Fay Honey Knopp

Fay "Honey" Knopp (née Irving, August 15, 1918 – August 10, 1995) was a Quaker minister, peace and civil rights advocate, and prison abolitionist.

Early life and education

Fay Birdie Irving was born on August 15, 1918 in Bridgeport, Connecticut to Mollie Feldman and Alexander Ajolo Irving, a Russian-Jewish emigree. She graduated from Warren Harding High School as valedictorian in 1935. After high school, she became a women's fashion buyer and in 1941 married Burton Knopp. Together they had two children, Sari and Connecticut politician Alex Knopp.[1] She studied at the Hartford Art School, the New School for Social Research and the University of California, Los Angeles.[2]

Career

In 1939, she attended a Quaker peace demonstration as a Gandhian pacifist. In 1955, Knopp began visiting conscientious objectors of the Vietnam War in prison. In 1962, she traveled to Geneva, Switzerland as part of the Women Strike for Peace delegation, protesting the effects of nuclear testing on children's health. Also that year, Knopp became a Quaker serving as a prison visitor in the Federal penitentiary system through her designation as a "minister of record", and in 1968 co-founded Prisoner Visitation and Support with Bob Horton to further that work.[1][2][3]

In 1974, she founded the Safer Society Program and was the director until 1993. The program's goal was to offer sex offenders treatment through an international referral system to break the cycle of behavior rather than punishment.[4][2] In 1976, Knopp founded the Prison Research Education Action Program and published the book Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists. The book includes three goals for abolitionists: prohibit the building of new prisons, reduce prison populations, and move away from incarceration as a solution.[2][5][6]

She was also director of the New York Region of the American Friends Service Committee, projects director for the National Peace Education Division in Philadelphia.[2]

Knopp died on August 10, 1995 in Shoreham, Vermont from ovarian cancer.[2]

Reception

Most academic criminologists, even those of an abolitionist persuasion, seem to have never heard of Fay Honey Knopp. Criminologist Harold E. Pepinsky mentions that he "had never read her work or seen it cited in the criminological literature." He now thinks that "she ought to be ranked as one of the giants in U.S. criminology...Her Quakerism, her radical feminism, and her prison abolitionism have reinforced and informed one another."[7] Dutch criminologist Herman Bianchi remembers her as the "Mother Teresa among abolitionists."[8]

Bibliography
  • Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, 1976[9]
  • Retraining adult sex offenders: methods & models, 1984[10]
  • Community Solutions to Sexual Violence. Feminist/Abolitionist Perspectives[11]
  • When Your Wife Says No: Forced Sex in Marriage, 1994[12]
  • A primer on the complexities of traumatic memory of childhood sexual abuse: a psychobiological approach, 1996[13]

References
  1. Ware, Susan (2004). Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary Completing the Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674014886.
  2. Saxon, Wolfgang (1995-08-16). "Fay Honey Knopp, Dies at 76; Founded Quaker Prison Ministry". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-06-25.
  3. Angell, Stephen Ward; Angell, Stephen W.; Dandelion, Pink (2013-09-26). The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies. OUP Oxford. ISBN 9780199608676.
  4. Johnson, Sally; Times, Special to The New York (1988-08-14). "A Vermonter's 'Tough' Help for the Sex Abuser". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-06-25.
  5. Kushner, Rachel (2019-04-17). "Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-06-25.
  6. Washington, John (2018-07-31). "What Is Prison Abolition?". ISSN 0027-8378. Retrieved 2019-06-25.
  7. Pepinsky, Harold E. Peacemaking in Criminology and Criminal Justice In: Pepinsky/Quinney, eds., Criminology as Peacemaking, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1991, 314
  8. Feest,Johannes, Definitionsmacht, Renitenz, Abolitionismus. Wiesbaden 2020, 299
  9. Knopp, Fay Honey; Boward, Barbara; Morris, Mark; Schnapper, Morris Bartel (1976). Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists. Prison Research Education Action Project.
  10. Knopp, Fay Honey; Churches), Prison Research/Education/Action Project (New York State Council of (1984). Retraining adult sex offenders: methods & models. Safer Society Press.
  11. Harold Pepinsky/Richard Quinney, eds., (1991) Criminology as Peacemaking,Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 181-193
  12. Knopp, Fay Honey (1994). When Your Wife Says No: Forced Sex in Marriage. Safer Society Press. ISBN 9781884444104.
  13. Knopp, Fay Honey; Benson, Anna Rose (1996). A primer on the complexities of traumatic memory of childhood sexual abuse: a psychobiological approach. Safer Society Press. ISBN 9781884444203.
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