in this state. Make it.