Fighting the long fight: activist Clare Regan

Along
the timeline of death penalty reform, 1978 was a relatively slow year.
According to Amnesty International, only Denmark outlawed the practice that
year. Meanwhile in the US, partly because of contradictory court decisions on
the question, society was in a political and moral knot.

            You get a local feel for this from
reading the February 1978 issue of Justicia,
the official newsletter of the Judicial Process Commission, a group founded in
the aftermath of the 1971 Attica Rebellion.

            The issue carried an announcement of
the “Death Penalty Declaration of the Stockholm Conference,” which deemed
abolition “imperative for the achievement of declared international standards.”
There was also a “Reply to Sheriff Lombard” by local activist Karen Reixach,
who took apart the sheriff’s public justifications of capital punishment.
Reixach presciently said “guidelines handed down by the Supreme Court are not
going to eliminate conviction and execution of innocent people….”

Atop the
masthead of that issue was another activist’s name: Clare Regan.

            Regan, then the newly named editor
of Justicia, had been in the thick of
criminal justice reform through her work with JPC. But she couldn’t have known
that accepting the position would chart a course for progressive advocacy in
Rochester — and for herself.

            In fact, Regan at first downplayed
the move. “That’s not my bag,” she recalls telling the late Virginia Mackey, a
JPC founder and guiding spirit who offered her the editorship. Nevertheless,
Regan stuck with it, and stuck, and stuck. “I would love it if someone else
were to take over, but there isn’t anyone else,” she says today.

            Regan says she still types with two
fingers. This hasn’t prevented Justicia from growing into a widely read and respected grassroots journal, with articles
on prison issues (some written by prisoners), alternatives to incarceration,
the death penalty, and drug policy reform. Though the newsletter has been cut
back from 12 issues a year to six, its reach has grown. Circulation now stands
at 3,500: Of this total, 1,000 copies go to inmates in state prisons, and
another 1,000 go to addresses outside the Rochester area.

            The March-April 2002 issue is
typical: closely typed pages with few graphics but scads of information. Some
space is devoted to a JPC annual report. But the issue concludes with activist
Joel Freedman’s six-page review of the internationally controversial Mumia
Abu-Jamal case, one that has become pivotal in attempts to stop capital
punishment and the racism behind it. And as almost a postscript, there’s a
“Death Penalty Potpourri” — actually a sober update on specific US legal
cases.

            Today at 75, Regan not only edits
but regularly writes big portions of Justicia.
She’s also an extramural speaker, occasional classroom teacher, and, you might
say, head of a de facto debating team on hot issues. Still, Regan considers
herself more a data-gatherer than writer. She does claim possession of “the
teaching gene,” however. And there may be a political gene, too: One of her
grandfathers worked as a Congressional aide, she says, while the other was a
district attorney.

            Regan, who was born Clare McGinnis
in Hackensack and grew up in Pittsburgh, has an academic background in biology
and chemistry, at both Duquesne University and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. (At MIT she worked with well-known chemist JD Roberts on molecular
orbital calculations.) Regan could easily have pursued a career in the
sciences. But in the 1950s she opted for home and family instead.

            She and here husband, the late Tom
Regan, came to the Rochester area in 1964 after Tom landed a job at Kodak; they
settled into a home in Fairport, just down Manor Hill Drive from another
soon-to-be activist named Louise Slaughter and her husband, Bob. The
Regan-Slaughter friendship and information exchange continues on the block.

            “I had six kids in eight years,”
Clare Regan says with pride. Unfortunately, she lost her partner in 1990. (Tom
died of pneumonia and emphysema; as a result, Clare has been something of an
activist against tobacco, which she pointedly says is one of the most harmful
addictive drugs. In particular, she has supported ASH, Action on Smoking and
Health, a Washington-based anti-smoking group.)

            Very early on, Justicia production took over the Regans’ dining-room table. It’s
still there.

Though the
issues haven’t changed much in a quarter century, Clare Regan herself gets more
radical as she goes along. Hearing her tell her own story, you realize that
it’s been quite an evolution.

            “I started with the legislative
committee of the [Fairport] PTA,” she says. That led to the formation of a
Democratic Party committee in the town of Perinton and electoral work for 1972
presidential candidate George McGovern. Meanwhile, Regan also tutored at East
and Monroe high schools in the city, and she became a draft counselor at the
old Genesee Co-op. (The counseling service evolved into the Peace and Justice
Education Center, which through merger turned into Metro Justice.)

            “After the Attica riot,” says Regan,
“one of the draft counselors who knew me said they were starting a prisoner
assistance project.” Finding housing for the ex-inmates was job one, she
explains, with employment a close second. “Most of these guys,” she says, “had
no high school or training, and the most you could get them was dishwashing jobs.”
The assistance project put Regan on a path to fight prison expansion. Indeed,
she worked hard — but failed — to stop a new Monroe County prison from
being built in Brighton near Monroe Community College. Likewise, she argued
against expanding the jail downtown, also without success. In both cases, she
said that alternatives to incarceration, if used consistently and thoroughly,
could erase any need for new cells.

            Yet Regan’s advocacy of “ATIs” has
borne fruit, sometimes indirectly. For example, Monroe County’s Drug Court, a
type of program once unthinkable here, now is functioning; it diverts selected
people nabbed for drug-prohibition-related crimes from jail into supervised
treatment. Regan is quick to credit Judicial Process Commission leaders Virginia
Mackey and Lois Davis with the actual groundwork for local ATIs; but Regan’s
own role as educator through Justicia has been critical in spreading this gospel of moral and practical reform.

            Regan says her passions all along
have been fighting against the death penalty and agitating for an end to the
failed War on Drugs. The anti-death-penalty work is spiritually anchored in the
understanding that killing people who kill is plain wrong.

            This connects to Regan’s anti-war
work, too. “My religious journey,” she says, “has taken me in a different
path.” For more than seven years, she took part in Catholics Against Nuclear
Arms, a group that held vigils at Seneca Army Depot in the Finger Lakes while
nuclear warheads were stored there.

            “We stopped in May 1990 because we
thought peace had broken out,” she says. Then came 1991 and the Persian Gulf
War to puncture that hope.

            And then came 2001. Regan recalls
spending the months after September 11 at weekly vigils downtown at the Liberty
Pole. “I had a sign that said, ‘How many dead Afghan civilians constitutes
terrorism; the God of Peace is not honored by more killing.'” She says she
stopped doing the vigils only when the cold weather threatened to make her ill
— and keep her from a commitment to teach a college class.

            But Regan’s most intensive
commitment in public life has been educating against the failed War on Drugs.
“I started writing about the need for a more rational drug policy in 1981,” she
says. “It wasn’t popular.” Regan has been a consistent critic of the
Rockefeller drug laws, which impose long sentences without much judicial
discretion. But she goes well beyond this level of criticism, which after all
has become almost mainstream.

            Drawing on sources as diverse as
conservative economist Milton Friedman and liberal reformer Ethan Nadelman,
Regan has long been an advocate of drug legalization,
beginning with marijuana. She favors treating drug addiction with care, not
repression.

            “I feel it probably ought to be done
either under prescription, or with some health-care control, with treatment on
demand instead of law enforcement,” she says.

            “I don’t want anybody to use drugs
— but if they ban chocolate, people will steal to buy it,” Regan says. She
believes her approach will enhance public safety by taking desperately addicted
people out of dangerous situations. “I don’t want you ramming into me because
you’re high on something,” she says. Regan herself doesn’t smoke any substance,
drink alcohol, or use caffeine — though chocolate, she says, is another
story.

            She puts emphasis on precise
language: “‘Drug-prohibition-related
crime: I’m trying to get people to say this instead of ‘drug-related crime,'”
she says.

            In a wide-ranging 1998 essay titled
“America Is Losing the War on Drugs,” which leaped from Justicia to the internet, Regan let her critique fly. The essay
begins with a quote from a National Drug Control Strategy report: “Drug abuse
and its consequences destroy personal liberty and the well-being of
communities, [and] illegal drugs foster crime and violence in our inner cities,
suburbs, and rural areas.”

            Regan’s commentary: “It would be
more accurate if the word ‘prohibition’ was substituted for ‘abuse’ in the
statement; it is the sale of illegal drugs and the huge profits that can be
made because of the illegality that foster crime and violence.”

            The essay also cites a finding that
at one time in New York City, “more than half of all murders were
drug-related,” and that “of these, 74 percent were related to the illegality of
the drugs — disputes over territory, the quality of the drug sold, or
suspected cooperation with the police.” Regan also criticizes authorities for
raiding medical-marijuana providers in California, for rewarding paid informers
with millions of dollars, and conversely for seizing billions of dollars in
assets from people involved in, or merely suspected of involvement in drug
activity.

            Regan’s conclusion is a plea for
clean Needle Exchange Programs to help stop the spread of HIV and other
infections by addicts who share used syringes. Regarding the programs, Regan
can claim some accomplishments on the ground. “We [at JPC] were the prime
movers,” she says, on a needle exchange program eventually picked up by AIDS
Rochester.

Regan has
managed to pick up friends and admirers on both sides of several aisles.

            Neighbor Louise Slaughter, who went
from local activism to the US House of Representatives, calls Regan “a saint.”
Judicial Process Commission co-worker and Green Party activist James Caldwell
says Regan “is one of a kind, a nonstop person, always willing to educate, to
uplift people.”

            “She makes me want to continue on
this path,” says Caldwell, an ex-inmate who has run for Monroe County sheriff
on the Green ticket.

            JPC staffer Susan Porter has worked
alongside Regan over the long haul. Without Regan aboard, says Porter, “JPC
wouldn’t have attacked the jail expansion and promoted Alternatives to
Incarceration for so many years.” Porter credits Regan with the fact that
Monroe County now maintains a Day Reporting Center downtown; the facility
allows arrestees who might not have been able to make bail or be released on
their own recognizance to get drug treatment, health and literacy assistance,
and so forth.

            “Such accomplishments don’t come
easy, says Porter. “It takes someone with guts, patience, a willingness to do
the homework.”

            Regan has her critics, too. Among
these is Monroe County District Attorney Howard Relin, perhaps the Rochester
area’s most vocal, visible, and well-positioned advocate of capital punishment.
But Relin’s criticisms are ideological and analytical, not personal.

            “I think Clare Regan and I have
debated the death penalty more than any other two people in the region,” says
Relin. “She has been true to her position for 20 years. She’s really dedicated
to improving the criminal justice system. She’s a very good advocate. She’s not
afraid to go into a forum and talk about new ideas.”

            In that light, consider that Regan
serves on the Monroe County Criminal Justice Council, along with Relin, local
judges, the Public Defender, representatives of the County Legislature and
sheriff’s department, and other agencies.

            “JPC,” says Regan, “has a permanent
seat.” The prerogative was written into the rules years ago, she says, at a
time when Democrats were in power and JPC was opposing jail expansion.

            The permanent seat is the perfect
counterbalance to Regan’s post with Justicia.
But her message is the same in any forum. That’s because it’s driven by a
combination of self-conscious humor and self-assured presentation, as in
Regan’s quick analysis: “I don’t look upon myself as radical. I always say, I’m not radical, I’m right.”

This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2002.