In June, IAHR sat down with Virginia's Secretary of Public Safety and the state's top corrections officials — the kind of meeting that doesn't happen unless people in power are starting to listen. But letters keep arriving from inside Red Onion and Wallens Ridge telling a different story.

In 2024, Virginia passed a law requiring at least four hours of out-of-cell time a day for people in restrictive housing — a modest, hard-won floor that IAHR helped build after years of advocacy alongside Delegate Joshua Cole and the Virginia Coalition on Solitary Confinement. It was a real win. It was also, it turns out, not the end of the story.

Letters our correspondence volunteers receive from inside Red Onion and Wallens Ridge State Prison keep describing something closer to two hours out of cell each day, half of what the law requires. The gap between what's written into the Code of Virginia and what happens behind a locked door is exactly why IAHR doesn't stop advocating once a bill signs.

That's what made June's meeting worth paying attention to. IAHR and our Virginia Coalition on Solitary Confinement partners sat down with Secretary of Public Safety Stanley Meador and senior Department of Corrections management — not a courtesy call, but a working conversation about where implementation is falling short and what oversight should look like going forward. Meetings like this happen because a decade of documented casework, legislative wins, and coalition pressure have made IAHR a partner the Commonwealth has to reckon with.

The General Assembly is in recess until January, but the work doesn't pause. Virginia's prefiling window for the 2027 session opened July 20, and IAHR is already positioning legislation to close the enforcement gap, building on the four-hour requirement, the K-9 use restrictions we helped pass in 2024, and the independent ombuds office now empowered to investigate exactly these kinds of complaints.

In July, Board Chair Kimberly Jenkins-Snodgrass carried this work further, representing IAHR at a community gathering hosted by State Senator Mike Jones focused on criminal justice reform one more room where directly impacted people and advocates got a seat at the table.

Laws change slowly. Enforcement changes slower. IAHR's job is to make sure both keep moving and that the people living the gap between the two are the ones setting the agenda for what comes next.