Selected Topics in S2820 (Reform-Shift-Build Act)

These summaries were prepared by Maia Raynor in the Office of Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz.

School to Prison Pipeline

The bill helps dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline by:

  • Providing increased  oversight of school resource officers by mandating the following reporting requirements: school districts must report to the Department of Elementary and Secondary education the number of school resource officers in their district, the number of social and emotional support personnel in the  district, the costs of maintaining SROs to the district, and the number of arrests, citation, and court referrals made by SROs annually within the district
  •  Limiting school districts from sharing students’ personal information with law enforcement
  • Expanding access to record expungement for young people by allowing individuals with more than one charge on their juvenile record to qualify for expungement
  •  Promoting student safety and well-being over criminalization by removing the automatic assignment of School Resource Officers, and requiring that the maintenance of school resource officers must be voted on annually by the relevant school committee 

Justice Reinvestment

The bill promotes the reallocation of funds away from law enforcement-based methods of control and into community-driven invests through the establishment of, and dedicated funding streams for, the Justice Reinvestment Workforce Development Fund. The fund :

  • Will be controlled by community members and with lived experiences of incarceration and over policing community development professionals
  • Requires the calculation and publication of the department of corrections costs per line item, including staffing, programs, health care, etc. The savings accrued to the state each year due to reductions in jail and prison populations are required as well and up to $10 million a year of those savings will be directed into the fund
  • Will make competitive grants to drive economic opportunities in communities most impacted by excessive policing and mass incarceration
  • Will also receive damages from police overtime fraud cases

Racial Profiling

The bill bans racial profiling by law enforcement and requires data collection on all stops, frisks and searches to track, manage and allow for public scrutiny of patterns of profiling as well as provides those stopped with a receipt of the encounter for their own records, and further requires intervention when evidence demonstrates profiling; the data, and subsequent analysis, will be available to the public