Advocates for making changes to New York's criminal justice system are calling for Albany lawmakers to pass a sweeping package of provisions in the coming year dealing with measures that range from housing to mental health and drug treatment programs.

The proposals also include funding for anti-violence programs, pre-trial services and support for a measure that would seal criminal records.

All told, the measures being sought by more than 85 advocacy organizations would amount to a re-orientation in how the state's criminal justice system functions moving forward. It also comes after a campaign season in which public safety themes dominated the debate and as Republicans have sought changes to a law that largely ended cash bail requirements for many charges.

But Democrats will remain the majority party in both chambers of the state Legislature and, with Gov. Kathy Hochul's election, will hold the governor's office for the next four years.

The measures backed the groups, which include support from VOICE Buffalo, The New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault, Westchester for Change, the Long Island Social Justice Action Network, United Voices of Cortland, the New York Civil Liberties Union, also has the backing of Democratic state Sen. Julia Salazar.

The organizations outlined their push ahead of the new legislative session in a letter to Hochul and the top Democratic leaders in the Legislature, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.

"Instead of continuing to rely on punishment and retribution, we must invest in communities by enacting a moral budget that funds housing, public health, education, employment opportunities, decarceration, and meaningful off-ramps from the criminal legal system," the groups wrote in the letter.

Salazar is chair of the Senate Crime Victims, Crime and Correction Committee.

"We know the safest communities have the greatest resources, not the highest arrest and incarceration rates. In the Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods of my district alone, which includes neighborhoods with some of the highest arrest rates in the city and others with low crime and arrest rates, this is crystal clear," she said. "While the opposing party is obsessed with locking up more Black and brown people as a political strategy, we as lawmakers must be focused on actually delivering public safety. That means, at a minimum, making the investments and policy reforms laid out in this letter. I thank these organizations for putting forward these recommendations and I know my colleagues and I will take them seriously as we look forward to state budget negotiations in the months ahead.”

The groups are calling for housing policies such as $1 billion for a voucher access program and a statewide expansion of low-threshold housing to aid people who are homeless and struggling with mental health. A proposed law that would create regional teams to oversee a public health-based response to mental health crises is being called for as well, a measure knnown as Daniel's Law.

Supervised injection sites, an approach meant to curtail the record spike in overdose deaths, has the backing of the organizations, as does the decriminalization of buprenorphine and the expansion of crisis intervention centers.

Advocates want to address pre-trial services with more funding and provide more money to programs that offer alternatives to incarceration and re-entry services.

Proposals like the Clean Slate Act are meant to make it easier for people to obtain employment after being incarcerated; the measure has struggled in multiple sessions to get past lawmakers.