Eye On Illinois: Parole expansion effort suffers rare strong defeat on House floor

On Thursday, House Bill 3332 failed 49-51.

That alone was news, as Democrats typically don’t let bills reach the floor without feeling secure that at least 60 of the 78 party members will vote in favor.

With only 100 votes cast, it’s clear that 18 representatives abstained. When the nay total exceeds 40, it’s certain that the opposition was bipartisan. In this case, there were 10 abstentions, two “present” and six excused absences (two of whom are Republicans).

This look at the voting numbers is useful outside the context of the actual legislation as a means of contextualizing Statehouse power dynamics. Although almost 63% of House Democrats backed the bill, that’s not enough; passage requires 77%.

In the past, Democrats operated with smaller overall numbers, which required a greater percentage of members to be on the same page, but decreased the likelihood of intra-party voting blocs undercutting momentum. Yet we need only glance at the current dynamic on Capitol Hill to understand the perils of operating at the slimmest of majorities.

As for the bill itself, the politics are a little less straightforward. Per Capitol News Illinois, HB 3332 would’ve expanded a 2023 law that affected people who were younger than 21 when sentenced to life in prison. That law, applicable to those sentenced on or after June 1, 2019, allows for the possibility of release after serving 40 years of the initial sentence.

The new proposal would’ve extended that option to everyone sentenced to life without possibility of parole before that date, an inmate population stretching to those incarcerated as far back as 1979, when the state abolished parole.

Opposition is easily understood. State Rep. Patrick Windhorst, R-Metropolis, spoke about the finality of sentencing and the burdens placed on victims and their families who choose to oppose parole proceedings. That reasonable position is unchanged from the 2023 law.

But any support of that earlier change would also seemingly be applicable to retroactive expansion. Everyone who turned 21 in 1979 was born in 1958. A 15-year-old sentenced in 1980 would be 60 this year and have already spent 45 years in prison. The bill wouldn’t automatically release such a person, but would make them eligible for a parole hearing. The state could deny parole or even the hearing itself.

Rigid belief in the infallibility of police, prosecutors, judges, juries and sentencing laws from the last millennium allows the inference that everyone serving a life sentence fully deserved that punishment and is nominally human but otherwise irredeemable. That’s not how I see the world, especially as the federal government begins redefining our foundational principle of due process.

Restorative justice and making incarceration effectively corrective aren’t incompatible. The political capital required to invest in those efforts remains insufficient.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.