Massachusetts Group Home Bills Would Criminalize Disability
Massachusetts has two bills in conference committee – H.4767 (Massachusetts Legislature, https://malegislature.gov/Bills/194/H4767) and S.3184 (Massachusetts Legislature, https://malegislature.gov/Bills/194/S3184) – that would extend criminal assault provisions to healthcare workers in group homes. The House version allows felony charges. The Senate version, as introduced, treated assaults as misdemeanors but included a mechanism for immediate, warrantless arrests in the patient's home. Senate amendments added a one-year pause on arrests for patients with mental or behavioral health diagnoses while the state assesses impact, but advocates say the pause is insufficient and want group homes removed from the legislation entirely (WBUR Cognoscenti, September 21, 2026, https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2026/09/21/massachusetts-healthcare-worker-protection-bill-susan-senator-maura-sullivan).
I'm autistic. I know what these bills would do.
The framing problem
The bills are called healthcare worker protection acts. That framing positions residents – many of whom are autistic or have intellectual and developmental disabilities – as threats to staff. It assumes that behaviors staff find difficult or dangerous are volitional acts deserving criminal sanction, rather than communication from people who have no other way to signal distress, pain, overstimulation, or trauma.
The authors of the WBUR piece, Susan Senator and Maura Sullivan, describe their adult sons, both of whom have profound autism. Their sons' behaviors – the kind that might be classified as assault under these bills – are communication, not crimes. A meltdown triggered by sensory overload isn't an attack. A physical reaction to being restrained isn't assault. Autistic people in crisis aren't criminals.
Extending criminal assault statutes into group homes redefines disability as deviance.
What the one-year pause doesn't fix
The Senate amendments (S3171) prioritize de-escalation and pause arrests for up to one year while the Executive Office of Health and Human Services evaluates the policy's impact. That sounds reasonable until you realize what it concedes: the default position is still criminalization, just delayed.
A one-year assessment period doesn't change the fact that after that year, autistic residents can be arrested in their own homes for behaviors linked to their disability. It doesn't prevent the initial classification of those behaviors as crimes. It doesn't address the trauma of having police show up to your group home because a staff member filed charges. And it doesn't protect people whose behaviors don't fall neatly into a diagnosed category or whose diagnosis isn't recognized by the state's assessment process.
What happens in year two? If the assessment finds that arrests worked – meaning fewer reported incidents, which could just mean staff stopped reporting or residents were too afraid to react – does the pause lift and criminalization proceed? If the assessment finds harm, does the legislature repeal the provisions, or does it just extend the pause and call that progress?
The real problem isn't the residents
Group homes are understaffed, underfunded, and often poorly managed. Staff turnover is high because the work is hard, the pay is low, and training is minimal. When a resident has a crisis, the response depends entirely on whether the staff member present has the skills, support, and time to de-escalate – and most don't.
Criminalizing residents doesn't fix any of that. It just shifts the cost of systemic failure onto people who can't defend themselves in court, can't advocate for policy changes, and can't leave the homes where they're now subject to arrest.
If Massachusetts wants to protect healthcare workers, fund the homes properly. Increase staff ratios. Require trauma-informed care training. Pay wages that retain experienced staff instead of cycling through undertrained temps. Build accountability systems for when staff use excessive force, neglect residents, or escalate situations that didn't need to escalate.
Arresting autistic people for being autistic isn't worker protection. It's carceral logic applied to healthcare.
Why this matters beyond Massachusetts
These bills set a precedent. If Massachusetts criminalizes disability-linked behaviors in group homes, other states will follow. The logic is too convenient: frame vulnerable people as threats, extend existing criminal statutes to cover them, and call it safety.
I'm autistic. I've never lived in a group home, but I know people who have. I know what happens when staff don't understand autism, when a meltdown gets classified as aggression and the response is restraint instead of de-escalation.
Criminalizing those moments doesn't make anyone safer. It makes autistic people more vulnerable – to arrest, to incarceration, to trauma, and to the belief that their existence is a problem to be managed with handcuffs instead of support.
What should happen instead
Remove group homes from the legislation. If the goal is protecting healthcare workers, address it in hospitals, nursing homes, and settings where patient-staff dynamics are genuinely asymmetric. Group homes are residents' homes. Extending criminal liability into people's homes for behaviors linked to their disability is state-sanctioned abuse dressed up as policy.
The one-year pause isn't enough. Conference committee should strip the group home provisions entirely, or advocates should kill the bills and start over with legislation that actually funds care instead of funding prosecution.
I don't have faith that will happen. Carceral solutions are cheaper in the short term than systemic fixes, and legislatures love short-term savings. But the cost shows up later – in trauma, in institutionalization, in autistic people learning that their distress is criminal and their communication is evidence.
Massachusetts can do better. The question is whether it will.
