The Legislature will meet this Saturday and Sunday, marking the last formal sessions of the 2015-2016 session. These bills passed the Senate and are pending in the House so calls to your state representatives asking them to ask Speaker DeLeo to schedule these bills for a vote during these final two days are needed. Find your […]

Time sensitive: we need YOU to take action on the state budget to ensure successful reentry for folks returning from jails and prisons. Act now!

UPDATE: It passed the Senate at $500,000 instead of $2 million. Not all that we wanted, but a first step. We'll put another alert in early June when the House and Senate have to rectify their budgets with one another.

Senate Budget Amendment S761 is in limbo right now, and we need to make it move. The amendment would allocate $2 million to fund jobs and job training for formerly incarcerated people and court involved youth. The Senate bundled amendments into 3 piles: Yes, No and Held. The good news is it didn't go to the No pile; it's in the held pile.

Please contact your Senators and Senate Leadership and also have your members call to let them know how important this amendment is for formerly incarcerated people and court involved youth to have access to jobs and job training.

Call on your Senator to support $ for job training for folks returning from incarceration as well as finding jobs for court-involved youth. #JobsNotJails

Join the Jobs Not Jails coalition as we take the Statehouse by storm to push to raise the felony larceny threshold. Massachusetts has the 3rd lowest felony threshold. That must change for #cjreform to happen.

We passed the RMV bill! Now here are the nuts and bolts of how to reinstate your license.

Unable to attend the May 7 Jobs Not Jails community gathering? Read up on what we did, and how you can get involved. #JobsNotJails

The Massachusetts legislative session ends July 31, 2016. There's still time to enact criminal justice reform this session. If you are convicted of larceny of items over $250, it is a felony here in Massachusetts. The present $250 threshold is unjust because it captures many low level offenses and makes felons of countless people. Any felony carries a heavy stigma, creates barriers to jobs, and contributes to reliance on public assistance. There also is a 10 year waiting period to seal criminal records for low level offenses because they are classified as felonies. Increasing the threshold to $1500 would help many young people and numerous others who are trapped in poverty and unemployment for what were actually low level offenses. Massachusetts is an outlier with an outdated $250 threshold enacted in 1987. Every state in the U.S. has a higher amount except New Jersey ($200) and Virginia ($200). It's time to raise the felony threshold.

We need your help to stop the courts from putting criminal records online which will have the effect of gutting the benefits of sealing CORI records. We are also asking them to halt the current practice of putting housing records online. Comments are due Wednesday, May 4.

A bill to update the Felony Larceny Threshold has been passed out of committee and is now in the Senate Ways and Means Committee. Let's get this bill passed by contacting the legislators in charge to let them know that we need this change!