Full Citizens Coalition was founded in April 2018 by James Jeter Jr. and Kennard Ray — two organizers who had spent years inside Connecticut's criminal legal system and came out refusing to be treated as anything less than full citizens. We built FCC on a simple, radical premise: the people most harmed by mass incarceration and disenfranchisement are the people best equipped to lead the fight to end it.
We started with one target: Connecticut's felony disenfranchisement laws, which stripped voting rights from tens of thousands of residents on parole, even after they had returned home to their families and communities. For three and a half years, we ran the Unlock the Vote campaign — knocking on doors in Hartford, Waterbury, Bridgeport, and New Haven, testifying at the Capitol, and telling our own stories to legislators who had never had to think about what it means to be governed by laws you have no voice in shaping.
In June 2021, that organizing paid off. Governor Lamont signed Public Act 21-32, restoring voting rights to more than 4,000 Connecticut residents on parole. It was one of the largest expansions of the franchise in the state's modern history — and it was won by the people it was meant to help.
Winning back the vote was never the finish line for us. Since 2021, we've expanded into credible messenger work that trains formerly incarcerated residents to interrupt violence in their own neighborhoods, campaigns against wrongful convictions, advocacy for commutations, juvenile justice reform, and what we call cultural abolition — the work of dismantling not just unjust laws, but the cultural narratives that convinced Connecticut those laws were ever acceptable. We are still led by the people who lived this fight, and we are not done.
