By Diana Martinez, Chicks Ahoy Farm
Chicks Ahoy Farm kicked off the 2026 legislative session determined to organize around our broken probation and parole systems. We often meet people who ask why a farming-based nonprofit organizes around criminal justice reform. For us, it’s simple. Everyone needs to eat, but some of us cannot. The criminal justice system is where people land after they are failed and abandoned by other systems. We call it a social safety net when, in practice, it’s a sieve that shakes out individuals, children, and families it’s not equipped to hold. People who fall through end up institutionalized, surveilled, or written off. And the sieve doesn’t just hurt them, it taps us all.
Our members share how their struggles with poverty, mental health, substance use, and trauma led them or their loved ones into the legal system. We hear how easy it is to be violated while under supervision, for a mental health episode resulting from not having access to care or medication, or because vindictive neighbors or family members weaponize the police. We’ve heard how people were coerced into abusive relationships by partners who regularly threaten to call their probation officers with accusations, and of having to choose between paying their supervision fees and buying food. CT law going above and beyond federal requirements in denying people with supervision violations access to SNAP, or deterring them from applying, is yet another tap on the social safety sieve.
This session, our members successfully introduced a measure in SB 497, An Act Concerning Protecting Food Security for Veterans and Others and Mitigating Federal Cuts to Nutritional Assistance through the Human Services Committee, that will remove this barrier and create access to SNAP benefits for people with violations. On Tuesday, the 17th, I’ll be standing alongside our members in offering testimony urging the committee to vote in support of SB 497. If you’re reading this on or after the 17th, you can still support by submitting written testimony to the Human Services Committee and your own representatives. Below is my testimony, which I hope can serve as a guide. If you’d like to learn more about our work or this bill, reach out to me at diana@chicksahoyfarm.org.
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Attention Human Services Committee Members:
I am the Founder and Executive Director of Chicks Ahoy Farm. Our organization works at the intersection of food justice and the criminal justice system, with the dual goals of increasing access to farming for underrepresented and directly impacted people and organizing to address the gaps in our social safety net that land people in the criminal justice system. Our members and leaders support people in all matters of small-scale farming. We often encourage people with SNAP benefits to harvest organic seeds from produce they purchase at farmers’ markets to start their own seedlings. Over the course of the past year, we learned that some of our community members are unable to access SNAP benefits even if they earn under the income limits, simply because they have a violation of probation or parole.
Today, over three times as many people as are in prison in CT are under supervision. Many thousands of others in our communities have completed supervision at least once. Over half the people on probation earn under $20,000 a year, a reality exacerbated by race and gender, as evidenced by 70% of all women and 81% of Black women on probation earning under that amount. Violations of supervision are commonplace and can be triggered by new crimes or by technical non-criminal reasons like missing a probation appointment or failing a drug test. At least 20% of formerly incarcerated people report experiencing food insecurity. In Connecticut, where the vast majority of people incarcerated come from our major urban hubs, that insecurity is bolstered by food deserts and the lack of farms in urban and suburban spaces.
Members of our organizing arm, Cultivating Justice, launched the FREE CT campaign to address the failures of our supervision systems in enabling successful reentry and to ban the box on food access. We queried the Prison Policy Initiative and learned CT goes well beyond the federal mandate in restricting SNAP benefits. Federal regulations deny SNAP access to people with underlying felony drug charges who are “probation violators”, a term they use to refer specifically to people with active warrants for their arrest, as opposed to any person with a violation of supervision. In addition to the state law, the SNAP application further deters people from applying for benefits by very broadly asking, without explanation or stipulation, “Do you or any member of your household have a probation or parole violation?”
Today, we are urging you to vote Yes on SB 497 AAC Protecting Food Security for Veterans and Others and Mitigating Federal Cuts to Nutritional Assistance because it would both align our policies with those of the Federal government and eliminate or amend the violations question on SNAP applications. Community supervision is meant to help people establish themselves, reengage with their families, and contribute successfully to our communities. Restricting access to food runs directly counter to those goals because we know people are less likely to recidivate if their basic needs are met. Food is as basic as it gets. Help us keep people home and keep people fed by voting Yes on SB 497.
Thank you,
Diana Martinez
Founder and Executive Director
Chicks Ahoy Farm, Inc.
