State House leaders expect to pass a bill this summer to overhaul how prisoners are treated after release from state corrections facilities, but the dozens of lawmakers who want the legislation to go further called for swift action Monday.
Legislative leaders and Gov. Charlie Baker plan to pass a recidivism bill this session that would offer job training allow more prisoners to work toward early release and provide more substance abuse programs.
That bill has more than enough support to pass, but advocates for more radical changes to the criminal justice system and dozens of lawmakers want to go much further and abolish mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent crimes.
"These policies are a relic. Something tried and disproved and best relegated to a closed chapter in our history," Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz said.
Polls show that doing away with minimums is popular, but several of the state's District Attorneys like Brockton's Timothy Cruz say ending minimums for nonviolent offenders won't make much of a dent on the prison population.
"When you look at our numbers in Massachusetts, you're talking we're 48th or 49th incarceration-weise in the United States of America. I think we're doing it smart in Massachusetts. We're using it as we can to go after traffickers. There's nobody doing time for possession," Cruz said at a hearing of the Legislature's Judiciary Committee Monday.
There's support in the Senate to end mandatories, Gov. Charlie Baker is skeptical and House Speaker Robert DeLeo wants to take more time to look at the issue.
The panel also heard testimony on a bill to allow juvenile offender records to be sealed.
"It's not fair to youth for them to have permanent stigmas for mistakes that they made at an age in which trial and era is expected and at an age when we're trying to find our way into the world and find out where we're supposed to be," Idris Abdullah, from the group Teens Leading the Way, told lawmakers.
