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12/04/2024 02:28 AM
Pennsylvania State Senate
https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/Legis/CSM/showMemoPublic.cfm?chamber=S&SPick=20230&cosponId=37972
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Senate of Pennsylvania
Session of 2023 - 2024 Regular Session

MEMORANDUM

Posted: December 1, 2022 12:10 PM
From: Senator Sharif Street
To: All Senate members
Subject: Medical Parole
 
In the near future, I will introduce legislation that will create a medical parole program for the men and women incarcerated in our Commonwealth’s correctional facilities.

A person’s fundamental right to be safe and free from disease does not stop at the prison wall. Those rights persist, even for the incarcerated.  The pandemic has enhanced our need for immediate legislative action. And, as we have witnessed in California, outbreaks in correctional facilities don’t only place the lives of those who are confined at great risk – the health emergency can easily spread beyond the prison walls and gravely affect the greater community as a whole.

Currently, the incarcerated who suffer from a serious or terminal illness can petition the court that originally sentenced them and request a transfer to a hospital, hospice location or long-term nursing facility for treatment. This process is lengthy, inefficient, and rarely used.  Replacing this process with a medical parole program would provide the means for humane care for the incarcerated, reduce our prison population which would help mitigate the spread of diseases such as COVID-19, all while saving the Commonwealth millions of dollars in medical care for aging and geriatric prisoners.

My bill creates a new medical parole process authorizing a court that imposes a sentence to modify a term of imprisonment when any of the following apply:
  • The individual has a serious health issue such as a terminal illness, a chronic and debilitating physical or medical condition or disease or deteriorating physical or mental health due to the aging process.
  • The individual is at least 55 years of age who has served the lesser of 25 years in prison or one half of the minimum term imposed for the offense for which they are currently imprisoned.

Prospects for parole would be granted release subject to criteria the Parole Board would deem appropriate. The process would also require notification to both the original sentencing court, the District Attorney, and the Office of the Victim Advocate.

Our consultation with the Department of Corrections identifies an age of 55 years to grant medical parole. This is consistent with our own General Assembly’s Joint State Government Commission on Geriatric and Seriously Ill Inmates, chaired by then Senator Stewart Greenleaf, that identified geriatric as one “who is 50 years or older because [they] have a physiological age 5 to 10 years older than their chronological age.”
 
We have a responsibility as to protect our communities. This includes the men and women who are incarcerated.
 
I hope you will join me in co-sponsoring this important legislation. 




Introduced as SB136