DeVaughn Ward is one of a few attorneys in the state who handles claims against the state for “conditions of confinement,” cases that argue the state violates an inmate’s constitutional rights for reasons like inadequate medical care, failing to protect inmates from violence.
And because of its size, the lawyers who represent prisoners know each other.
In September 2024, Ward was named the Ombudsman to the Department of Correction. In March, he was confirmed. And as he settled into the position — which had been eliminated in 2011 but was revived by the legislature eleven years later — Ward worked to establish relationships with people who worked with the incarcerated population.
Given that Ward’s job as ombudsman is to solve problems, and the Inmate Legal Assistance Program is tasked with helping inmates access courts to address many of the same problems, Ward told me he looked up the lawyers running the program, assuming he would have at least seen the names before.
“Who’s Bansley?” he thought.
Ward had never heard of Walter C. Bansley IV, the lawyer who helms ILAP. [Full disclosure: Bansley and his father were appointed to represent me in a probate matter over twenty years ago].
A lucrative business
Even with Supreme Court decisions shaping policy on prisoners’ access to courts, it’s still not clear if any access is possible under the currently constituted ILAP.
ILAP has only been run, in earnest, by two law firms since its organization. And those two firms earned significant revenue from the program.
In 1995, Department of Correction put the program out to bid.
Under principal Attorney Sydney T. Schulman, the firm of Schulman and Associates secured a one-year contract with a bid of $571,323.86 — that’s $1,216,824 in 2025 dollars. Schulman remained the legal assistance provider for the department for the next 20 years until 2015, when Bansley Law LLC (under a different name) replaced Schulman.
When Bansley was awarded the contract, Schulman engaged Department of Correction in a public battle over a Freedom of Information Act request for copies of Bansley’s proposals.
“I didn’t know if it was the one man show or if he had other lawyers working for him. I never had any idea except I assumed he had some staff for the money and I thought that they saved a whole bunch of money by giving them less money, which obviously is wrong,” Schulman told me in an interview.
Bansley’s first contract was for services provided from June 25, 2015 to June 30, 2017 and the department agreed to pay Bansley — the firm underwent two name changes during the contract’s duration — a total of $1,599,000 for those two years. The contract was amended four times and extended until 2021; the last 15 months of the contract was capped at $1,092,147.
The next and most recent contract with Bansley’s firm, covering 2021-4, expired in June 2024 with a payout capped at $2,391,000 from 2021 to 2024. The contract was renewed for two more years, until June 2026, at $797,000 per year. In the past 10 years, ILAP has been paid approximately $8 million.
ILAP claims they employ five full-time attorneys and four full-time paralegals for the state’s 11,033 prisoners.
When ILAP was launched, it could represent a prisoner in a parole hearing under certain circumstances – which they could invoice DOC for an additional $1000.00. The program was also contractually bound to provide an attorney at the state’s women’s prison, York Correctional Institution, at least one day per week to handle family matters for women inmates.
ILAP’s current contract doesn’t require them to do either.
No shows
As Ward was settling into his position as ombudsman, lawyers from other Connecticut agencies asked him if there was someone to represent inmates when filing claims. And touring the prisons, Ward said he didn’t see posters displayed advising inmates how to contact the Inmate Legal Assistance Program.
“And the posters that I did see were 10 years old,” Ward told me in an interview.
Ward discovered the program had only made five in-person legal visits to all Connecticut prisons in Fiscal Year 2023-24.
Ward told me he asked Bansley to show the services provided by ILAP, but Bansley didn’t reply.
Ward then issued a subpoena to secure the information.
Bansley and ILAP didn’t comply.
Since summer, ILAP has been under subpoena to hand over the information and statistics regarding the services it provides to the state’s incarcerated population and has so far refused to provide the information, forcing Ward to file suit to secure a court order to compel compliance with the subpoena.
In an objection to the subpoena, Attorney Walter Bansley IV told the court ILAP was “meeting or exceeding the minimum required by the constitution and case law to provide inmates access to the courts.”
It would settle the matter to show those metrics but Bansley has not done that.
And Walter C. Bansley has not answered an email asking for comment or an interview. His firm does not have a dedicated website.
On Oct. 9, Ward sent a letter to Commissioner of the state’s Department of Correction, Angel Quiros, requesting that the department pause the contract with ILAP.
Quiros has not yet replied. Instead his office has requested two separate extensions. He was scheduled to answer Ward’s request on Nov. 17.
The court case — the Office of the Correctional Ombudsman has not filed a lawsuit to protect the rights of inmates — is unprecedented.
Alternatives raise conflicts of interest
ILAP’s method, in 2025, of sending paper through the mail is more than outdated.
Connecticut is one of fourteen states that has not adopted an electronic legal services program allowing prisoners to find forms, guidance and case law to help them challenge the conditions of confinement through the tablets distributed in the prisons.
And these electronic search services are drastically cheaper than ILAP.
For example, the state of South Dakota paid $54,720 for its prison research service in 2018 for a combined prison and jail population of 5114 people, about half of Connecticut’s. The Oregon Department of Corrections has taken a more bespoke approach. A librarian asked the incarcerated population what they needed and she designed the digital infrastructure. The cost of it cannot be parsed out of the state’s corrections budget.
The price of alternatives to ILAP raises the question of why the Department of Correction is so dedicated to paying so much for so little. The legal relationship between the department and ILAP pose a conflict – namely whose side they’re on when a prisoner says they’ve been harmed by the department and they want to seek legal relief. It may be worth it to the Department of Correction to pay almost one million dollars to ILAP if it can prevent claims from being filed.
Every inmate doesn’t have a meritorious complaint about the conditions of their confinement. But the number who do is greater than zero. The Connecticut Department of Corrections paid out at least $5.7 million between 2019 and 2024 to settle dozens of medical and use-of-force lawsuits.
ILAP is essentially a glorified research service — a very expensive, very paper-bound one at that. At the very least, the state needs to examine whether there are better ways to achieve the same results other than relying on ILAP as it currently operates.