Bucks County Beacon: “Andre Carroll started representing Philadelphia’s 201st district in the Pennsylvania General Assembly on September 20, 2024, following a special election to fill a seat vacated by state Rep. Stephen Kinsey. In the 18 months since he took office, the 35-year-old Democratic state lawmaker has wasted no time proposing changes he believes would have made a difference in his own life and in the lives of his fellow Pennsylvanians.

Carroll maintains that electing people with lived experience in poverty, the criminal justice system and public education is important to assuring that the commonwealth makes wise choices and favorably impacts the lives of everyday people.

A primary focus for Carroll is the Department of Corrections.

‘Recognizing that a person like myself, who had experience, who had trauma as a kid, having my father be incarcerated the first 20 years of my life. I’ve always felt compelled and interested in how we reform the criminal justice system.’….

Saleem Holbrook, faculty member at U. Penn Law School and Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, still has to ask permission to go to Geneva for human rights conferences. And if Carroll and his dozens of co-sponsors don’t succeed in changing the state parole system – he’ll be asking permission for the rest of his life. Only a handful of states – Pennsylvania is one of them – sentence people to parole for the rest of their lives.”

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