Legislation

At a meeting of a state legislative commission designed to examine the impact of the criminalization of sex work, we testified in favor of decriminalization of these offenses and provided a number of other policy recommendations on the topic.

We urged rejection of the sections of this bill which put in place criminal records checks that could broadly disqualify justice-involved individuals seeking to become Medicaid personal care attendants or high-risk providers.

Noting that “life without parole” sentencing robs incarcerated individuals of any rehabilitative hope, is a type of sentencing with a racially discriminatory impact, and is a wasteful use of public resources, we supported legislation to eliminate this criminal sentence in Rhode Island.

We supported this legislation which would have repealed the state "civil death" statute as a matter of cleaning up this unjust and unconstitutional law from the books.

In an important piece of criminal justice reform legislation, this bill would have slightly redefined in two ways the definitions of “felony” and “misdemeanor” in Rhode Island law.

We supported legislation which would have generally prohibited the detention of a juvenile under the age of 14 at the Rhode Island Training School.

We supported legislation which would have formally codified an ongoing program in our state Department of Corrections which provides medicated assisted treatment for individuals who are incarcerated.

We opposed legislation which would have inappropriately imposed a broad criminal record check requirement on individuals who seek to be engaged in the business-side of the medical marijuana industry, as well as on patients who may need this medicine to manage a health condition.

Though we support recreational marijuana legalization, we raised a number of concerns about this bill and called for amendments to strengthen the language.