Toni Berrios. This is what she calls being responsive to constituents.

Running for her political life, Toni Berrios is trying to to recreate herself into a progressive.

But with a 12 year record to run on, that is hard to do.

Twelve years of pension underfunding. Twelve years of voting for pension theft.

Twelve years of bowing to her patrons, Mike Madigan and Big Daddy Berrios.

Back in November my wife Anne wrote Representative concerning SB1342. It was a bill that would require mandatory sentencing and add an estimated 4,000 people to the state’s enormous prison population.

Anne wrote to her State Representative to express her opposition to the bill.

Please stand strong against new mandatory minimums, because mandatory minimums do not deter gun violence. SB1342 would increase the penalty for unlawful use of a weapon to 3 years. This new mandatory minimum would only serve to crowd our prisons and drive up our budgets without increasing public safety.

The Illinois Department of Corrections estimates that SB1342 will add nearly 4,000 inmates to the already-swollen prison population at a cost of nearly 1 billion dollars over 10 years. Yet mandatory minimums have not proven effective. When Florida enacted a 3 year mandatory minimum sentence for certain gun crimes, a study published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Crimonology found that it “did not have a measurable deterrent effect on violent crime.”

Other states have been realized that mandatory minimums are the wrong way to go. Pennsylvania State Senator Stewart Greenleaf, Republican Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently opposed a proposed two-year mandatory minimum sentence for anyone convicted of illegally possessing a firearm in Philadelphia: “I introduced most of the mandatory sentences in Pennsylvania over the years. We thought we would get really tough on crime, and reduce violent crime and have lower recidivism and things like that. Well, just the opposite happened . . . All we did was fill our prisons up and violent crime continued to go up.”

This bill would be a huge step backward for Illinois. Please stand strong against any new mandatory minimums in Illinois, including SB1342, and tell your colleagues to do the same.

Five months later and after early voting has already begun, 39th State Representative Toni Berrios got around to responding to Anne’s letter.

Thank you for reaching out to me about Senate Bill 1342. Constituent input is important to me when voting in Springfield.  As the legislative session moves forward, I’ll keep you informed on the bill’s progress through the legislative process. Again, thank you for contacting my office. Please let me know if my office can be of service to you.

Was she for SB1342? Against it? Who knows? It seems Representative Berrios does not know what happened to SB1342.

Someone should let Representative Berrios know that SB1342 failed to be called for a vote back on December 3rd, the last day of the last session of the last General Assembly.

And so it died.

I was corrected. It is still alive and may be revisited now that the General Assembly has reconvened.