Originally published in the Winter 2024 edition of the Virginia Defender, issue 74, printed February 21. Reproduced here for accessibility and archival purposes. To find other stories in the Winter 2024 issue or to download the full PDF, see this post. For other issues dating back to 2012, see the Full Issues page.

For several years now, the Virginia Prison Justice Network and the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality, along with many other organizations, have been calling for Independent Outside Oversight of Virginia’s prisons, jails and immigrant detention centers. And in the past year, there has been a constant stream of media reports about the horrendous conditions inside these facilities: alleged fatal beatings of prisoners by guards; death by starvation; years spent in solitary confinement; fatal drug overdoses; suicides; lack of air conditioning while temperatures top 100 degrees; and more. This has been bad publicity for Virginia and its elected officials, many of whom aspire to higher office.

So it’s not surprising that the Youngkin administration and the General Assembly have agreed to establish an office of Ombudsman to investigate and report on these conditions. We welcome this development.

At the same time, we know that these same elected officials have for years been well aware of these same conditions and have chosen to ignore them. And we know what has happened to earlier popular demands such as establishing a Marcus Alert and ending solitary confinement: Bills introduced to address these demands were watered down, while other reforms were later reversed.

The Ombudsman position, as it has been established, could provide a means for prisoners to raise grievances in a more effective way than presently exists. Or it could just be a toothless mechanism designed to convince the public that a serious problem has been addressed, when in fact it hasn’t.

Gov. Youngkin’s budget calls for an Ombudsman position that is limited to investigating complaints and reporting to the governor and General Assembly. There is no enforcement power. Further, the budget allocates a mere $250,000 for the office, when, as the Richmond Times-Dispatch pointed out in a Sept. 28 editorial, a study conducted by DLG Strategies for the Virginia Department of Corrections concluded that, “… an effective, independently run ombudsman office would cost between $2.3 million and $3.7 million to fully staff.” In other words, between nine and 15 times what the Virginia budget allocates.

This is no time to declare victory. The only sure guarantee that the government will do the right thing is constant public pressure. It was the mass Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 that forced some changes in the prison and criminal (in)justice systems. That same kind of mass pressure will be needed to ensure that any Ombudsman position is more than just a fig leaf hiding a festering wound.

Lives depend on it, as does our own integrity