Legislative Bill Update: Progress on Dignity and Freedom Campaign!

An Update from Prisoners’ Legal Services – December 19, 2025

Greetings friends and family of incarcerated people, We hope this email finds you well. Thank you for your interest in legislative advocacy and for all your collaboration in helping to push PLS’ Dignity and Freedom Campaign Bills forward. 

We are very excited to say that the House side of the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security has reported out the Visitation Reform Bill (H.2591), Incarcerated Human Rights, Programming and Education Bill (H.2608), and the Elder/Medical Parole Bill (H.2693) out favorably! And the Senate side of the Committee has reported out the Race Data and Oversight Bill (S.1725) favorably! 

This is a HUGE success, and we would like to thank everyone who has worked so hard on moving these bills forward! This success comes from hard work building coalitions, spreading public education and awareness, building relationships with legislators and staffers, working in close partnership with incarcerated leaders, and all of you making calls, showing up to lobby days, and sending emails. This has been a huge team effort, and we are truly grateful for your collaboration and to the Committee for supporting these bills. 

As a friendly reminder, the committee is responsible for reporting the bill out of the committee in one of three ways, but they may also ask for an extension if needed:

1. Favorably, which means the committee will recommend passage to the next step of the legislative process; 
2. Adversely, which means the committee rejects the bill; 
3. Accompanies a study order, which formally means that a bill may be studied during the recess, but in practice, the bill is dead for the session. 

The Committee may also choose to redraft a bill if they wish to do so, and as you will see below, the Senate side of the Committee did this for a couple of our bills. 

*The Visitation Reform bill (S.1720) and the Elder/Medical Parole bill (S.1722) both accompany a new version of the bill. This means that they have been reported out favorably on the Senate side as well as on the House side, but on the Senate side, they have been redrafted. Below we explain the redrafts that happened on the Senate side for the Senate bills, but please remember that these bills were reported out favorably as originally drafted on the House side of the Committee. 

For the Visitation reform bill on the Senate side, we have not received the official redrafted language as it is pending in the Senate Clerk’s office, but we have been advised that the redraft leaves current visitation law intact except for two main changes (1) it creates a visitation cap of up to 20 approved visitors per incarcerated person and (2) it allows visitors to be approved to see more than one incarcerated person each.  

For the Elder/Medical parole bill, there were two bills filed this session. The one we have been prioritizing is S.1722, An Act relative to elder and medical parole, which reforms the existing medical parole process to ensure access to medical parole, and also creates a new elder parole system, granting all those age 55 and older an opportunity to see the parole board, regardless of their underlying criminal conviction or medical status. We have also supported S.1707, An act to ensure access to medical parole, which reforms the existing medical parole process in all the same ways as S.1722, but does not include elder parole. We do not have the official redrafted bills yet, but our understanding is that the elder/medical parole combined bill (S.1722) was attached to the stand alone medical parole bill (S.1707), and that the medical parole reforms are moving forward with one modification – changing the age for cognitive screenings from age 55 to 70. This redrafted version on the Senate side does not include the elder parole provisions. While we view the elder parole reforms as critical, we are very excited to see medical parole reform move forward in both the House and the Senate, and are excited to advocate for it. We are also excited that the House reported out the elder/medical parole bill in full, including the elder parole provisions.  

What’s Next?

For those who contacted their legislators and the Committee about bills that were reported out favorably, we would suggest following up with a short “thank you” message of appreciation for their work moving these bills forward. The contact information for the members of the Committee can be found here.   The bills that have been reported out favorably and those that have been redrafted will move forward in the legislative process. They will be assigned to a secondary committee for review (usually Ways and Means, but potentially Health Care Financing for the elder/medical parole bill), and if they are reported out favorable from that secondary committee, they will be assigned to a tertiary committee for review before they can go to the House or Senate floor for a vote. At each step, we will need to advocate for the strongest and most complete language to move forward. Mass Legal Services, the Massachusetts Bar Association, and the MA Legislature all have information on the full legislative process in MA if you are interested in learning more about the next steps in the process.   We once again want to thank you all for your support and hard work in pushing the Dignity and Freedom Campaign forward. We hope to continue working in close collaboration with all of you, our partner organizations, and incarcerated people to continue moving these priorities forward and the Commonwealth towards public safety and healing.