Protesters demand ‘decarceration’ of state prisons
NEW HAVEN — About 50 people protested outside the New Haven Community Correctional Center off Whalley Avenue on Monday, demanding that the state Department of Correction reform the way it operates state jails and prisons and release at least half of the system’s inmates in order to achieve proper social distancing.
The protesters included a mix of activists, formerly incarcerated people and relatives of people who are currently incarcerated.
“Across the state of Connecticut, there’s a lot of crazy stuff that goes on in the facilities” and the Whalley Avenue facility “is one of facilities where the atrocities happened,” said protester and New Haven resident Jewu Richardson of the Connecticut Bail Fund.
“We’re basically advocating for people who are inside,” he said.
Minutes later, at the start of the rally, he told people that “because of (the state’s) negligence” in not providing enough protective masks to both inmates and guards, “they brought COVID into these facilities.
“They’re responsible for the people’s well-being,” he said. “We demand that all the COs wear masks — and if they got caught not wearing masks, they get sent home.”
Richardson, who did much of the talking during the rally, speaks in part from experience.
He spent time in the Whalley Avenue prison after agreeing to a plea bargain and being sentenced in 2014, four years after he was involved in a police chase that ended with an officer shooting him after he allegedly tried to run the officer over.
Richardson, speaking in a parking lot on County Street before the start of the protest, said people have been “beat up and assaulted by (corrections officers),” some were victims of sexual assault at York Correctional Institution in Niantic and one inmate died in the New Haven facility under questionable circumstances a while back.
“There’s a lot of things that are happening behind these walls,” he said.
Among the demands he read on behalf of the group was that the DOC “initiate large-scale decarceration coupled with public divestment from the prison industrial complex,” that it establish a new, independent body and process to review sentence modifications, create a legal resource center in every facility and restore visits “in a safe way,” perhaps in outside spaces with proper protective equipment.
The protesters also called for better care for people with COVID-19 and for the DOC to “immediately stop denying people parole and other forms of release, provide personal hygiene supplies to everyone who is incarcerated and “mandate
that everyone incarcerated is able to clean their living area whenever they want.”
In addition, they called for a mandate that all DOC staff “keep their masks on while in the facility” and for the DOC to have an independent body investigate all allegations of sexual and physical abuse.
“Because our loved ones are incarcerated doesn’t mean that their lives are worthless,” Richardson said. “Our loved ones are not worthless. We love them. Their lives are worth something.”
No one from the Department of Correction attended the protest.
Police stayed mostly out of sight — with several cruisers and four motorcycle officers parked on Whalley, about a block from where the rally began on County Street. Officers emerged to stop traffic on Goffe Street, however, as a few dozen marchers and a number of vehicles honking their horns drove around to repeat their demands and finish the rally on the Hudson Street side of the facility.
A number of the marchers were veterans of other Black Lives Matter protests that have taken place in the area in the weeks since the May 25 death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer touched of nationwide protests.
They chanted “No Justice, No Peace” and “Show Me What Community Looks Like.”
Leighton Johnson, of New Haven, who is part of a group called Stop Solitary CT, also knows what it’s like in the Whalley Avenue facility.
“I’ve been in this place,” said Johnson, 36, who said he spent 10 years in prison from age 23 to 33. “My mission is to stop solitary confinement” and make correctional facilities do more to address what lands people in jail, he said.