Fay Honey Knopp

Fay Honey Knopp ( August 15, 1918 in Bridgeport , Connecticut - August 10, 1995 in Shoreham , Vermont ) was an American civil rights and peace activist , feminist and prison abolitionist .

Origin, professional life, private life

Fay Birdie Irving was born to a Russian Jewish immigrant, Alexander Ajolo Irving and his wife Molly Feldman. She finished her education at Warren G. Harding High School in Bridgeport, top of the class. However, because of her family's financial difficulties, she was unable to study. Instead, she became a buyer for a chain of women's clothing stores, a job which she linked to her future husband (1941), Burton Knopp. The couple had two children: Sari Knopp (later Knopp-Biklen) and Alex Knopp. The family moved to California in the mid-1950s, and Fay attended a UCLA Creative Writings Course . It was not until 1964 that she was able to give up her daily job and devote herself full-time to her work in the peace movement and the movement for social justice.

social commitment

Knopp saw herself as a pacifist in the tradition of Gandhi at an early stage and contacted the American Friends Service Committee . From 1955 she began visiting conscientious objectors from the Vietnam War in prison. In 1964 she formally became a member of the Quaker and worked for them as a "prison visitor". In 1968 she founded, with Bob Horton, "Prison Visitation and Support", an organization that helps offenders . In 1974 she founded the "Safer Society Program" (today: Safer Society Foundation), of which she was until 1993 director. The aim of the organization was to offer sex offenders an alternative to punishment through treatment. In 1976 she founded the Prison Research Education Action Program and published the world's first handbook for prison metabolists. The book proclaims three goals for abolitionists: a ban on building new prisons, a reduction in prison populations, and a move away from incarceration as the solution to problems. Until her death she occupied herself in research, practice and legal policy with alternatives to the prison system . Most recently she was also director of the American Friends Field Service Committee in New York and project director of the Quaker National Peace Education Project.

reception

The US criminologist Harold E. Pepinsky has recognized her and called her one of the greatest ("one of the giants") in US criminology (Criminology as Peacemaking, 1991, 324). But word of that hasn't even got around among abolitionists. Even Thomas Mathiesen , whom she quotes from the beginning, does not mention her in the new edition of his book (The Politics of Abolition revisited, London / New York 2015). An exception to this rule is Herman Bianchi , who knew her personally and calls her "Mother Theresa the Abolitionists" ( Johannes Feest , Definitionsmacht, Renitenz, Abolitionismus, 2020, 299).

Publications (selection)

• Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, Syracuse 1976. ( online )
• Retraining Adult Sex Offenders: Methods & Models, Orwell, Vt., 1984.
• Community solutions to sexual violence. Feminist / Abolitionist Perspectives. In: Harold E. Pepinsky / Richard Quinney, eds., Criminology as Peacemaking, Bloomington 1991, 181–193.
• When Your Wife Says No: Forced Sex in Marriage, Orwell, Vt., 1994.
• A primer on the Complexities of Traumatic Memory of Childhood SexualAabuse: a Psychobiological Approach, Orwell, Vt., 1996.