A group of juvenile justice reform advocates hosted a press conference at the Texas Capitol today as part of Youth Justice Action Month calling for a new commitment to juvenile justice reform in Texas.
NJJN’s Texas members, the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition (TCJC), Texas Appleseed and Texans Care for Children were successful in their collaborative efforts to pass legislation focused on dual-status youth, confidentiality of juvenile records, 10 and 11 year olds in the juvenile justice system and the suspension and expulsion of kids in early grades.
Read the rest of this post at the National Juvenile Justice Network.
The FBI released its 2016 Crime in the United States report today and, although there are pockets of increased crime, the data indicates that Texas crime rates have dropped statewide.
States are responding to U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have found mandatory life-without-parole sentences unconstitutional for juveniles except for the rare homicide offender incapable of rehabilitation.
In early 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court told states to retroactively apply its 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life without parole for juveniles convicted of homicide. While many states have acted to resentence offenders to parole-eligible terms, Texas has left it to inmates to apply individually.
Read the rest of this article at the San Antonio Express-News.
During the past 10 years, Texas has made incredible progress both in reducing the number of individuals incarcerated and in creating alternative programs for low-risk offenders.
Read the rest of this op-ed at the San Antonio Express-News.
Texas will shutter more prisons this year than it has in any single year in history, a response to the state's tight budget and shrinking inmate population. In the state's two-year budget, which lawmakers approved in May, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice was ordered to close four prison facilities by Sept. 1.
Boys locked up for sex offenses were left unsupervised at a Dallas County juvenile detention center long enough to engage in sexual acts with each other on at least two occasions.
The cutoff for criminal responsibility in Texas was increased to age 17 in the year 1918. Before that, 9-year-olds could be prosecuted as adults.
On Thursday, though, the Legislature got a step closer to passing legislation that would raise the age to 18 after the House passed House Bill 122 with an 82-62 vote, sending the bill over to the Senate. Representative Gene Wu (D-Houston) called it “the most important change to our criminal justice system that we have done in probably five decades.”
