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.

Fay Birdie Irving was born onAugust 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. She studied at the Hartford Art School, the New School for Social Research and the University of California, Los Angeles.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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