Connecticut’s sole supermax prison to close

In March 2012, six state senators and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s criminal justice point person, Michael Lawlor, visited two prisons: Northern Correctional Institution, a “supermax” prison where the men on death row were incarcerated, and MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, the largest maximum security prison in New England.

The goal: to convince lawmakers on the fence — all Democrats — to vote to repeal the death penalty.

The legislature had already sent a bill to end capital punishment to the governor’s desk in 2009, but it was vetoed by thenGov. M. Jodi Rell. Fast forward three years, however, and the math had changed. Several lawmakers were reconsidering their earlier votes, hesitant to go against the wishes of

Dr. William Petit, whose wife and two daughters were murdered at their Cheshire home in 2007.

“At every point of every conversation on criminal justice after July 2007, the Cheshire murders were the focal point,” Lawlor said in a recent interview. Now an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven, Lawlor also served 12 terms in the General Assembly.

Northern lived up to its reputation during that March tour. Lawmakers saw prisoners locked up 22 hours a day in tiny cement rooms, under guard when they moved outside their cells.

“The totality of the living conditions there, the grimness of the living conditions there, the totality of the grimness of the living conditions, had a profound effect,” former Senate President Pro Tem Donald E. Williams Jr., told the CT Mirror in 2012.

Then the group went to MacDougall. Natural light poured in through the windows in the facility’s atrium. Because the senators arrived midday, many prisoners were out of their cells.

To get senators to a yes on repeal, a compromise would need to be struck: those originally sentenced to die must remain in conditions more akin to Northern than MacDougall.

One of those Democrats was Sen. Edith Prague, D-Columbia, who was in favor of abolishing the death penalty until she met with Petit, who told her a repeal would make it more difficult for prosecutors to get a death sentence for Joshua Komisarjevsky, one of the two men who killed his wife and daughters. “I want to give [Petit] a little ounce of consideration here and that’s my reason at this point in time to not support repeal,” Prague told The Hartford Courant in 2011. “I have to live with myself. I could not for one second cause this family any more stress.”

The trip to Northern, however, assuaged

Prague’s doubts.

“I did go to Northern and saw death row and saw how horrible it is there. … Spending life in prison without the possibility of parole on death row, in a situation that is just like death row, is very, very, very, severe punishment,” Prague told her colleagues in a Senate floor debate on April 4, 2012, recalling the visit to the Somers prison the previous month. “So — and that was our Amendment ‘A.'”

That amendment would become 18-10b, a statute that requires the Department of Correction to impose severe conditions of confinement on the former death row inmates. The bill created “special circumstances” that would ensure the men would not live comfortable lives in prison, even if they were spared lethal injection.

Proponents of ending the death penalty in Connecticut succeeded in 2012, but not until they struck a deal that ensured those on death row would be held in conditions more onerous than the general incarcerated population. Not only did they codify many of the special conditions of confinement for death row inmates, the bill they passed was prospective, meaning capital punishment would not be sought as punishment for future crimes. But lethal injection would remain a distant possibility for the 11 men on death row at the time, until the state Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 2015.

Malloy signed the bill April 25, 2012, enshrining 18-10b into statute.

All seven of the men formerly on death row who are still locked up in Connecticut on special circumstances are at Northern. Joseph Silva, convicted of murder with special circumstances in 2018, is also subjected to those conditions of confinement. Like the others, he remains at the Somers prison.

Last month, DOC Commissioner Angel Quiros announced Northern will close by July 1. He cited the declining number of people in prisons and jails — a decline hastened since the pandemic’s onset — and his “obligation to the taxpayers of Connecticut” as the basis of his decision to shutter the supermax. The closure is symbolic to advocates who see the facility as a monument to a past ethos that the purpose of incarceration is to punish and “break people.”

Now, with Northern’s closure looming, prison officials must decide where to incarcerate the men who had been sentenced to die.