March 2026
Ronald Mariano, Speaker of the House
24 Beacon St., Room 356
Boston, MA, 02133
Karen Spilka, Senate President
24 Beacon St., Room 332
Boston, MA, 02133
Aaron Michlewitz, Chairperson
House Committee on Ways and Means
24 Beacon St., Room 243
Boston, MA, 02133
Michael Rodrigues, Chairperson
Senate Committee on Ways and Means
24 Beacon St., Room 212
Boston, MA, 02133
Dear Speaker Mariano, Senate President Spilka, and Chairpersons Michlewitz and Rodrigues:
The 110 undersigned organizations represent a wide array of constituents across the Commonwealth. We are organizations including clinicians, lawyers, clergy, formerly incarcerated people, survivors of crime, and advocates for young people, elders, women, children, and families. We have come together to advocate for the passage of six bills that have been vetted and reported favorably and are now in either House or Senate Ways and Means:
- An act relative to medical and elder parole (H.2693)
- An act to build restorative family and community connection (H.2591)
- An act relative to human rights and improved outcomes for incarcerated people (H.2608)
- An act relative to justice for survivors (S.1256)
- An act establishing a jail and prison moratorium (H.3422, S.2944)
- An Act to Promote Public Safety and Better Outcomes for Youths (S.1061)
We need strong action now from Massachusetts lawmakers to protect children and adolescents, families, elders, and survivors of violence, uphold our civil rights, and ensure resources are directed to communities that need them.
Massachusetts communities are under attack. This package is critical to protecting families, young people, elders, and survivors of violence and abuse, groups already bearing the brunt of federal attacks on the social safety net and the human and civil rights of our most vulnerable communities. These bills will promote efficient use of state resources at a time when every dollar matters, uphold the civil rights that Massachusetts is already defending, and break cycles of violence by investing in people rather than in costly systems of incarceration. We urge policymakers to include the above bills among your priorities.
To fully meet the moment, this package of bills must be passed this session.
An act relative to medical and elder parole (H.2693) This bill brings the current medical parole statute into alignment with the original intentions of the Legislature. It closes gaps to ensure equitable access to the medical parole process and then creates a pathway to parole review for elders who have already served lengthy sentences. This bill addresses the reality that we have the oldest incarcerated population in the country and will prevent suffering, reduce costs, and maintain public safety.
An act to build restorative family and community connection (H.2591) protects children and families of incarcerated people, and improves one of the most critical mechanisms we have to pave the way for successful re-entry to the community—visits with loved ones. The bill helps families, friends and other important figures in incarcerated people’s lives stay connected by streamlining the visiting process and making it more equitable, addressing racial discrimination in current policy and practice, and reducing the harms that families experience when they are denied visits.
An act relative to human rights and improved outcomes for incarcerated people (H.2608) supports people to re-enter the outside community successfully after periods of incarceration. It creates universal access to productive out of cell time with programming, education and vocational training for all incarcerated people. The bill would encourage re-entry planning from the moment a person enters the correctional system to ensure that we are creating hope, maximizing people’s chances at successful parole, and breaking cycles of violence.
An act relative to justice for survivors (S.1256) interrupts cycles of harm by allowing criminalized survivors of abuse, sexual assault, or trafficking to seek relief from extreme punishment. The bill creates a fair and consistent process for courts to use critical information about survivors’ experiences to reach informed dispositions. It also expands diversion, alternative sentencing, and re-sentencing for survivors.
An act establishing a jail and prison moratorium (H.3422, S.2944) would pause expensive prison construction and expansion projects in a moment when capital dollars are urgently needed to address housing, healthcare, and education infrastructure issues. A five year pause would allow time to pursue sensible efforts to further reduce the incarcerated population and implement alternatives. Incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people, clergy leaders, public health professionals, respected advocates, and constituents broadly support a prison moratorium.
An Act to Promote Public Safety and Better Outcomes for Youths (S.1061) would gradually raise the age of juvenile jurisdiction to include 18-20 year olds, so that young people would be tried as adults only after they reach the age of 21. This reform would ensure that young people could get developmentally appropriate interventions towards rehabilitation, rather than exposure to the harmful, counterproductive adult prison and jail system, which is actually criminogenic, meaning it increases chances of recidivism.
Spending on incarceration continues to increase even as the incarcerated population declines–this makes us all less safe as this excessive spending comes at the expense of investment in communities that need more resources to thrive.
Together these six bills will help Massachusetts invest its resources where they are most needed right now, and prevent excessive spending on systems that are causing substantial harm with no evidence of public benefit. Massachusetts families are struggling to pay their bills while the Commonwealth spends on average $134,000 every year on each person it incarcerates. Costs per capita range by prison, with the DOC spending well over $200,000 for each woman incarcerated at MCI Framingham, and nearly $600,000 per person to incarcerate the very seriously ill people at Lemuel Shattuck Hospital.
A quarter of the sentenced population in our state prisons are elders, the population least likely to recidivate and most costly to incarcerate. Access to elder parole and clarifying medical parole would help reduce costs and alleviate the humanitarian crisis created by continuing to incarcerate this rapidly aging population without adequate avenues for relief. Please see a detailed cost savings analysis here.
The current population of MCI-Framingham is a little over 200 incarcerated women. Many of these women are pre-trial, or may be eligible for elder or medical parole or for sentence reduction if the Survivors Act were passed. Yet, Massachusetts is considering building a $360 million new women’s prison despite the fact that currently incarcerated women oppose this plan.
We can better promote public safety by increasing access to visits and implementing universal access to programming and education while people are incarcerated. These are cost effective mechanisms to promote successful reentry, break cycles of harm and ensure people remain safely in their communities.
Raising the age at which a person could be prosecuted as an adult, get a CORI and be sent to the adult prison system helps to protect young people from abuse and trauma that derails young people’s access to what they need to reduce recidivism. We must move towards investing resources we are currently focusing on punishing teenagers as adults into developmentally appropriate rehabilitative interventions, currently in the juvenile justice system, that will improve public safety and are more cost effective. Please see the caseload and cost analysis here.
As the Commonwealth rightly pushes back against federal violations of due process and individual rights, legislators can lead by example and prioritize addressing serious civil rights concerns that persist within our own correctional system.
Recent years have brought costly litigation over use of force, documented instances of corruption, and conditions that fall far short of constitutional standards – problems that these bills directly address. Massachusetts recently settled a class action excessive use of force case for nearly $7 million dollars after incarcerated people were beaten, attacked with dogs, racially targeted and retaliated against after an attack on correction officers. A young man at Suffolk County House of Correction was killed by correctional officers who remain on duty as of this writing, while assaults have continued. Mr. Kenny’s death was preceded by a rash of suicides at state prisons, which still have not been accounted for. These are consequences of long-standing problems that are ripe for reform.
The Legislature did excellent work seven years ago in passing the Criminal Justice Reform Act (CJRA) and more recently in passing No Cost Calls. The CJRA helped to decrease the prison population, yet did not address extreme, racialized, tough on crime era sentencing. Since then we have seen increases in racial disparities and a disproportionately sick and elderly population.
The CJRA addressed restrictive housing, but conditions at Souza Baranowski Correctional Center and in the DOC’s new segregation units are leading to upticks in deaths by suicide, substance use disorder, and overdoses. No Cost Calls has meaningfully increased family connection, while improving access to in-person visits is still on the table and is a critical next step. Justice-involved survivors of violence, disproportionately women, are routinely erased in conversations about reform while Massachusetts sets out to invest $360 million in a new prison for them.
More than a decade ago, Massachusetts raised the age of juvenile court to keep 17-year-olds out of the adult system. Since then, juvenile crime has declined, and Massachusetts has seen faster declines in violent and property crime rates than the national average. Not only can the juvenile system absorb this new cohort of young people, the system also has the expertise, policy and programmatic infrastructure to effectively intervene with them.
It is time to build on the success of the CJRA, no cost calls, and prior juvenile justice reforms and address their unfinished business.
Legislators can limit the harms of the Trump administration while improving our own local systems and strengthening our communities. These bills are targeted interventions that reflect the specific population dynamics of our criminal legal system in Massachusetts and will address rapidly worsening crises. These bills will protect young people, elders, families, children, and survivors, interrupt cycles of violence, and ensure that the Commonwealth’s own policies and systems reflect the values it is fighting to uphold. We urge you to move them forward without delay.
Sincerely,
Authors
Citizens for Juvenile Justice
Families for Justice as Healing
Jane Doe, Inc.
Keeping Families Connected Coalition
Medical Justice Alliance of Massachusetts
Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts
Progressive Massachusetts
Signatories
ACLU of Massachusetts
Allston Brighton Progressives
Antiracism Working Group of Congregation Beth El of the Sudbury River Valley
Asian American Resource Workshop
Beacon Prison Action
Black and Pink Massachusetts Coalition Inc
Boston College Law School Civil Rights Clinic
Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network (BIJAN)
Boston Workers Circle
Cape Verdean Association of Brockton
CAIR-MA
Casa Myrna Vazquez
CELWOP
Center for Community Health Education and Research (CCHERS)
The Center for Hope and Healing
Central West Justice Center
Citizens for Public Schools
Coalition for Effective Public Safety (CEPS)
Coalition for Social Justice Action
Committee for Public Counsel Services
Communities Not Cages
Community Action Agency of Somerville, Inc.
Community Reentry Program Inc.
Congregation Dorshei Tzedek
Criminal Legal Round Table of the UCC
Dignidad/ The Right to Immigration Institute
Disability Law Center, Inc.
Drop LWOP New England
End Mass Incarceration Together (EMIT)
The F8 Foundation
Families and Friends of Individuals with Mental Illness
Family and Community Resources
First Parish in Brookline
First Parish Milton, Unitarian Universalist
The Freedom Unshackled Coalition
GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD Law)
Greater Boston Legal Services CORI & Re-entry Project
Greater Boston Reentry Taskforce
HALT Solitary
HarborCOV
Health in Partnership
High Frequency Academy Ltd., Anthony P. Clay Healing Project
IMPACT Boston
Indivisible Acton Area
Indivisible LAB (Lexington, Arlington, Bedford, & Beyond)
Indivisible Upper Cape
Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center
Justice for Housing, Inc.
Kavod Boston
Law Office of Lisa Newman-Polk
The Life After Prison
Mass NOW
Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
Massachusetts Jobs With Justice
Massachusetts Law Reform Institute
Massachusetts Parole Preparation Partnership
Massachusetts Survivors Coalition
Material Aid and Advocacy Program
Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee (MHLAC)
Nashoba Indivisible
National Association of Social Workers – MA Chapter (NASW-MA)
National Lawyers Guild-Mass. Chapter
The Network/La Red
New Beginnings Reentry Services, Inc.
New Hope Inc.
New England Innocence Project
New Vision Organization, Inc
Northeastern University Domestic Violence Institute
Northeastern University Immigrant Justice Clinic
On The Rise
Out Now
PowerUP Massachusetts
Parole Review For All (PRFA)
Portal to Hope
Prison Policy Initiative
Prisoners’ Rights Clinic, Northeastern University School of Law
Progressive Mass Western Norfolk County
REACH Beyond Domestic Violence
The Real Cost of Prisons Project
Releasing Aging People in Prison
The Remedy Project
Resilience Center of Franklin County
RIA, Inc.
Safe Passage, Inc.
Salasin Project c/o Western MA Training Consortium
The Second Step
Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) North Central MA Chapter
The Social Action Council of UU Wellesley Hills
Social Justice Action Committee of First Church in Jamaica Plain Unitarian Universalist
Solidarity Lowell
Spanish American Center, Inc.
SURJ Boston
Transition House, Inc.
Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
Unitarian Universalist Mass Action
United American Indians of New England
Unlock the Box
Visioning B.E.A.R. Circle Intertribal Coalition
We Are Joint Venture, Inc.
Wildflower Alliance
Women & Incarceration Project, Center for Women’s Health and Human Rights
Young Cape Verdean Club, Inc
YWCA Northeastern Massachusetts
