WEST BOYLSTON, Mass. (AP) – There’s a long list of things that you can’t do when you’re behind bars, but for inmates at the Worcester County Jail and House of Correction, the list is getting a little longer.

Sheriff Guy W. Glodis has ordered an end to the face-to-face sessions in most sections of the Worcester County Jail and House of Correction, saying that contact between prisoners and visitors are to blame for most of the drugs and weapons entering the county lockups.

That means an end to the brief hug that prisoners are allowed to receive at the end of a visit, as well as any other direct contact with visitors. Kissing has been banned for several years.

“There has to be some kind of disincentive to go to jail,” Glodis told the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester. “This shouldn’t be a place to be coddled, hugged or given contact. This is a penal facility in which you lose many rights. That’s why it’s a jail.”

Contact visits between inmates and family members and friends will end April 1, and the last remaining open meeting area will be converted to a no-contact room, with prisoners and visitors separated by Plexiglas windows and talking by phone or through a mesh steel screen.

Glodis said the policy is part of a new approach linking prisoners’ privileges, such as television and canteen services, to their willingness to participate in rehabilitation and education programs.

Contact visits will still be allowed in the minimum-security wing of the jail.

Civil liberties activists and prisoners’ advocates said the change is unneeded and will hinder prisoner rehabilitation.

Russell S. Chernin, a Worcester lawyer and board member of the Worcester chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, questioned the tie between contact visits and contraband and said jail officials should improve security and monitoring efforts.

“When you end social contact, you’re adding another hurdle for getting these people back into society,” he said. “It’s a bad idea in terms of corrections policy. It’s a policy that gives a politician some good lines, but in reality it’s not a problem that needs solving.”

AP-ES-02-12-05 1635EST