Press Contact: For all media inquiries, please contact Madison Kaigh, Communications Manager, at mkaigh@TexasCJE.orgor (512) 441-8123, ext. 108.
Death row inmates in Texas are given at least an hour a week outdoors. Hardened criminals inside California's famous San Quentin prison get 10 hours. Yet kids at a Dallas County correctional center for boys went months, sometimes more than a year, without going outdoors more than a few times.
Barring some last-minute Christmas miracle, the city's meet-and-confer agreement with the Austin Police Association is dead. Over the weekend, union membership voted overwhelmingly (1,305 to 110) to reject City Council's overtures for a renegotiation.
The Austin Police Association on Tuesday resoundingly rejected the City Council’s request that it continue its current contract for a few months and return to the negotiating table.
Austin police officers have exactly two weeks to decide whether or not they will keep hashing out a new contract with the city.
Activists said the contract would perpetuate a broken system of citizen oversight and shield cops who engage in misconduct.
Outraged by reports of abuses in Texas’ secure facilities for young offenders, lawmakers in a Senate finance committee called for top-to-bottom reform, and they’re not the only ones.
Amid calls by children's advocacy groups for the state to close its six remaining juvenile lockups, and ongoing investigations into a chronic pattern of sexual assaults at those centers, a legislative committee on Tuesday is expected to open an inquiry into how to divert more teenage offenders into community-based programs rather than state custody.
Back when the county jail here housed maybe three women, jailers didn’t have to worry much about contraband mascara, tampon shortages or raunchy love notes in the intra-inmate mail.
Four Texas civil rights and youth-justice reform groups called Thursday for the state to close all of its remaining juvenile-justice lockups and replacing them with community-based treatment and rehabilitation centers.
A group of juvenile justice reform advocates sent a letter today to Lt. Governor Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus calling for moving youth in state juvenile facilities to local juvenile probation, community programs, and small rehabilitative facilities closer to youth’s families, and urged legislators to develop a plan to close down all state secure juvenile facilities.
