HR4922-119

What This Bill Does

The DC CRIMES Act changes District of Columbia youth-offender and juvenile-crime transparency rules. Section 2 amends the Youth Rehabilitation Act of 1985 so youth-offender treatment is limited to people under 18, replacing language that covered people up to age 24 or, in an earlier version, 18 or younger. It removes a related paragraph in section 3(a-1), changes the section 4(a)(2) age range from 15 to 24 to 15 to 18, and makes conforming changes to section 4(b). The practical effect is to remove Youth Rehabilitation Act protections or sentencing treatment for many 18-to-24-year-old defendants who previously could qualify as youth offenders under DC law.

Section 3 requires the DC Attorney General to establish a public website on juvenile crime statistics within 180 days. The website must include annual counts of juveniles arrested; arrests by age, race, and sex; arrests for vandalism, theft, and shoplifting; arrests for crimes of violence; first-offense arrests; arrests of juveniles with prior arrests; number of arrests among previously arrested juveniles; prosecution declination rates; numbers and percentages of sentenced juveniles tried as adults; misdemeanor and felony sentencing outcomes; and sentence-length information. The website must be updated monthly, indefinitely archive historical arrest and prosecution data, provide machine-readable bulk downloads, and exclude personally identifiable juvenile information. The bill also overrides confidentiality restrictions so juvenile case records, social records, and law-enforcement records can be provided to the Attorney General for the website.

Who Benefits and How

DC residents seeking juvenile-crime data, crime victims groups, law enforcement agencies in DC, DC prosecutors, researchers studying juvenile crime, journalists covering DC public safety, public-safety policy advocates, and members of Congress overseeing DC criminal justice benefit because the bill creates public, downloadable data on juvenile arrests, recidivism, declination rates, adult trials, and sentencing outcomes and narrows youth-offender treatment for older defendants.

Who Bears the Burden and How

Young adult defendants ages 18 to 24, young adult defendants ages 19 to 24 under earlier DC law, DC public defenders, criminal justice reform advocates, the DC Attorney General Office, DC juvenile court records staff, DC social-record custodians, DC law-enforcement record custodians, juveniles whose anonymized data will be published, and privacy advocates must comply with reduced youth-offender eligibility, broader data-sharing to the Attorney General, monthly website updates, indefinite archives, machine-readable downloads, and privacy-screening duties.

Key Provisions

• Amends the Youth Rehabilitation Act definition so youth-offender treatment is limited to people under 18.
• Reduces covered age ranges in Youth Rehabilitation Act sentencing provisions from 15-to-24 to 15-to-18.
• Requires the DC Attorney General to establish a juvenile-crime statistics website within 180 days.
• Requires annual arrest data by age, race, sex, petty crimes, crimes of violence, first offenses, prior arrests, and repeat arrests.
• Requires prosecution declination data, adult-trial data, sentencing outcome data, and sentence-length data.
• Requires monthly updates, indefinite historical archives, machine-readable bulk downloads, and exclusion of personally identifiable information.
• Requires juvenile case records, social records, and law-enforcement records to be provided to the Attorney General for the website.