Sponsors (9)
The bill concentrates juvenile treatment and tailors programs for under-18s while improving public data transparency and analytical access — but it risks excluding 18–24-year-olds from youth services, increasing adult system costs, and creating privacy, compliance, and stigma harms from broad data publication.
Children and adolescents under 18 will be held to youth rehabilitation rules and age-appropriate dispositions (including tailored community service and probation for ages 15–18), increasing access to juvenile-focused rehabilitation instead of adult processing.
Residents, parents, and local officials will gain regularly updated, transparent statistics on juvenile arrests, prosecutions, and outcomes, improving public oversight of youth crime trends and prosecutorial/sentencing accountability.
Researchers, policymakers, and educators will get disaggregated data (age, race, sex, offense type, repeat arrests) to design targeted prevention, rehabilitation, and school-based interventions.
People aged roughly 18–24 who previously qualified for youth rehabilitation may lose access to youth-focused services and programs, shifting them out of systems designed for adolescents.
Young adults moved out of the juvenile system could face harsher adult-court sentencing, reduced rehabilitative placements, or worse reentry outcomes compared with juvenile treatment.
Shifting more 18–24-year-olds into adult prosecution may increase burdens and costs on adult corrections, probation, and community supervision systems, creating new local and taxpayer expenses.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Limits D.C. youth-offender status to under 18 and requires the D.C. Attorney General to publish monthly, machine-readable juvenile crime statistics online within 180 days.
Makes three changes to Washington, D.C. law: it renames the act, narrows the statutory definition of "youth offender" so that only people under 18 qualify (removing those aged 18–24 from the youth-offender provisions), and requires the D.C. Attorney General to build and run a public, machine-readable website with monthly juvenile crime statistics. The website must include detailed breakdowns (age, race, sex, offense types, first-time vs. repeat arrests, prosecutorial declinations, charging and sentencing outcomes, and repeat-arrest details), be updated monthly, allow bulk downloads, archive data indefinitely, and avoid publishing personally identifiable juvenile information.
Official title: To limit youth offender status in the District of Columbia to individuals 18 years of age or younger, to direct the Attorney General of the District of Columbia to establish and operate a publicly accessible website containing updated statistics on juvenile crime in the District of Columbia, to amend the District of Columbia Home Rule Act to prohibit the Council of the District of Columbia from enacting changes to existing criminal liability sentences, and for other purposes.
Introduced August 8, 2025 by Byron Donalds · Last progress September 17, 2025