House Bill 150
MEDICAL RELEASE
Description: HB 150 would allow incarcerated people to petition for medical release when they have a substantially diminished ability to function in a correctional facility due to a terminal illness, a chronic and debilitating physical or medical condition or disease, a serious functional or cognitive impairment or deteriorating physical or mental health due to the aging process.
PA Justice Alliance Member Positions & Feedback
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With the abundance of effective life sentences imposed by Pennsylvania’s courts, many people face age-related mental and physical deterioration while in the custody of the Department of Corrections. PA’s current compassionate release mechanisms are so narrow as to be impractical in almost every case.
The ACLU-PA supports HB 150 because it takes a more compassionate and reality-based approach to the conditions in which someone should be eligible for early release. It would also allow extended family members greater access to visits and would provide an incarcerated person's family and legal counsel easier access to their medical records. Humanizing this system to allow for expanded compassionate release would shift limited corrections resources to where they are most needed.
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HB 150 (PN 1386) includes several critical improvements. Mechanisms like medical release provide an amazing opportunity for our communities to benefit from returning credible messengers with lived experience to our communities after incarceration. Across the country and here in Pennsylvania, FAMM advocates alongside incredible incarcerated people who have demonstrated readiness to return to their communities, yet for far too many of these people, there is an absence of opportunities to do so. As our society moves away from a past focus on unnecessarily harsh sentencing and toward embracing mercy as a counterbalance to punishment, Pennsylvania should prioritize enacting mechanisms to allow people to be safely released from incarceration.
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The combination of mass incarceration policies and severe sentencing laws over the past several decades has resulted in a fast-growing number of elderly incarcerated persons requiring extensive medical care. Medical care for people confined by the Department of Corrections costs Pennsylvania taxpayers $400 million annually and every year the Department of Corrections budget creeps higher. Our large population of people sentenced to grow old and die in prison will only drive that cost higher as people continue to age behind bars.
HB 150 will help the Commonwealth save taxpayer money and is a humanitarian measure that will help restore the dignity of people in our Commonwealth in being able to care or their incarcerated loved ones when they are either very sick or dying. It is a pro-family bill and a bill that makes good fiscal sense.
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YSRP supports HB 150 for the simple reason that we know what it looks like for people with life sentences to come home and thrive in their communities, and we support any expansion of this opportunity for more incarcerated individuals and their families. For the past seven years, YSRP has worked closely with former "juvenile lifers" - people who were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole as children - as they were resentenced and reentered society after a series of Supreme Court decisions declared their sentences unconstitutional. Today these individuals are pillars of their community, beloved colleagues and leaders, and walking examples of how powerful second chances can be to neighborhoods and families. This bill would expand opportunities for second chances in common sense and judicious ways, providing more individuals and communities the opportunities we have seen be so beneficial for ours. We respectfully urge you to support HB 150.
