State Sen. John Kissel said a prison inmate serving 86 years for first-degree sexual assault is exploiting the state's Freedom of Information Act to request the names of contributors to his re-election campaign.
Kissel, a Republican from Enfield, said this week that the request reveals a "loophole" in a new law that protects prison guards by restricting inmates' FOI rights, adding that officials need to address it.
However, the director of the state's Freedom of Information Commission, Colleen Murphy, cautioned against a "knee-jerk" overreaction to a half-dozen or so inmates in the state's prison population of 18,000. She said Wednesday that the state's FOI law already includes security provisions that were developed in consultation with state correction officials.
Kissel said that James Stevenson, an inmate at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, filed the request more than a week ago in "an apparent attempt to circumvent the spirit of a new law that seeks to prohibit inmates from obtaining the personal information, names and addresses of corrections employees."
He said he believes that Stevenson is targeting him because he had championed the bill that was approved last May.