The liberal Texas Criminal Justice Coalition was a major player in the fight, but it was the support of the conservative TPPF that helped make passage possible in a Republican-dominated Legislature.
Read the rest of this article at Texas Monthly.
Last year, the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition reviewed the citizen panel’s recommendations in other cases, including other mental health calls that resulted in cops killing people, and found that police officials mostly ignored them.
“For 19 black women and a socialist to be elected judge in Houston, which is the epicenter of mass incarceration, is not a small deal,” said Jay Jenkins, an attorney with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. “The possibility that we could fix some of the issues that the sitting judges have just proved unwilling or unable to fix is on the horizon.”
Read the rest of this article – and watch an interview with TCJC’s Jay Jenkins – on Vice News.
County commissioners change course on substance abuse treatment funding.
On average, one-third of families reject children who come out as LGBTQ, which puts them at greater risk for homelessness and incarceration.
In Harris County, which is home to Houston and the third-largest county in the United States, Democrats unseated 59 Republican judges—including all 23 district judges, all 13 family court judges, all eight county civil judges and probate judges, and all 15 misdemeanor judges. Of the newly appointed Democrats, an unprecedented 19 are black women, significantly changing the face of a judiciary that had been primarily white.
The Democratic sweep in Harris County Tuesday night could remake one of the largest criminal justice systems in the country.
After losing his bench in a Democratic sweep, Harris County Juvenile Court Judge Glenn Devlin released nearly all of the youthful defendants that appeared in front him on Wednesday morning, simply asking the kids whether they planned to kill anyone before letting them go.
Read the rest of this article at the Houston Chronicle.
“What we ultimately got was a juvenile system where the lawyers get rich … and everybody wins but the kids.” — Jay Jenkins, an attorney from the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, who said Harris County judges and lawyers are part of a “pay-to-play” system.
Every day in Memphis, more than 5,000 people, on average, spend their hours locked up inside one of four Shelby County facilities, according to figures provided by county officials. More than half are pretrial detainees, held behind bars before being convicted of any crime.
Read the rest of this article at Memphis Commercial Appeal.
One-size-fits-all justice systems fail lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people, who experience worse outcomes and are over-represented in every part of the justice system, according to a new study released by the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition.
Read the rest of this post at The Crime Report.
An analysis of state and county data by The Texas Tribune shows that the county’s three juvenile district courts — led by Republican Judges Glenn Devlin, John Phillips, and Michael Schneider — have been assigning an extraordinary number of cases to a handful of private lawyers.
The Texas Criminal Justice Coalition released the third report in its “One Size FAILS All” report series. The report, Out of Sight: LGBTQ Youth and Adults in Texas Justice Systems, explores how the Lone Star State often fails to adequately address the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) Texans, and instead frequently moves them into the youth and adult justice systems at higher rates than people in the non-LGBTQ community.
Harris County officials failed to retain an unknown number of emails over a one-year period that could be pertinent in the hotly contested lawsuit over its bail practices, according to documents made public Monday.
Read the rest of this article at the Houston Chronicle.
After discovering the convict cemetery in March, the city appointed a panel of stakeholders. Now it’s ignoring their recommendation.
Read the rest of this article at Texas Monthly.
According to the Travis County Plan for Substance Use Disorders, there are more than 85,000 youth and adults who abuse alcohol or illicit drugs every year in the county.
The Dallas County district attorney, Faith Johnson, often reminds voters that she recently won a rare murder conviction against a white police officer who shot into a car full of teenagers, killing a black 15-year-old boy.
Two Harris County judges accounted for more than one-fifth of all children sent to the state’s juvenile prisons last year, driving up the county’s Texas Juvenile Justice Department commitments even as those figures fall in the rest of the state.
Read the rest of this article at the Houston Chronicle.
Two years ago, Kim Ogg was elected district attorney of Harris County. One of her campaign promises was to implement a diversion program for first time offenders charged with low-level marijuana possession. These are cases where a person gets arrested for “two ounces or less” of marijuana.
Read the rest of this op-ed at the Houston Chronicle.
The flaws in the state’s justice system cycle thousands of people through jails with little effort to address the roots of their behavior, says the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition.
Read the rest of this post at The Crime Report.