Legislation

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.

We need to tackle the opioid crisis with public health and epidemic responses to combat the rising number of deaths, and not by further entrenching policing in the problem. We support bills like House Bill 6090 that approach the opioid crisis through a lens of harm reduction.

Criminal penalization through both fines and prison sentences is an outrageously disproportionate response to the vandalization of stone walls.

Relying on police as first responders to drug overdoses and other addiction crises will not improve our public health outlook for opioid addiction, but rather will prop up the system of mass incarceration.