Sister Fights for Brother's Rights at Osborn Prison

Lisa Velasquez-Torres starts each day the same way: waiting for her brother’s call from Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers.

On those calls, Luis Velasquez, 43, describes what life looks like inside one of Connecticut’s oldest and most troubled prisons. Mice in the cafeteria, including dead ones left to sit. Mold. Water he doesn’t trust. Electrical blackouts. Medical appointments that take months to schedule and cost three dollars just to request.

“These are people being punished for what they did,” Velasquez-Torres told the New Haven Independent. “But this doesn’t mean they are animals that you can neglect. They’re still human beings.”

Velasquez-Torres is a longtime Hill neighborhood resident and recently elected Ward 3 Democratic co-chair. Her brother has been at Osborn for three months, after serving portions of his five-year sentence at the Whalley Avenue Correctional Center and MacDougal-Walker in Suffield. He is two years into a sentence following a fatal car crash on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, on charges of manslaughter and assault with extreme indifference to life.

“Osborn is the worst one,” she said.

Luis Velasquez arrived at Osborn already managing serious health conditions: diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, and asthma. A hip injury limits his mobility. His sister says his health has deteriorated since the transfer. He does not consistently receive his medications on time. He does not have access to the CPAP machine he needs for his sleep apnea. And when he needs medical attention at the facility, which does operate an inpatient hospital, the process is slow and costly by any reasonable measure for someone who is incarcerated.

Velasquez-Torres wants her brother moved somewhere closer, where she and her family can be more directly involved in his care.

Her advocacy has connected her with veteran prison-watchers across Connecticut, and together they are pushing to bring sustained attention to conditions at Osborn, a facility that detainees, advocates, and the state’s independent prison-system ombudsman have described as possibly nearing the end of its useful life as an institution. Osborn currently holds nearly 1,200 incarcerated men.

The timing of her campaign coincides with a period of sharp scrutiny on Connecticut’s Department of Correction. Craig Whyte, a 45-year-old New Haven man, died after a corrections officer found him unresponsive in his cell at Osborn this past Sunday. Whyte was the ninth incarcerated person in Connecticut to die so far this year, according to reporting by the CT Post.

Governor Ned Lamont recently announced that the DOC commissioner plans to step down in May, departing amid mounting concern about the state’s prison system. The announcement did little to quiet critics who argue that leadership changes alone won’t fix facilities that have been underfunded and neglected for years.

Osborn, for its part, sits at the center of those concerns. The problems Velasquez-Torres describes are not new to people who follow Connecticut’s corrections system closely. What is new, perhaps, is that those concerns now have a clearer public face: a sister, a Hill resident, an elected ward official who answers her brother’s calls every day and takes notes.

She is not asking for her brother to escape consequences. She is asking for basic sanitation, consistent medication, functioning infrastructure, and the ability of a family to remain connected to someone they love. Those are not extraordinary requests. In Connecticut in 2026, they shouldn’t be.

The broader question facing state lawmakers and whoever takes over at the DOC is whether Osborn can be reformed or whether it needs to be replaced. The ombudsman’s concerns, the deaths, the departing commissioner, and the persistent complaints from people inside the walls and their families outside them are all pointing in the same direction. Connecticut has a prison it may no longer be able to justify keeping open in its current condition.

Velasquez-Torres isn’t waiting for that debate to resolve itself. She’s on the phone every day, listening, and she’s not planning to stop.