Black and Latino state lawmakers on Friday slammed Gov. Charlie Baker’s last-minute move linking free calls for those in prisons and jails with the adoption of tougher pre-trial guidelines for those charged with sexual assault or domestic violence. The Black and Latino caucus warned the move could have disproportionate impacts on communities of color.
In this year’s state budget, the House and Senate passed language that would make phone calls free for those incarcerated in Massachusetts prisons and jails. Baker on Thursday sent that section back to lawmakers with an amendment adding on pieces of a pre-trial detention bill he’s been pressing them to pass, essentially creating a threat that he could veto the no-cost calls language unless the Legislature goes along with his ideas.
Eliminating charges for prison and jail calls was a priority this session for the Massachusetts Black and Latino Legislative Caucus, whose members said at a press conference that they were disappointed by Baker’s move.
“The truth of the matter is, our governor is not recognizing the victimization that our communities experience day in and day out by being overpoliced,” Rep. Brandy Fluker Oakley, a Mattapan Democrat, said. “Furthermore, it is abhorrent and an abomination that he would even try to tie this to no-cost calls when it is the lifeline that our families are able to connect with those on the outside and data and statistics and study after study shows that when there is family contact, it reduces recidivism.”
Baker’s bill aims to make it easier for courts to hold people before a trial if they are deemed a danger to the public, and among other measures it would expand the list of offenses that could trigger a dangerousness hearing.
Rep. Chynah Tyler, a Roxbury Democrat who chairs the caucus, said 48 percent of Suffolk County’s population is Black or brown, but 90 percent of the cases involving dangerousness hearings — where prosecutors can request that someone be incarcerated before at trial — involve people of color.
“The impacts on communities of color are staggering, and it simply sounds like a racist system to me,” she said.
Baker, in his final year and office, has been advocating for his broader dangerousness bill alongside survivors of domestic and sexual violence, who in a series of roundtables have delivered emotional testimony about their experiences and the challenges they faced interacting with the courts.
Baker said Thursday that many of those survivors “feel they've been let down and in some cases abandoned by the commonwealth.”
Baker wrote in a letter to lawmakers that he hopes they will agree to adopt "key provisions" of his bill, rather than rejecting them and again passing the free calls legislation.
"Providing free phone calls, a benefit our state government provides to no one else, to inmates while dismissing the pleas of victims of crime is contrary to the traditions of, and frankly beneath the dignity of, the Massachusetts Legislature," he wrote.
The governor and lawmakers have been at odds over the bill since the Judiciary Committee last Friday killed it by including it in a dead-end study order. The friction comes in the final days of formal legislative sessions for this two-year term, with Sunday serving as the deadline to pass major bills.
House Speaker Ronald Mariano said Friday that “it remains to be seen” how lawmakers will tackle Baker’s amendment.
“I’m not sure how much flexibility we have in how we can deal with that, so we’ll have the attorneys look at it and see if there’s some ways to deal with it,” Mariano said.
