News & Commentary

The 2025 legislative session has come to a close, and it was certainly a trying session for all. In a session where roughly 3,800 bills were introduced, only about 380 bills were passed, rounding up to a passing rate of about ten percent.

My name is Terri Ricks, I am a resident of Hartford and a Smart Justice Leader with the ACLU of Connecticut. I am a person who has been directly impacted by homelessness due to housing challenges. I am an individual who is here speaking and fighting for change even when I lived for three-and-a-half years in a hotel due to housing challenges. Every day has been a fight, but nothing has been a fight as tough as being freed from prison in 2005. After completing changing my life, housing has consistently been a problem that even eludes me to this day.

Housing is the most critical and fundamental part of reentry, but far too often the most difficult to achieve. The more I see it the more I understand why people go back to jail. HB 6948 is about giving people a fair opportunity to find a safe place to live.

In order to better understand how HB 5242, an Act Concerning the Collateral Consequences of Criminal Records on Housing, helps people to get access to housing, digital content strategist Rachel Moon sat down with Jess Zaccagnino, our policy counsel, to discuss what exactly this bill does.

Welcome to 2024. We have a lot to do during this legislative session and we’ll need your help to step up to protect the civil rights of everyone in our communities. Are you ready to join us?

Together with the national ACLU and our partners, we sued the Trump Administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) over its attempt to gut fair housing protections under the Fair Housing Act. This story is part of our 2020 newsletter, which looks back at the past year.