SB 888: Relating to the Criminal Justice System
Sponsor: Sen. Nick Schroer
OPPOSE
Requires major structural changes
SB 888 is a large criminal-justice package, not a narrow single-purpose bill. It contains some provisions conservatives would like on the merits, including limits on restraining children in juvenile court and a parent-friendly safe harbor for letting children engage in reasonable independent activities. But it also expands state reporting and biometric collection, widens juvenile information sharing inside the justice system, authorizes a new optional up to 1% county sales tax, adds more agency discretion and offender fees, and restructures parole and conditional-release rules.
What Does This Bill Do?
- Surveillance & Data Collection Expansion: Requires expanded juvenile fingerprinting and allows photos and "other unique biometric identification" to be collected and made available to criminal-justice agencies through MULES.
- New Optional Sales Tax & Fees: Authorizes a voter-approved sales tax of up to 1% for regional juvenile detention facilities, and allows probation and parole to charge up to $60 per month in supervision fees.
- Broad Agency Rulemaking: Gives the parole board broad rulemaking authority over parole eligibility, hearings, and conditions, moving substantial power away from clear statutory rules and toward administrators.
Special Note on §568.045 & Parental Medical Decision-Making
The bill leaves out critical protections for families.
Several grassroots Missourians have raised concerns about §568.045 (first-degree child endangerment). While the bill raises the age limit to 18, it still broadly criminalizes knowingly creating "a substantial risk to the life, body, or health of a child."
The Core Issue: The bill provides no explicit protection for parents who decline medical intervention for religious, moral, or personal reasons. This leaves parents entirely dependent on prosecutorial discretion rather than on clear, objective guardrails in the statute. The risk is not necessarily how today's officials say they would use the law—the risk is what future officials could argue the statute allows.
Constitutional or Critical Context
The legal umbrella of this bill is the "criminal justice system," but that umbrella is doing a lot of work. The measure bundles entirely separate policy areas: criminal-history/biometric reporting, juvenile certification and records, public access to juvenile proceedings, detention-facility construction/financing, a local sales-tax authorization, parole/supervision-fee policy, and multiple crime-penalty rewrites. That makes the bill a borderline-to-serious fair-notice problem and a likely violation of the spirit of the single-subject discipline. Furthermore, the expansion of centralized biometric justice data raises significant due process and surveillance-creep concerns.
Red Flags & Recommended Amendments
No Explicit Parental Medical-Choice Safeguard
The broad "health" language in §568.045 lacks protection for parents making judgment-based medical decisions, leaving families vulnerable to overreaching prosecutors.
Single-Subject & Surveillance Issues
The bill packages taxes, state surveillance infrastructure, parole, and penalty changes into a single omnibus bill while directly expanding the use of "unique biometric identification."
Act for Missouri Recommendation:
OPPOSE. There are provisions here that could deserve support on their own, especially the juvenile-restraint limits and the parental safe harbor for reasonable independent activities. But the bill, as a whole, is an omnibus-style criminal-justice package that expands government, increases surveillance/reporting infrastructure, authorizes a new sales-tax mechanism, and carries a materially uncertain fiscal impact. It would require major structural changes—breaking it up into separate bills—not small amendments, to become supportable.