Legislation

This bill seeks to ban the use of police deceptive interrogation tactics on children. No one, including children, should be imprisoned because police coerced them into a false confession.

The ACLU-CT is dedicated to ending mass incarceration. That effort includes examining all aspects of the criminal and civil legal systems, including fees and fines. Fines and fees in the criminal justice system are a practice that traps people into cycles of debt.

No animal should be abused or harmed for human entertainment. But rather than create a new misdemeanor, members of the Enviroment Committee should consider enforcement mechanisms that focus on penalizing the corporations and businesses behind the traveling animal acts.

One of the biggest injustices faced by people living with a criminal record are the myriad of collateral consequences flowing from that criminal record. By mandating background checks for security officer licenses, SB 968 creates another collateral consequence.

Contact between community members and police can have tragic consequences for people experiencing mental health crises. We have significant concerns with Senate Bill 972 because of its failure to reduce the role of policing in our communities.

At the ACLU-CT, we believe in the complete decriminalization of cannabis—from cultivation to sale and delivery to possession and use. House Bill 5434 is an attempt to repeal key aspects of cannabis legalization in Connecticut.

Today, there is widespread recognition that disordered substance use is an illness to be treated and not a criminal problem to be punished. However, CT and the rest of the U.S. insist on addressing addiction, a public health problem, through criminal law for decades.

School resource officers are police, just as much as any other law enforcement staff across the state, and their in-school policing has much of the same effects on school communities as municipal and state policing have on the broader community.

Connecticut is stronger and safer when a person who is formerly incarcerated has a fair chance of accessing a job, housing, and education. Yet, people who are formally incarcerated are nearly ten times more likely to be homeless than any other members of the public.