This bill narrows who qualifies as a “youth offender” in the District of Columbia by replacing the existing cutoff of 24 years of age or younger with a limit of under 18. It makes conforming changes to program eligibility and community-service language in the District’s Youth Rehabilitation Act and removes a paragraph from the Act’s sentencing subsection, altering existing statutory sentencing provisions.
The bill also directs the Attorney General of the District of Columbia to build and operate a publicly accessible website with detailed juvenile-arrest and prosecution statistics, requires monthly updates, mandates indefinite archiving and machine-readable bulk downloads, and overrides certain confidentiality provisions to allow the Attorney General access to juvenile case, social, and law enforcement records for that purpose. The website must not include personally identifiable information and must go live within 180 days of enactment.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill reduces the age range covered by the Youth Rehabilitation Act to persons under 18, deletes statutory references to 18–24-year-olds in planning and community-service provisions, and edits subsection 4(b) of that Act by removing a paragraph and renumbering. Separately, it creates a new statutory duty for the D.C. Attorney General to publish specified juvenile crime statistics online, with monthly updates, archival access, and machine-readable downloads.
Who It Affects
Young people aged 18–24 who previously fell within D.C.’s youth-offender framework and programs; the Office of the Attorney General, which must build and operate the website and collect data; family court clerks, juvenile services, and D.C. law enforcement agencies, which must supply data; researchers, journalists, and policymakers who will consume the published data.
Why It Matters
The change shifts a significant cohort of young adults out of the statutory youth-offender category and into the adult system for purposes of statutory treatment and planning. At the same time, the government gains a new transparency tool that centralizes juvenile-arrest and sentencing metrics—but does so by carving out confidentiality rules to permit data sharing with the Attorney General.
More articles like this one.
A weekly email with all the latest developments on this topic.
What This Bill Actually Does
The bill makes two separate but related changes to how the District of Columbia treats young people who commit crimes. First, it tightens the Youth Rehabilitation Act’s age threshold: the statutory definition of “youth offender” will now capture only individuals under age 18 rather than the broader category that previously reached up to 24 years.
The text accomplishes this by directly replacing the phrase “24 years of age or younger” with “under 18 years of age” and by striking related statutory language that referenced 18–24-year-olds in planning and community-service provisions.
Second, the bill creates a new statutory obligation for the Attorney General of the District of Columbia to establish and operate a public website containing a specific set of juvenile-crime statistics. The items listed include totals and demographic breakdowns for juvenile arrests, counts and percentages for petty crimes (with examples), counts for crimes of violence, first-offense versus repeat-offense rates, declination rates for prosecutions by the Office of the Attorney General, whether juveniles were tried as adults, sentencing outcomes (misdemeanor v. felony v. not sentenced), and the length of time that will be served under sentences.
The statute requires monthly updates, indefinite archiving for public access, machine-readable bulk downloads, and an explicit prohibition on including personally identifiable juvenile data.To enable that website, the bill amends existing confidentiality provisions governing juvenile case records, juvenile social records, and law-enforcement records so that persons and entities holding those records must provide information to the Attorney General for the website. Those statutory edits are limited in scope: they insert carve-outs to existing confidentiality sections that allow release to the Attorney General for the statutorily defined public-reporting purpose.
Finally, the Attorney General must put the site into operation within 180 days after enactment, creating a relatively quick compliance timeline for both the AG’s office and the record-holding entities.
The Five Things You Need to Know
Section 2(a)(1) replaces the Youth Rehabilitation Act’s phrase “24 years of age or younger” with “under 18 years of age,” removing statutory youth-offender status for people aged 18–24.
Section 2(a) makes conforming edits: it deletes a statutory planning paragraph that considered 18–24-year-olds and narrows a community-service provision from “15 to 24 years of age” to “15 to 18 years of age.”, Section 2(b) amends section 4(b) of the Youth Rehabilitation Act by striking paragraph (2) and renumbering, altering the Act’s existing sentencing-language structure and removing an identified sentencing provision.
Section 3 creates a new D.C. statute requiring the Attorney General to publish specified juvenile-crime statistics—demographics, offense categories, first-offense versus repeat, declination and prosecution outcomes, and sentence lengths—with monthly updates, indefinite archives, and machine-readable bulk downloads, while prohibiting disclosure of personally identifiable information.
To feed the website, the bill amends confidentiality provisions for juvenile case records, juvenile social records, and law-enforcement records to require those record holders to provide information to the Attorney General; the website must be operational within 180 days of enactment.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
Every bill we cover gets an analysis of its key sections.
Short title
Provides the Act’s short titles: the “D. C. Criminal Reforms to Immediately Make Everyone Safe Act of 2025” and the “DC CRIMES Act of 2025.” This is a formal caption; it does not change substance but frames the bill’s stated focus on criminal reforms.
Narrowing the Youth-Offender Definition
Directly amends section 2(6) of the Youth Rehabilitation Act of 1985 by substituting “under 18 years of age” for the existing “24 years of age or younger.” The provision also makes two explicit conforming changes: it removes a paragraph in the Act’s strategic planning section that referenced individuals aged 18–24 and changes a community-service age range from 15–24 to 15–18. Practically, this withdraws statutory youth-offender protections and program-related references from the 18–24 cohort.
Alteration to Section 4(b) of the Youth Rehabilitation Act (Sentencing Language)
Edits to section 4(b) accomplish a structural change: the bill strikes one paragraph (designated paragraph (2) in current text), removes a labeling element, and renumbers the remaining paragraph. The net effect is a statutory deletion within the Act’s sentencing subsection; practitioners will have to compare pre- and post-amendment text to map precisely which sentencing exceptions or discretions were removed and how court behavior may change.
New Statute Requiring Juvenile-Crime Website
Adds a new section to title 16 requiring the D.C. Attorney General to create and operate a public website with enumerated juvenile-crime statistics: total juvenile arrests, demographic breakdowns by age/race/sex, counts and percentages for petty crimes (vandalism, theft, shoplifting), crimes of violence, first-offense versus repeat rates, prosecution declination rates, trials as adults, sentencing outcomes, and projected time to be served. The statute also imposes operational requirements: monthly updates, indefinite archival access, machine-readable bulk download capability, and a prohibition on publishing personally identifiable juvenile information.
Mandatory Data Sharing and Timeline
Amends three existing confidentiality provisions—juvenile case records (16–2331), juvenile social records (16–2332), and police/law-enforcement records (16–2333)—to add carve-outs requiring record holders to provide information to the Attorney General for the website. These targeted exceptions do not repeal the broader confidentiality regimes but create a statutory route for data transfer to the AG for public reporting. The AG must operationalize the site within 180 days of enactment.
This bill is one of many.
Codify tracks hundreds of bills on Criminal Justice across all five countries.
Explore Criminal Justice in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Office of the Attorney General for D.C. — Gains statutory authority and access to aggregate juvenile records to build a public data platform that can inform prosecution, policy, and public reporting.
- Researchers, journalists, and policy analysts — Receive regular, machine-readable, archived juvenile-crime data (demographics, repeat-offense rates, declination rates, sentencing outcomes) useful for trend analysis and public accountability.
- D.C. policymakers and oversight bodies — Obtain a standardized, centralized data feed for juvenile justice metrics that can support legislative or programmatic decision-making.
Who Bears the Cost
- Individuals aged 18–24 — Lose coverage under the Youth Rehabilitation Act and related program or sentencing considerations that applied when the statutory cutoff extended to age 24.
- Office of the Attorney General — Bears the design, hosting, data-cleaning, redaction, and operational costs to build and maintain a monthly-updated, machine-readable public database within a 180-day deadline.
- Family court clerks, juvenile services, and law enforcement agencies — Must produce records and implement redaction/transfer processes under new confidentiality carve-outs, adding administrative burden and potential IT costs to deliver machine-readable datasets without PII.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central tension is between a narrower, more punitive statutory classification that moves 18–24-year-olds out of the youth-offender framework and a simultaneous push for greater transparency about juvenile crime: policymakers seek both to tighten public safety contours (by shrinking youth-offender coverage) and to expand publicly available juvenile-crime data, but doing both raises trade-offs between rehabilitation objectives, data privacy risks, and the administrative burden of implementing an accurate, de-identified public dataset quickly.
The bill stitches together two policy choices that create implementation friction. Narrowing the youth-offender definition to under-18 aligns D.C. law with a strict age boundary but removes a policy space (18–24) where many jurisdictions and researchers treat “emerging adults” as distinct from older adults for rehabilitation purposes.
The statutory deletion in the sentencing subsection is compact on its face but could remove an existing sentencing exception; courts and defense counsel will need to parse case law and prior practice to see whether judicial discretion has been materially curtailed.
On transparency, the statutory list of required measures is specific, but the law pushes a high operational bar: monthly updates, indefinite archival access, and machine-readable bulk downloads all demand sustained investment in data pipelines and privacy-protective redaction. The bill attempts to preserve confidentiality by forbidding personally identifiable information on the site, yet publishing disaggregated counts by age, race, and location categories risks re-identification in small-cell situations unless the AG designs suppression rules.
Finally, the statute creates mandatory data flows from courts and police to the AG without providing funding or technical standards, raising questions about data quality, harmonization across systems, and legal liability for erroneous disclosures.
Try it yourself.
Ask a question in plain English, or pick a topic below. Results in seconds.