Sponsors (9)
The bill focuses juvenile rehabilitative resources and legal protections on those 18 and under while increasing transparency through centralized, machine-readable juvenile justice data and preserving existing D.C. sentences—trading expanded oversight and targeted services for younger teens against reduced protections for 19–24-year-olds and new privacy, administrative, and local-governance risks.
Children and teens 18 and younger will have a clearer youth-offender status, allowing juvenile programs and courts to concentrate rehabilitative services and age-appropriate interventions on adolescents.
Parents, families, researchers, community organizations, and defense attorneys gain access to regularly updated, machine-readable juvenile arrest, charging, and outcome data, improving oversight, research, and evidence-based policymaking to reduce youth crime.
D.C. residents, prosecutors, and crime victims retain existing criminal sentences as of enactment, providing short-term legal certainty and reducing immediate ambiguity about applicable punishments.
Young adults aged 19–24 will lose youth-offender status and related rehabilitative sentencing and program access, exposing them to harsher adult penalties, reduced community-based options, and likely higher incarceration and system costs.
Public centralization and release of juvenile demographic and charging data increases risks of re-identification, profiling, and stigmatization—particularly for racial and ethnic minority youth and other vulnerable groups.
Freezing existing D.C. sentences and removing local authority limits the D.C. Council's ability to adopt evidence-based or more lenient sentencing reforms, potentially locking in outdated or overly harsh penalties for residents and defendants.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Narrows who qualifies as a "youth offender" in D.C. from people up to age 24 to people 18 and younger, changes related age ranges for community service and sentencing rules, and prevents the D.C. Council from altering any criminal sentence that exists on the act's enactment date. It also requires the D.C. Attorney General to build and operate a public, machine-readable website with monthly, archived juvenile crime statistics and to collect juvenile case, social, and law enforcement records for that purpose. The website must publish counts and breakdowns (age, race, sex), categories of offenses (including petty crimes and violent crimes), first- vs. repeat-offense rates, declination rates, numbers tried as adults, prosecution outcomes, and lengths of time served — without disclosing any juvenile personally identifiable information. The Attorney General must launch the site within 180 days of enactment; affected agencies and record holders must provide records to support the database.
Introduced August 8, 2025 by Byron Donalds · Last progress September 17, 2025