Advocates feel Connecticut and the nation can enact legal system reforms in 2025, ranging from ways to more humanely treat incarcerated people to increasing investments in communities, rather than in the criminal justice system.
In Connecticut, some advocates pushed for reforms to parole so it is not as punitive.
Wanda Bertram, communications strategist for the Prison Policy Initiative, said while similar reforms passed in New York, they have stalled in Connecticut.
“There hasn’t been much movement on that in Connecticut,” Bertram acknowledged. “I think that’s less because these aren’t winnable reforms, it’s more because legislators don’t see criminal justice consistently as a priority.”
Overall, she feels criminal justice not being a priority for lawmakers is why reforms do not often pass in statehouses. Connecticut’s 2024 legislative session ended without major criminal justice reforms passed. One of the few related bills to pass was House Bill 5524, which allocates $25 million to youth justice centers.
While many reforms were goals from previous years, Bertram noted they are reforms with long-term benefits. One is restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions who have been released from prison. Connecticut is one of several states to restore the right in recent years but she noted some of this year’s defeats can affect achieving next year’s goals.
“The nation’s rightward turn and its election of Donald Trump and far-right congresspeople is somewhat of a defeat in and of itself,” Bertram observed. “Because the ideologies that are being promulgated by those new electeds are explicitly violent with, for example, new support for the death penalty.”
Despite this and other defeats from this year, she emphasized 2024 brought plenty of positives, including Massachusetts being the first state to ban life without parole for people younger than 21, the Federal Communications Commission establishing new phone rates for prisons, and several states providing funding for public defenders.
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