Joseph Gaylin

This year the PROTECT Act, otherwise known as Senate Bill 1059, offers Connecticut an opportunity to address conditions in Connecticut state prisons and jails that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture condemns as “a State-sanctioned policy aimed at purposefully inflicting severe pain… which may well amount to torture.”

Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration stands at a crossroad. Down one path is real change and anti-racist legislation; down another are mere procedural reforms that leave a disastrous status quo mostly intact. The governor chose the wrong path in a recent letter sent to the legislature. In it, he proclaimed that he would call for a special session only after legislative leaders developed a bipartisan compromise, effectively shielding the legislative process from the public and likely stripping a civil rights bill of its most meaningful provisions.