SOME NOTES OF ANALYSIS:

1- This bill is a big win for progressives–and it happened only because of advocacy. Making your voices heard, organizing in your communities, reaching out consistently and continually, from bill cosponsorship to amendments, gives our progressive legislators the support push for the most progressive reforms that they can. Your advocacy pushes those who would not otherwise be with us to take a hard stance–or at least not go unnoticed when she/he fails to lead. 

Let’s take a moment to thank the progressive leaders on the Hill who made this victory possible, and recognize the tremendous role that all of our activism played in making it so. BIG rounds of applause!! 

When our legislators take risks, we need to show we have their backs and appreciate them: reach out to your Senator and express your gratitude for the Senate adoption of a strong, progressive bill* that reduces mass incarceration and moves our whole system towards more justice. (We’ll have some template/draft language to make it easier, but in the meantime, a quick heartfelt “thanks” email or call is simple and can go a long way).

(*FWIW: not every legislator worked for this outcome–10 senators voted against the final bill–and many, many more voted to weaken the bill or even worsen the status quo (see: the noxious “#BlueLivesMatter” super-penalty provision (which we’ll address in subsequent follow-up posts). Still: expressing your happiness with the outcome — regardless of how the senator voted– is itself important: it shows that their constituents value progressive steps forward (and they know how they voted in opposition to those aims). That said, be sure to extra-thank our progressive leaders. We’ll have a fuller analysis and vote breakdown soon.)

2- This is not yet law; this is one chamber (Senate) that has acted. The MA House will pass its own CJR bill. The House is less progressive than the Senate: ongoing advocacy with your State Reps continues to be important, and, like yesterday, during amendment time–critical and urgent. 

3- Advocacy around Amendments are where the differences are made between a decent bill and a boldly progressive bill. Engagement during these moments is crucial.

Unfortunately–the process is very difficult to organize and mobilize advocacy/action around: amendments are drafted in a short turnaround, the list can be extraordinarily dense, and the actual window of advocacy unfolds rapidly. 

Though the Senate bill passing is a truly positive step forward, we must be attentive to the fight over amendments, for every legislative battle for progressive advancement in Massachusetts. Now that it has passed the Senate chamber, it is easy enough for your Senator to take credit for voting for this historic advancement. But,

• …did she or he ALSO try to weaken the bill by voting for poisonous, regressive amendments like weaponizing drug overdoses (amendment 28, adopted without a roll call) or reducing the felony threshhold (amendment 5, voted down but with 5 Dems voting for it)? 
• …did she or he stand up for progressive advancements like eliminating minimum mandatory sentencing? Did she or he vote down the peacocking “tough on crime” (and terrible for communities!) provisions like creating a “superpenalty” for shooting a law enforcement officer? 
  (again: we’ll have a fuller vote breakdown soon)

These amendment votes don’t carry headlines or even make much notice beyond a very brief window in aftermath. But these inflection points are exactly where we must take the measure of our lawmakers: when it comes time to do the harder things, to make the real reforms, do they stand up? Do they fight for us and our communities? Or, do they only go along with the easiest route toward the minimal standard of progress (and are happy to take the credit for the larger victory, nevertheless)?

4- Lack of Sunlight is a democracy-jammer; it makes our work together harder–and more important. It is really difficult to get at these important distinctions. We’d argue that the abysmal transparency of the MA Legislature as a whole is likely a feature, not a bug, and serves to keep these distinctions as obscured as possible. 

For the progressive citizen-advocate, we’d like to reiterate some of our motivations and goals as an organization of, by and for progressive citizen-activists/advocates:

• – We’re trying to make this process less opaque, and to make the moments where your advocacy really does shape important policy (the difference between bad, meh, good and ground-breaking), as easy to access and engage as we can.
• – Keeping track is important and difficult, but we’re building tools (see our scorecard) and providing information (see below) for all of us to not only see/assess these important distinctions, but to more easily refer to them, create a history of them, and therefore more readily keep legislators accountable.
• – When Progressive Mass makes these calls to actions on amendments — we need your help in encouraging others to understand the critical importance of acting. It’s all dense and complicated; we need to build the community of citizen-activists who ‘get it’ so we can be louder, faster, and at a moment’s notice.
• – All of this work is takes intensive labor, hours, and dedication by our all-volunteer Issues Committee (affectionately known as the PMIC). It can be exhausting!

Our vision is that someday we have the resources to do all of this even better.

Member engagement and contributions are critical to getting there.

If you have found this work, our tools, and our analyses helpful, please consider making it official by becoming a member, or convert to a monthly member investment, or make an additional contribution to show your support. (THANK YOU: for your support and for your commitment to take the actions, ongoing, to make the change we want to see).

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SUPPORT: 

• Amendment 1 (Cyr), which would guarantee equal protections for LGBTQ prisoners
• Amendment 8 (Barrett), which would protects the ability of prisoners to have in-person visitations
• Amendment 76 (Keenan), which calls for treatment for imprisoned drug addicts
• Amendment 100 (Hinds), which would require police to undergo implicit bias training
• Amendments 114 and 124 (Creem) and Amendments 134 and 135 (Eldridge), which would curb the abusive practice of solitary confinement
• Amendment 129 (Creem), which would repeal mandatory minimum sentences
• Amendment 149 (Creem), which would allow current prisoners serving mandatory minimum sentences for crimes for which mandatory minimums have been repealed to be eligible for good conduct credits earned on and after the effective date of the law.
• Amendment 152 (McGee), which would create a Justice Reinvestment Trust Fund to allow the savings from the decrease in incarceration to be redirected towards job training and programming for communities that have been disproportionately impacted by mass incarceration.

OPPOSE:

• Amendments 5 (Tarr) and 25 (Moore), which would reduce the felony theft threshold to $1,000
• Amendments 18 (Rush), 60 (Tarr), and 121 (Tarr), which would re-impose mandatory minimum sentences that take discretion away from judges, where it belongs
• Amendments 24 (Moore) and 87 (O’Connor), which would expand the use of invasive surveillance technologies
• Amendment 29 (Moore), which would eliminate valuable juvenile justice improvements
• Amendments 28 and 37 (Tarr), which would make anyone who shares drugs that result in death guilty of manslaughter, thereby creating the possibility that, in the event of an overdose, people sharing drugs would be hesitant to call for help
• Amendment 40 (Tarr), which would leave in place a harsh 1980 law that denies prisoners serving mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes all possibility of participating in programs aimed at reducing recidivism while they are incarcerated
• Amendments 42 and 80 (Tarr), which would retain current parole fees

Overview of Results

Five senators consistently voted to keep a strong bill intact and further improve it: Joe Boncore, Sonia Chang-Diaz, Cindy Creem, Jamie Eldridge, and Pat Jehlen have a perfect score on our CJR report card. If you live in their district, you should thank them. (If you don’t, tell your own Senator how much you appreciate their leadership!)

Following them were a dozen Democrats with (mostly) As or (some) Bs: Mike Barrett, Will Brownsberger, Majority Leader Harriette Chandler, Julian Cyr, Sal DiDomenico, Linda Dorcena Forry, Cindy Friedman, Adam Hinds, Jason Lewis, Tom McGee, Senate President Stan Rosenberg, and Ways & Means Chair Karen Spilka. They almost always held the line and should be thanked as well.

Like the Senate’s six Republicans, eleven Democrats worked hard for their F, voting for the progressive position less than half the time: Michael Brady, Eileen Donoghue, Anne Gobi, Joan Lovely, Michael Moore, Kathleen O’Connor Ives, Marc Pacheco, Michael Rodrigues, Mike Rush, Walter Timilty, and James Welch. That said, Brady, Lovely, Moore, Rodrigues, Timilty, and Welch still voted for the final bill (unlike Rush, Gobi, O’Connor Ives, and Donoghue–Pacheco was absent) and deserve your thanks for that.

So what actually happened in all those amendments? Let’s explore.

Protecting the Progress of the Bill

The Senate defeated attempts to weaken or eliminate key parts of the bill, such as the following:

Raising the felony larceny threshold: In Massachusetts, the current threshold at which larceny (or theft) becomes a felony, rather than a misdemeanor, is a very low $250 (third lowest in the country)—in other words, less than the cost of an iPhone. This threshold was set at $100 in the 1800s, and it wasn’t raised until 1987. But if the felony threshold had kept up with inflation, today it would be well over $2,000. An unnaturally low felony threshold means that more people are subject to prison time for theft of a Yeti soft cooler.

Since 2000, 37 states have raised their felony larceny threshold, and property crime has not risen as a result. The Senate bill raises the threshold to $1,500—the same as Rhode Island’s.

 Senator Bruce Tarr attempted to reduce this to $1,000, and the amendment was voted down 15 to 22 (Scorecard 1s).

Curbing the school-to-prison pipeline: The Senate bill, removes disrupting a school assembly as an arrestable offense. To quote Senator Pat Jehlen: “Routine school discipline used to be handled inside a school.” When police get involved, they can often end up escalating a situation, with traumatic consequences for students in their formative years.Senator Bruce Tarr’s amendment sought to retain “school assembly disruption” as an arrestable offense, and his amendment was voted down 11 to 27 (Scorecard 6s).

Eliminating mandatory minimums for some nonviolent drug offenses: Mandatory minimum sentences remove judicial discretion in sentencing and treat every offender with the same blunt instrument, regardless of context. Mandatory minimums have succeeded spectacularly at fueling mass incarceration, but do not reduce crime. We should applaud the Senate for beating back many of the efforts to reinstate this failed policy–but some votes were much too close for comfort, and a few wrong-headed amendments did, embarrassingly, pass (more on that shortly).

70% of prisoners held under the Massachusetts Department of Correction for a drug offense were sentenced under mandatory minimum statutes, at great economic cost to the state and social cost to communities. Even if they are not applied, prosecutors use the threat of mandatory minimums to coerce individuals into confessing to crimes they did not commit. Our neighbor Rhode Island repealed mandatory minimums for drug-related crimes back in 2009: both the prison population and violent crime fell afterwards.

Republican Minority Leader Bruce Tarr made two attempts to strengthen/restore mandatory minimums relating to non-violent cocaine offenses, but both failed, albeit somewhat narrowly, with votes of 18 to 19 (Scorecard 7s) and 17 to 21 (Scorecard 8s). At least 10 Democrats joined in each effort to undo the progress of the bill.

Tarr also sought to restore mandatory minimums for selling drugs in a school zone. The idea of stricter rules around school might make sense at first (“of COURSE we should extra penalize selling drugs to kids!”–can you see the attack mailer now?)–until you think it through. The 1,000-foot school zone distance is absurd in practice and ends up penalizing just whom you’d expect: black and brown communities, part and parcel of the racist machinery of our criminal justice system that we need to dismantle. But if that isn’t sufficient enough rationale, as Senator Will Brownsberger noted on the Senate floor, a review of cases of selling drugs in a school zone turned up no such cases of selling to minors. The geographic distinction is arbitrary and outdated, and it disproportionately, negatively affects communities of color. Tarr’s amendment failed 15 to 23, with 9 Democrats joining to support this ill-conceived, regressive, fear-mongering pander (Scorecard 9s).

Granting testimonial privilege to the parent-child relationship: Massachusetts law forbids minors from testifying against their parents in a criminal matter, under most circumstances, acknowledging the long-term and irreparable damage it could cause to the parent-child relationship. The Senate bill, also recognizing the personal and community importance of the parent-child relationship, simply codifies the logical inverse. Granting this testimonial privilege to parents means they cannot testify against their minor children. Minor children should be able to to communicate with parents without fearing that those conversations could be held against them in court.

Republican Minority Leader Bruce Tarr sought to strike this provision. His amendment failed 18 to 20; a dozen Democrats joined the Republican caucus in this regressive, and frankly cruel, effort (Scorecard 10s).

Raising the age of criminal majority from 18 to 19: Under current law, 18 year-olds–often seniors in high school–are tried as adults; the Senate bill changes the age of criminal majority (that is, when you get tried as an adult) from the 18th to the 19th birthday. Ample research shows that teenage offenders served by a juvenile system are much less likely to re-offend and more likely to successfully transition to adulthood. Teenagers in a juvenile system have access to greater educational and counseling services, and they’re much less likely to face sexual assault than at an adult facility.

Senator Michael Moore  sought to strike this from the bill, but his amendment was voted down by a too close 17 to 20. 10 other Democrats (along with all 6 Republicans) joined him in this regressive effort (Scorecard 12s).  

Sealing convictions for resisting arrest: The Senate bill allows individuals to seal felony records after five years and misdemeanors after three, and allows the crime of resisting arrest to be sealed. As Senator Will Brownsberger explained during the Senate debate, “resisting arrest” is a fairly common charge–and, it is often abused.

Arrest records can create significant obstacles for people to re-integrate as productive members of their community, as persons with records can face discrimination when seeking employment. It clearly makes no sense to seal the offense for which someone was arrested, but not the arrest  Like so many other of these amendments, the motivation almost seems arbitrarily vengeful, not like sound policy to rehabilitate offenders or repair communities.

Republican Minority Leader Bruce Tarr sought to strike this provision, but his amendment failed 8 to 28 (Scorecard 17s).

Defeating New Mandatory Minimums, Harsher Penalties, and the Morality Police

The Senate also defeated several efforts by Republicans (aided by some Democrats) to create new and/or stronger mandatory minimums and other penalties, aiming to undermine the purpose of the bill. Minority Leader Bruce Tarr’s attempt to create new mandatory minimums for drunk driving failed 14 to 23 (Scorecard 2s). Some senators seemed stuck in the worst old thinking of the failed “war on drugs”.  9 Senators, for instance, voted for Sen. Patrick O’Connor’s amendment expanding mandatory minimums for fentanyl (reducing the quantity to trigger the minimums) and broadening mandatory minimums to any Class A drug (Scorecard 11s). And 15 supported Sen. O’Connor’s proposed new mandatory minimum for carfentanil trafficking (22 opposed) (Scorecard 13s). O’Connor sought to empower DAs to charge sexting teenagers with felonies for child pornography failed on a (too) narrow 18-19 vote: a dozen Democrats joined this reactionary move (Scorecard 26s). A Civil Liberties Win and a Civil Liberties Loss

O’Connor also sought a broad expansion of the state’s wiretapping laws. This “unprecedented power-grab” (ACLU) would have granted DAs power to surveill electronic communications and to use their surveillance tools to investigate small offenses with no connection to organized crime, like petty drug distribution. The amendment went down 14 to 23 in a win for civil liberties (Scorecard 15s).

Although there were many great wins for civil liberties, and civil rights, there were a few very low moments. They should remind us of the need to stay vigilant and organized–and to not underestimate the persuasive power of the opponents to reform, or legislators’ willingness to pander to bad legislation that “looks” good.

Most notable among roll called votes was Bruce Tarr’s “Blue Lives Matter” amendment. Relying on a pernicious, racist narrative of a “war on cops” which is belied by statistics, this vote would establish a new mandatory minimum for assaulting a police officer. Disguised behind seemingly simple “We support our police” sentiments, these policies are often used to defame, deter, and suppress Black Lives Matter activists and others resisting or victimized by police brutality. Or, to be honest, activists in support of any progressive cause. We do not have to draw a special circle around our officers to value their role in our communities. A special law just for them contributes to the right-wing complex that says cops are persecuted victims in need of extra protection.

The amendment first passed on a 22 to 15 vote (Scorecard 3s), with 16 Democrats joining Republicans in voting for it. But then even more Democrats wanted to vote for it, so there was a revote. The amendment then passed 31 to 6 (Scorecard 4s). Giving People a Second Chance

The Senate bill repeals various mandatory minimum sentences. Should a person serving a mandatory minimum sentence for a crime for which the mandatory minimum be repealed have to serve the full term? The cause of justice clearly says no. If we no longer believe that full sentence to be wise or just, we should not be doing more damage to individuals, communities, or state budgets by forcing someone to serve it in full.

Cindy Creem’s amendment to allow such prisoners to be eligible for good conduct credits earned on and after the effective date of the law passed 25 to 13 (Scorecard 5s). By contrast, Tarr’s amendment to require individuals in prison for a mandatory minimum sentence that has since been repealed to serve the full term of the sentence rightly failed 13 to 24 (Scorecard 14s).