A sponsor of Senate Bill 4 voted against the bill after another senator successfully proposed an amendment. The dispute took place during Senate floor debate on Monday, Feb. 6.
The bill, as written, allowed state court judges to refer juveniles to the Department of Corrections after three strikes. Under the amendment, the juvenile has only one strike.
Lee Schoenbeck is a state senator from Watertown. He introduced an amendment to SB 4, to give judges the option of referring a juvenile to DOC after only one prior offense.
“You’re not helping those kids when you’re just putting them on the ‘prison on the installment plan’ and a life on the installment plan,” he said. “You need to be trying to get intervention earlier, and for some of them, intervention involves cells.”
Schoenbeck said educators have told him they need relief from the misbehavior of juvenile offenders in school.
Sen. David Wheeler served on the legislative interim committee that studied the need for reforms in juvenile justice. The committee held several public hearings during the summer of 2022.
“Every single person that came up front of there— prosecutors, law enforcement, school personnel—no one said we should be locking more kids up,” he said.
Wheeler asked the Senate to vote against the amendment or, failing that, to kill the bill to allow for further study.
“Let’s have some more testimony on the cost and effect of these bills, instead of rewriting them this drastically with no idea what effect it will actually have,” he said.
The bill’s prime sponsor, Sen. Erin Tobin, also served on the interim committee. During Senate debate she said she did not approve of amending the bill in its final stage of legislative approval.
“It’s very important for us to understand why fences were built before we tear them down, and I wish the senator from Watertown—wish I would have saw him more during the committee meetings this summer, because he could have shared more of this with us,” she said.
But Tobin said she would vote yes on the amended bill because the legislation is important and needs to continue forward.
The Senate approved the amendment by a vote of 18-17 and then voted 29-6 to pass the bill as amended.
