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.
Then the false positives started. Between March and December 2025, DOCCS turned away 2,557 people from visiting because of body-scanning problems, roughly 2 percent of all visitors, according to reporting by New York Focus that ran in the Watertown Daily Times. The scanners were flagging tampons, contraceptive products, anatomical features and other anomalies as hidden contraband, even when no contraband existed. Salazar’s office said it received around 50 complaints in recent months from people across the state.
Caroline Hansen drove to Eastern Correctional Facility with her 16-year-old daughter; when the scanner flagged her tampon and she opened the door, she found herself facing three male officers and a dog. “This is how horror movies start,” she told New York Focus, which reported her visit was downgraded from a contact visit to a no-contact one. The New York Focus reporting documents more of the same. Vanessa Kelder, visiting Auburn Correctional Facility, had a piercing read as an “unknown object” and got a six-month suspension. Another woman at Auburn, Sydney Umstead, was told the machine had detected “the presence of an object inside her body that’s inconsistent with human anatomy” and was hit with a 180-day ban, with no explanation she could act on. The same reporting notes that one visitor’s IUD set off a scan and she was sent away to come back with a doctor’s note.
Belinda Spurgeon, 39, of East New York, lost her visits to her husband at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in September 2024 after a benign skin growth on her body registered as contraband on the scanner. It took months and medical records to get her visiting rights restored. “I went through a mental breakdown and I’m still trying to recover from it,” she told reporters in coverage carried by WXXI News. None of these women was found to be carrying anything. The suspensions still went out and the visits were still lost. The contraband was never there.
Visitors are the ones being scanned, suspended and turned away, but a DOCCS commissioner acknowledged at a public hearing in May that most corrections officers do not consent to the body scans and are still allowed to come to work, per the NYCLU. Officers can opt for a metal detector and a frisk instead. And staff are a documented route for contraband: smuggling kept flowing into prisons even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when in-person visits were suspended outright, which is the exact point Salazar has made about who actually moves drugs and weapons inside. DOCCS says scanners help keep contraband out and that “there are already policies in place and that they are enforced uniformly,” CBS6 Albany reported, and the agency points to an appeals process for restoring visits.
The bill that passed does one thing: it stops facilities from treating a tampon or an IUD as a reason to bar you. It does not fix the lopsidedness of who gets scanned. That is a separate Salazar measure, bill S9467, which would require all employees to be screened on entry through the same rotating mix of body scanners, metal detectors, pat frisks and canine searches that visitors face, guarantee a disputed visitor a second scan, and mandate discipline and data collection on wrongful denials. As of early June it was still sitting in the Senate Rules Committee, which means the “screen the guards” half of the fix has not passed. The Tampons Aren’t Contraband Act is the half that got through.
The live question now is Hochul. Both chambers have passed S8353A, and as of a June 11 status check by the Amsterdam News the bill had not yet been signed; it is expected to reach her desk for a signature by the end of the year. If you have a stake in this, whether you visit someone inside or you just think bleeding in a security line to see your husband is not a security policy, the bill page is where you weigh in. You can read the full text of S8353A and register your support or opposition right on the New York State Senate’s site, and Salazar’s district office, which covers Bushwick, Williamsburg and Cypress Hills, takes constituent comment on whether the companion guard-screening bill should be next.
Featured image: New York Senate Photo / Mark L. Emerson / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
