Hassan Foster met J’Allen Jones when they were both in Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown in 2015.  He remembers Jones as calm and peaceful. He said he’d seen Jones struggle with a mental health episode, but his medication seemed to relieve the symptoms. He said he’d never seen Jo nes get angry or swear. They went to church together, he said, and talked about spirituality. They got to know one another.  “I asked him why was he there. He said that he fell on hard times. He’s from Atlanta, Georgia, and got caught up in some stuff just to pay some bills. He said, ‘I just didn’t have any family up here,’” Foster told The Connecticut Mirror at a rally at the Capitol on Tuesday, where advocates were calling for the release of a video showing the last hours of Jones’ life. According to Foster, the two men continued to check in with one another until Foster was transferred to MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield. It was there that he found out, in 2018, that Jones had died at Garner.     “I broke down. It was so painful,” he said. “We were talking to each other every single day. We were bonding in there. We needed each other to stay strong.”  Jones died after being pepper sprayed, restrained, struck and forcibly moved by as many as nine correction workers. In August 2018, Jones’ mother and girlfriend filed a lawsuit against the Department of Correction. The family has been petitioning the courts for the release of the video.    CT Insider reviewed a 350-page report by an investigator at the Department of Correction, which included still photos from the video, and described the events it showed.  Excerpts from the January 2019 report reviewed by the CT Mirror indicate that the 31-year-old Jones was being transferred within in Garner for monitoring when correction officers told Jones that he needed to submit to a strip search. He resisted, “chanting, yelling and shouting incoherently.” Staff physically forced him onto a bed and removed his clothes. One of the officers gave him several knee strikes to the thigh, according to the report.  A lieutenant sprayed Jones twice with pepper spray, and the officers put him into restraints. They covered his head with a Universal Precaution Safety Veil to prevent him from spitting on the correction officers. They also administered a combination of Benadryl, the anti-anxiety drug Ativan and Haldol, an antipsychotic, the report states.  At that point, Jones became “less resistive,” and the staff moved him to a cell. A nurse found him unresponsive, and he was transferred by ambulance to Danbury Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.  The investigator concluded that the staff’s use of force was not “excessive.” He noted that Lt. Gary Gray had tried to limit the use of force by other correction officers, stopping officers from holding Jones by the neck or putting their knees on his back, and explaining to Jones that the officers were “trying to control your actions so that you don’t hurt yourself.”  Gray told investigators that he’d called for Jones’ head to be covered with the safety veil as a “precautionary measure” to protect staff from being spit on and that he’d had “no idea” that Jones was asthmatic when the chemical spray was used.  But the investigator did say the officers had violated the department’s policy on use of force by failing to recognize when Jones stopped resisting and could not stand on his own. According to the report, it took 7 minutes and 16 seconds before the staff realized that something was wrong and began trying to revive Jones with CPR.  ACLU of Connecticut Legal Director Dan Barrett speaks at a press conference on March 25, 2025 demanding the release of the footage of J’Allen Jones’ death at Garner Correctional Institution. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror Dan Barrett, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is trying to intervene in the case to stop the Attorney General’s Office from sealing the video, said he believed the video should be made public.  “I think everybody should be able to see this record. This record or any other — it should be an anomaly, and the law says it is,  if you file it with a court and no one can see it,” he told the CT Mirror after the rally.  In 2019, both the state and Jones’ family members agreed to have the video sealed under a protective order. But Barrett said that a private agreement about how evidence should be handled during a lawsuit “has nothing to do” with the public’s right to see the video.  A trial judge denied the ACLU’s motion to intervene. The ACLU is appealing the decision.  The attorney general’s office, the governor’s office and the Department of Correction declined to comment on the case. DeVaughn Ward, the state’s interim correction ombuds, said he’d spoken with the governor’s office, urging for the video to be released. “I watched Attorney General William Tong stand with people of Black and Brown descent during the George Floyd movement in the 2020, and everything that his office is doing with respect to the death of J’Allen is in direct contradiction to some of those principles,” said Ward. “This video needs to be released. The public needs to heal.”  Ward has submitted a bill to the legislature that would require a correction officer who sees another officer using “excessive or lethal force” to step in. The correction officer must also report the use of force to the warden, who must notify the state police. Ward said this would align correction officers’ duties with that of police officers in the event of excess force.   The bill would also require the video of an event to be released if it involved a death at the hands of correction officers. It would also require the Department of Correction to develop a plan to implement body cameras for correction officers.  “As an attorney, too often I’ve witnessed assaults or incidents, critical incidents in DOC, and they’re required to have a handheld camera, but often that camera is either pointed at the ground, the video’s not turned on, an officer’s blocking it, and so we need to have more accountability and transparency,” he said. Lawmakers and advocates also used Jones’ case as an indication of the need for a change to the department’s policy on strip searches.  According to a report from the DOC’s Operations Data Unit, strip searches are conducted when incarcerated persons are being admitted or returning to a facility, after in-person visits, when they are being moved to restrictive housing or other specialized placement and in the case of trips to court or medical appointments.  Data showed that the department conducted about 355,000 strip searches on incarcerated people in 2024. An additional bill raised through the Judiciary Committee would require Department of Correction Commissioner Angel Quiros to purchase two body scanning machines, one for York Correctional Institute and one for Manson Youth Institute, by the end of the year. The scanners would serve as a pilot program. During a work session with the legislature’s budget committee, Quiros said that a body scanner costs about $154,000. He said that installing body scanners in facilities across the state — 26 body scanners in the facilities, 15 units for the lobbies and 12 for restrictive housing — would cost the state about $8.1 million. Quiros told the committee the body scanners would be “100% better” than strip searches in detecting any contraband that someone might bring in.  Robert Beamon, the president of SEIU local 391, the union representing correction officers, told the CT Mirror that he didn’t see a problem with reducing the number of strip searches as long as there were other safety measures in place.  “ I can tell you this: strip searches is not something that our staff look forward to doing,” Beamon said. “We do it … to keep each other and the inmate population safe, to make sure dangerous contraband isn’t brought into the facility. But if we have the technology means to make that a thing of the past … I can’t see an issue with it.”  State Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, told the CT Mirror that while body scanners would certainly eliminate the problem, advocates felt that something needed to be done immediately to address the strip-search policy. A bill in the legislature’s Government Oversight Committee would require the Department of Correction to provide information about the cost and efficacy of body scanners, and to report on how many strip searches were happening at each facility. But Winfield said the bill was largely repeating what the Judiciary Committee has already done.  He said they were in discussions about how far they would go. He said he didn’t think it would be possible to eliminate strip searches completely without something like the body scanners, but he said it might be possible to make the policy “less onerous.”  “I mean, hundreds of thousands of strip searches … it sounds like people are having strip searches tens of times a year,” said Winfield. “It’s hard to believe that that’s actually necessary.”  State Rep. Craig Fishbein, R-Wallingford, told the CT Mirror that he was also in favor of body scanners, saying he understood that strip searches could be intrusive and used arbitrarily.  “Ultimately, searches are about preventing contraband from entering our prisons, as well as providing for the safety of our corrections officers, and persons that are incarcerated. We have learned that body scanning systems are many times more accurate, while at the same time less intrusive than strip searches,” he said.  But at the press conference, Winfield pointed to a larger question around the death of J’Allen Jones: whether the state of Connecticut was really capable of jailing people in a way that respected their humanity.  “If we started to treat people as human beings inside of our system, we wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t have all the lawsuits we have. We wouldn’t have a mother who’s lost her son. We wouldn’t have children who lost their father. And if we did, we’d know exactly what happened, which is all that’s being asked here,” he said.  ...read more read less