CLEVELAND, Ohio — Cuyahoga County officials say they are bending to the backlash against the recent adoption of a policy that eliminated in-person visits at the county jail and the county’s plans to implement a for-profit system that could have seen the county net millions of dollars from families of inmates.

The move came one day after cleveland.com reported that the administration of County Executive Armond Budish did away with in-person visitation for inmates at the Cuyahoga County jail in favor of Skype-like video calls.

Budish’s Chief of Staff Bill Mason and Jail Director Ronda Gibson said Friday the county will re-instate in-person visitation on Fridays, which the county expects to begin by March 20. Prior to last month’s policy change, family members could visit inmates every day of the week.

The county also said it would reduce the cost of at-home video calls to inmates to $5.95 for calls up to 25 minutes. The county’s contract with Securus Technologies would have required family members who made video calls from home to pay $12.99 for 20-minute video calls.

The county also plans to renegotiate its contract with Securus so that future fees will no longer generate a profit for the county. Under the original contract, the county would have received 20 percent of the first call to an inmate each month, and 50 percent of each additional call to the inmate in the same month.

The Budish’s administration announced the changes hours after cleveland.com asked it to respond to Cuyahoga County Councilman Michael Gallagher, who said the plan to profit off of video visitation was “morally bankrupt.”

Since Feb. 3, video visitation has replaced in-person visitation and was free for inmates’ friends and family if they used video terminals located at the downtown Justice Center. The county was also planning to roll out at-home video calls at the $12.99 cost, a rate that included what Gallagher called a “rather healthy profit margin.”

When the eight-year Securus contract was approved in 2016, it predicted that the county would make about $1 million per year, in addition to a $1 million signing bonus.

Gallagher on Friday said he had asked jail officials to crunch the numbers and determine how much the county would need to charge per-call to cover the costs of video visitation without generating a profit.

“We’re not in this to make money but we’re not in this to lose money. So find out what that break-even is, and that’s what the cost should be,” Gallagher said.

Gibson told cleveland.com that she asked Securus to provide those numbers and is awaiting a response, though the company expects the rate to fall between $5 and $6 for up to 25 minutes.

Gallagher, who said he did not know about the program until cleveland.com published the story Thursday, said he asked jail officials to provide the council with a list of other similar-sized jails that have made the same decision.

“I want to know if this is something out of the ordinary, or is this the national trend,” Gallagher said.

A 2015 study by the Prison Policy Initiative found that 74 percent of some 500 facilities that had video visitation capabilities at that time had opted to eliminate in-person visitation in exchange for video calls. That number has grown to 600 or 700 since the study was published, according to the Prison Policy Initiative’s Wanda Bertram.

Local news reports over the past five years show that the trend hasn’t stopped. County jails across the country — in Arkansas and New Mexico, Missouri and Massachusetts — have all phased out in-person visitation over the past four years.

A jail in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, near New Orleans, did it in 2017.

The Allen County Jail in Fort Wayne, Indiana swapped in-person visits for video calls in February 2019.

But some places are bucking the trend.

A 2018 Massachusetts law barred jails from eliminating in-person visits. Under the law, video calls are still an option but they cannot replace face-to-face visitation.

California Gov. Jerry Brown in 2017 signed into law a bill that statutorily requires jails to provide in-person visits rather than video calls. Though the law exempts facilities that banned in-person visits before 2017, those jails must provide the first hour of off-site video calls at no cost, according to Prison Policy Initiative.

Last year, a group of Tennessee inmates filed a lawsuit contending a county jail’s ban on in-person visits violated their rights under the First, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, according to a report by Prison Legal News.

The American Correctional Association, which Cuyahoga County hired last year to help improve conditions at the jail after a string of eight inmate deaths in 2018, amended its professional standards in 2016 by stating that “emerging technologies” should supplement in-person visits and not place “unreasonable financial burdens” on inmates or their families.