If you have ever taken a bus upstate to sit across a table from someone you love in a New York prison, you know how it can go at the door: a body scanner flags the tampon you are wearing as possible contraband, an officer tells you to take it out, and your choices narrow to bleeding through your clothes in a security line or going home without the visit. As of this month, Albany has voted to make that illegal. On June 3 the State Senate passed the Tampons Aren’t Contraband Act by a vote of 39 to 22, after the Assembly cleared it on June 1, and the bill has now passed both chambers on its way to Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk, according to the official Senate record for bill S8353A.

The bill, sponsored by State Senator Julia Salazar of Bushwick’s 18th District, says no state or local correctional facility can deny entry to a visitor because that person is menstruating, is wearing a menstrual product, or shows a contraceptive device on a body scan, per the bill summary on the Senate site. It is co-sponsored by Senators Jabari Brisport, Jeremy Cooney, Robert Jackson and Luis Sepulveda, and was carried in the Assembly by Member Hooks. “Visitors are either turned away or even suspended from visiting their loved one for simply having items like menstrual products, tampons,” Salazar said, in remarks reported by CBS6 Albany.

This goes back to last spring. New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, DOCCS, started running visitors through body scanners in March 2025 when it reopened visitation after a three-week wildcat strike by corrections officers, who had demanded the machines. The agency had bought Tek84 scanners for about $13 million back in 2023, and starting that March every visitor who wanted a full-contact visit (sitting at a table, able to touch the person they came to see) had to pass through one. Refuse the scan and you are downgraded to a no-contact visit behind a partition that prohibits touch. Those details come from the New York Civil Liberties Union, which documented the policy.