Longtime activist wins state prison reforms
There was moment this spring when Barbara Fair wanted to stand firm in making sure that any prison reform legislation she backed would include a ban on strip searches which she called “humiliating.”
Months later after crafting a deal with state Department of Correction Commissioner Angel Quiros and other stakeholders, Fair agreed to drop the ban in favor of something larger.
Thanks to her efforts, Gov. Ned Lamont signed a law May 10 requiring the DOC to limit solitary confinement and allow inmates at least four-and-a-half hours of out-of-cell time every day beginning July 1. The law also requires the agency to hire an ombudsman to investigate complaints and creates an independent oversight board. The governor had vetoed a previous version of the law last year.
“She brings a lot of history to the table because she’s been doing this for a while,” said Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, a co-chair of the Judiciary Committee which supported the bill. “She also brings a fight that not everybody has. Not everyone can go the distance. She knows you have to get things done and if that means going back to the table or getting them done a different way than you intended, she’ll do it.”
At 73, Fair, a West Haven resident, has no intention of giving up her activism or her role as a founding member of Stop Solitary Connecticut, even after getting the legislation passed and signed. “I’m working as hard as I was at the phone company,” Fair said. “This is very rewarding work.”
She’s been an advocate for prison reform, including solitary confinement reform, since she was in her teens, she said. But she was spurred to elevate the fight after an incident hit home more than two decades ago. She was doing the advocacy work in various states but never knew that Connecticut, her home state, had a “supermax” prison, Northern Correctional Institution built in the mid-1990s, she said. “I was clueless until my son ended up in Northern,” Fair said.
He was 17 and had been held on bond on charges of breach of peace and threatening at Manson Youth Institution. But he was transferred after what Fair described as a minor confrontation with a correction officer to Northern CI which had isolation rooms used for discipline and a “death row,” where convicted inmates awaiting the death penalty were housed.
“I remember the first time seeing my son there,” Fair said. “They brought him out, this kid in chains and shackles and leg irons. They chained him like an animal. It took everything I had in me not to break down at the sight of him. It was like I was seeing a scene from ‘Roots.’ I vowed I was not going to rest until Northern was shut down.”
Fair raised 11 children in the New Haven area while working at the phone company and going to school at night, at one point to become an attorney. She abandoned that plan however because “pre-law was taking up too much of my time,” and shifted to getting a bachelor’s degree, she said. She later took an early retirement and went to Southern Connecticut State University to complete her Master’s to become a fulltime social worker.
“It was a way to help,” she said. She went on to work at a school-based clinic in New Haven and a behavioral health center in Rocky Hill before retiring.
But she never gave up her mission to close Northern CI and to end solitary confinement in Connecticut.
“You can’t live in urban America and be a Black male and not have had any experience with incarceration, even if it’s a family member,” she said. She also pointed out that mass incarceration likely wouldn’t have become a “policy” choice “if the prisons were filled with 70 percent white people.”
Fair founded Stop Solitary CT in 2015 as a way of lobbying lawmakers for prison reform. In 2017, she and Winfield hatched a plan to bring a prison cell that had been on display in New Haven to the Capitol complex during the legislative session, Winfield said.
“Everybody talks about jail or prison, but they don’t go there, they don’t experience it,” the lawmaker said.
The cell included actual sounds that would be heard by incarcerated individuals. “It gave a real sense of what it means to be in there,” Winfield said.
It was such a success that several of the lawmakers who spent time in the cell only made it for a few minutes - even though at any point they could open the door and walk out, he said.
That session Fair was able to successfully get legislation passed that prohibited DOC officials from transferring juveniles to Northern CI for any reason. But it didn’t go far enough, Fair said. “They could still put them in isolation at Manson,” she said.
“After we got that law passed, we kept pressing,” Fair said.
It’s Fair’s longevity and straightforward and passionate style that makes her well-respected by lawmakers, state officials, and advocates, and puts her in a position to get something done, Winfield and others said.
“Barbara Fair has been fighting for the dignity and humane treatment of people in prison for decades,” said Hope Metcalf, a lecturer and supervising attorney for the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic which provided legal support for Stop Solitary CT this legislative session. “She embodies an unerring vision for justice, and she is a fearless truth-teller.”
She’s also a beacon of light for incarcerated individuals who often have no voice, Metcalf said. “I’ve worked with people in solitary confinement for more than a decade, and as I’ve sat with people in those concrete cages, people who have been left out and beaten down by our prison system, time and again, Barb’s name comes up as a flicker of hope,” Metcalf said. “They know she will fight to make sure they are heard and they know she will not back down. They take courage from her courage. And that is everything.”
As the pandemic emphasized the drawbacks of mass incarceration, sparking lawsuits including one that contended conditions at Northern CI were violating the Constitutional rights of mentally ill inmates, Fair and other advocates saw an opportunity get reforms passed.
The bill, known as the Protect Act, approved by the Judiciary Committee in the 2021 legislative session limited the use of solitary confinement, required more out-of-cell time for all inmates and more social contact with their families. The bill also set up an ombudsman and an independent body that would provide DOC oversight.
Lamont agreed to close Northern CI by July 1, 2021 under fire from activists including Disability Rights Connecticut which had filed the lawsuit on behalf of inmates with mental illness.
Last June Fair went on vacation after winning a stunning victory by getting the House and Senate to pass the law. But she returned to find out that Lamont had vetoed the legislation under heavy pressure from the unions representing correction officers.
Instead Lamont put in place an executive order that required the DOC to do some of what was outlined in the bill. But it didn’t include independent oversight of the agency, Fair said.
“Without people from the outside looking in, they (the DOC) didn’t have to do anything,” Fair said. “We appreciate that the Governor tried but without oversight you aren’t really trying.”
Even though this year’s legislative session was short - from February to May, Fair was undaunted and put forth another version of the bill with help from Metcalf ’s clinic and others. “Just because he vetoed it, we weren’t going to give up,” she said.
Instead of hiring a lobbyest, Fair sought meetings with Quiros and his staff and also spoke with union officials and Lamont’s office. “What really turned the corner for myself and the commissioner was that I suggested we have a one-onone conversation,” Fair said. “We talked about the challenges. At one point the commissioner said I’m here all night if I have to be to get a bill we can get the governor to sign.”
Her willingness to listen and to negotiate led Quiros to jump on board with the legislation, he said. “Throughout my career, I have welcomed any research or conversation which would advance our industry,” Quiros said in a statement on Fair. “It was important for my team and I to take an active role in the language included in the Protect Act. Conversations with Ms. Fair centered around the intricacies of our business, which allowed us to come to an understanding on safe and incremental changes which can be made to support individuals leaving incarceration.”
In typical fashion, Fair said the passage of the bill will lead to other reforms. “I gave up strip searches so we could get something passed,” Fair said. “He knows that this is just the beginning.”