Press Contact: For all media inquiries, please contact Madison Kaigh, Communications Manager, at mkaigh@TexasCJE.orgor (512) 441-8123, ext. 108.
The Houston Police Department plans to join Harris County’s cite-and-release program, fulfilling advocates’ long-running request to implement a policy they say keeps low-level offenders out of jail and saves law enforcement resources for more serious threats.
The discussion around criminal justice reform in Harris County is complex and often heated. Stakeholders disagree on what that change should look like and how to go about it. The issue of how to handle repeat offenders is a major sticking point. According to the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, more than 70,000 people return to the community from Texas prisons each year.
It’s the last day of June and 03 Greedo is on the other end of the phone speaking from inside a sweatbox Texas state prison where he’s spent the last two years. When the Los Angeles street rap seer wakes up tomorrow on the first day of July, he’ll have lost all of his inmate privileges.
I got started in youth advocacy in the area of police brutality around the death of Trayvon Martin. My parents had to sit my brother and me down and have that conversation of how, as a Black family and as a Black woman with a Black brother, we have to interact with the world differently - especially with police officers.
Read the rest of this article from the National Juvenile Justice Network.
Since November, eight defendants fresh out of jail on bond have walked into state District Judge Ramona Franklin’s court and been sent right back to jail. Instead of standing for a routine court hearing in a first step in their criminal court cases, they ended up back in sheriff’s custody after Franklin revoked their bail and ordered them back behind bars, sometimes with no lawyer present for the defendant.
As the national movement around justice system transformation continues to swell, this month the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition (TCJC) released two new data dashboards that make justice system information accessible to the public.
As it's commonly told, in 1920, the 19th amendment granted American women the ability to vote. But the reality is more complicated. In fact, the amendment was ratified in part because of the exclusionary rhetoric behind it; the women’s suffrage movement was undergirded by anti-Blackness and racism.
The Texas Criminal Court Data Dashboard - a project of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, January Advisors, Microsoft, and Norflet Progress Fund - has expanded its dataset. It now includes court data from Harris, Dallas, Bexar and Travis Counties, and statewide data from the Office of Court Administration going back 10 years. This lets one do a lot of work.
In February 2018, construction for the Fort Bend Independent School District's new technology building was underway. After laying a drainage pipe, workers noticed something buried in the dirt — a bone. Archaeologists rushed to the scene, where they discovered a total of 95 bodies which became collectively known as the Sugar Land 95.
The novel SARS-CoV-2 has roared through the American landscape leaving physical, emotional, and economic devastation in its wake. By early July, known infections in this country exceeded 3 million, while deaths topped 135,000. Home to just over 4 percent of the global population, the United States accounts for more than a quarter of all fatalities from Covid-19, the disease produced by the coronavirus.
