Pandemic Prison Protests Pioneered

Dozens of cars lined up on County Street outside of the Whalley jail, parked bumper to bumper, horns blaring.

A week later, dozens more rolled slowly by the governor’s mansion in Hartford, with shouts and cheers of, ​“Free them all! Free them all!” rising above the honking fanfare.

These weren’t traffic jams. They were protests — the products of days, sometimes hours, of rapid organizing by local advocates adapting to the physical realities of the Covid-19 pandemic in an effort to draw the public’s attention to the plight of the incarcerated.

These ​“honkathons” represent just one strategy that the Connecticut Bail Fund has turned to when more conventional in-person rallies on the steps of courthouses or City Hall have become all but impossible with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

In order to maintain a social, or at least physical, distance of six feet apart and still collectively amplify concerns about marginalized and overlooked populations hard hit by the virus, the Bail Fund and local immigrant rights advocacy groups like Unidad Latina en Acction (ULA) have had to get creative.

And with more and more people getting sick from the virus in the state’s prisons, the Bail Fund has also been ramping up the urgency of its message: That the safest and most humane short and long-term strategies for prisoners is mass release and decarceration.

The Bail Fund, a four-year-old prison abolitionist organization that focuses on helping free people locked up in pre-trial detention who cannot afford to make bail, has doubled down on its community organizing efforts.

By setting up a hotline for prisoners and their families to talk about what life is like behind bars during the pandemic.

By raising money for a commissary fund so that prisoners can afford to buy food and toiletries while confined in potentially unsanitary conditions.

By tapping into national networks of volunteers to help pick up people the fund has helped bond out of incarceration.

By supporting immigrants detained by the federal government in facilities where social distancing, adequate health care, and access to cleaning supplies are allegedly scarce.

By creating a new zine describing the reasons and moral urgency behind the #FreeThemAll movement.

And by hitting the streets — one car a time — to ​“raise the noise” about the dangers faced by those behind bars, including at immigration detention centers.

This week, through Thursday, Connecticut Bail Fund organizers plan to lead mass actions outside of five different state prisons. They’re calling for the governor and the Department of Correction (DOC) to issue mass releases during the pandemic.

“In this time of the Easter holiday, a time when families and communities join together, we stand with those incarcerated who are denied their right to unite with their loved ones,” reads the event description on Facebook.

“I feel like organizers are also essential workers,” Connecticut Bail Fund Co-Director Ana María Rivera-Forastieri said on an episode of WNHH’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program. ​“They’re out there doing the work that others are not willing to do right now from our government in freeing people and helping families get together. These organizers across the country are risking their own lives in order to support others.”

“Every honk, every time we go outside of a prison or a detention center and make noise, we’re letting [detainees] hear us and feel how present we are, ” said Connecticut Bail Fund Deportation Defense Organizer Vanesa Suarez, calling into that same radio program from a honkathon outside of the Wyatt Detention Facility in Rhode Island Friday. They’re hearing ​“how much we actually care about them, and that we’re supporting” the civil disobedience they too are taking from the inside.

The WNHH interview with Rivera-Forastieri, Suarez, and Connecticut Bail Fund Founder and Co-Director Brett Davidson also included a conversation with Yale Law School Professor Amy Kapczynski and Yale School of Medicine Assistant Professor of Epidemiology Gregg Gonsalves in which they expounded on two essays they recently co-wrote for the Boston Review about the structural inequalities laid bare by this crisis, and the need for building a new politics and infrastructure of care during and after the pandemic.

“No Peace Until Everyone Is Free”

Rivera-Forastieri, Suarez, and Davidson said during the radio interview that the work their organization has been doing for years around bailing people out of detention, empowering incarcerated individuals and their families to advocate for themselves, and highlighting the ​“punitive, militaristic, and violent” nature of the carceral state has taken on a new level of urgency during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“There’s no way to make prisons and jails safe,” Davidson said. ​“There’s no way to do social distancing in prisons and jails. There’s no way to turn them into hospitals. The only way to save lives is to let people go. Our demand is very clear and simple: The system as it exists has no legitimacy, and the governor has a moral obligation to free everyone.”

Throughout the country, jails and prisons have emerged as breeding grounds for the novel coronavirus.

The densest concentration of the pandemic anywhere in the country is not in a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash., or a religious community in New Rochelle, but rather in Cook County Jail in Chicago. According to NPR, over 500 people have tested positive for the virus at the 4,500-inmate facility, with two-thirds of those cases among prisoners and the remaining among staff.

Similar clusters of cases have emerged at the Parnall Correctional Facility in Michigan, the Oakdale federal prison in Louisiana, the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City, and elsewhere.

In Connecticut, the state American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sued the governor and state Department of Correction (DOC) commissioner, calling on them to release prisoners with pre-existing medical conditions, those being held pretrial on low bond amounts, and others eligible for supervised release or within six months of the end of their sentence.

The state attorney general recently moved to dismiss the lawsuit. The state DOC is moving coronavirus-positive inmates to a unit at Northern Correctional Institute in Somers as the commissioner has pointed to the release of about 800 people from state prisons since March 1.

By Tuesday, 118 DOC staff and 188 incarcerated people in Connecticut have tested positive for the virus.

On Monday, the DOC announced that the state prison system has seen its first incarcerated individual to die from Covid ‑19 while hospitalized: 63-year-old Bridgeport man Carlos DeLeon.

Locally, the mayor and police chief have pointed to a reduction in detainees held at the city’s pre-trial lockup at police headquarters since the start of the pandemic, a reduction in custodial arrests, and the city Health Director’s sign-off on conditions and spacing at the lockup.

Davidson and Rivera-Forastieri said these actions are not enough, and called on the mayor in particular to be more specific about how many custodial arrests are still being made and how many people are currently held in lockup.

Rivera-Forastieri said she has heard directly from incarcerated individuals in state prisons and their families about people not having access to soap, clean cells, or adequate health care.

In addition to distributing roughly $6,000 through its commissary fund, on top of another roughly $100,000 in recent weeks used to bail out immigrants from detention throughout the country, Rivera-Forastieri said the bail fund has turned to honkathons as a form of pandemic-safe protest that raises awareness about conditions behind bars.

“Our team was trying to figure out how do we continue to put pressure in a time of social distancing when we need to be safe and to protect each other,” she said. She said they were inspired by similar honkathons led by activists in New Jersey.

She said people inside the jails they honk outside of routinely call bail fund members afterwards and say that they heard them making noise outside the walls and recognize that there are advocates who have not forgotten about them.

“The honkathons are really important for continuing to put pressure on the government,” she said. “‘No peace until everyone is free’ has been our message.”

She said the bail fund has helped lead honkathons in recent weeks outside the Whalley jail, City Hall, Mayor Justin Elicker’s house, the governor’s mansion in Hartford, and outside the Hartford Correctional Center.

“We are going to continue doing these actions so long as there is inaction from our government.”

When asked about the mayor’s statement in late March that a mass release of everyone from lock-up is not an effective means to keep a community safe and that some people are locked up because they ​“are suspected of doing some pretty heinous crimes,” Davidson said the Connecticut Bail Fund always strives to draw attention to people suffering from incarceration and the social and legal structures that define who is a criminal and who is not.

“Let’s bring back the conversation to the actual human beings who are in the system instead of thinking about different frightening fantasies of violent criminality,” he said, ​“which are always tinged with racism and classism. [Let’s think] more specifically about who is the New Haven Police Department actually sentencing to their deaths right now?“ And what are the ways that the legal system and social structures can be changed to reduce violence and solve the structural sources of alleged criminal behavior without locking people in cages?

When asked during his April 10 daily coronavirus-related press briefing about his latest thoughts on the release of prisoners from local lockup and state-run facilities during the pandemic, Elicker pointed again to the police chief’s reduction of people held at the 1 Union Ave. lock-up to an average of three to seven at any given time, as opposed to pre-pandemic numbers that were in the 20s.

And he applauded the state DOC for releasing roughly 800 people from state prisons so far. ​“I think that the decision to release non-violent offenders is a good one.” He said that he is concerned that prison releases might lead to larger local homeless populations if the state and federal government don’t also act to help cities find money and places to house those who are released.

“Uplifting The Voices Of Those Inside”

While in the midst of a honkathon outside of a Rhode Island detention center on Friday, Suarez said from the driver’s seat of her car that organizing during a pandemic comes with a host of challenges.

“You have to move a lot quicker,” she said. ​“We’re moving with a lot less time than we normally have to plan actions.” Because the virus is spreading so quickly throughout the country and the world, activists need to act now — and quickly — in order to try to win some kind of relief for those confined in potentially dangerous conditions.

Also, people who would normally turn out to a rally or demonstration are a lot more wary of leaving their homes — considering that public health experts have warned again and again that the most effective way to ​“flatten the curve” of the virus and stay healthy and safe is to stay home as much as possible and leave only for essential activities.

The honkathons, she said, have emerged as a creative solution to both problems. People can hop in their cars, isolated from fellow demonstrators, and drive in unison to a prison or politicians’ house and make their voices (or, at least, their horns) heard.

“The fact that some of us have the ability to stay in a safe place to protect ourselves and the fact that others don’t is very problematic,” Suarez said.

“When we do these car actions, it’s a very creative idea in order to continue protesting and uplifting the voices of those inside while also letting people feel safe in their cars.”

Previous articles about political organizing during the pandemic. Series logo by Amanda Valaitis.

• ​“Food Garage” Feeds Families During Covid
• Pro-Immigrant Crew Tackles Covid Crisis
• Mutual Aid Teams Tackle Covid-19 Challenge