Sonia Chang-Díaz is a former public school teacher and the first Latina and Asian-American to serve in the Massachusetts State Senate — and she’s spent her career fighting for and winning the bold change that working families need. Sonia’s mom was a social worker. Her dad came to America with $50 in his pocket and became NASA’s first Latino astronaut. Now she’s building a movement to tackle our state’s biggest challenges and restore Massachusetts’ promise to all families.
It’s never been more clear that our policing and criminal legal systems are broken in Massachusetts and across our country. Decades of shortsighted criminal justice policies produced a costly, ineffective, and racist mess — targeting and incarcerating people of color while failing to provide real public safety. Thanks to the resilient efforts of Black and brown organizers, we’ve won some major legislative victories in the fight for reform. Now we need a Governor to implement and build on them, to ensure accountability, full implementation of our reforms, and continue the fight for justice.
Sonia knows that our policing and criminal legal systems are in urgent need of reform. Excessive use of force and police misconduct still occur far too often, and stark racial disparities continue in policing and incarceration. While our state’s incarceration rate is lower than most of the rest of the country, it’s still more than double that of countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, or France and more than three times what it was in Massachusetts in the 1970s. Massachusetts prisons have also exhibited a pattern of abusing and mistreating prisoners.
Sonia’s spent years fighting to reform our broken policing and criminal justice systems and won major reforms. As Governor, she’ll fully implement and build on the change she’s spent over a decade fighting for and passing into law, including:
Fully implementing the nation-leading police reform package passed in 2020, including critical measures that increased accountability and civilian oversight. The law, which Sonia championed and helped negotiate to the finish line, established a system for investigating and decertifying officers and set boundaries on police use of force — including banning chokeholds, limiting no-knock warrants, creating affirmative duties to intervene and de-escalate, banning racial profiling, and giving civilians and civil rights reformers real power on the police oversight board.
Fully implementing Criminal Justice Reform legislation passed in 2018, which included repeals of racist mandatory minimum sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenses that Sonia championed. As Governor, Sonia will ensure all aspects of the law are effectively implemented, including adopting critical reforms of our state prison system, improving reentry programs, and prioritizing criminal justice data collection and reporting to promote transparency and accountability.
Passing the Justice Reinvestment Act, which calculates the savings from sentencing reforms and reinvests those funds into community education and workforce development programs, to help address underlying causes of crime and promote long-term community safety. She’ll also continue to champion tens of millions of dollars in the state budget for community reinvestments, youth violence prevention programming, and supports for community members returning from incarceration.
Installing new leadership at the DOC, committed to an overhaul of the departments culture and transparency — to ensure the legal, civil, and human rights of incarcerated individuals and their families are respected. Sonia will also push to establish strong independent oversight of the corrections system, to last past her governorship.
As Governor, Sonia will also invest state dollars in programs that promote long-term community safety and partner with leaders in communities of color to identify forward-looking priorities to reform our criminal legal system and ensure community safety.