The DC CRIMES Act of 2025 lowers the age for youth offender status, streamlines community service requirements, and mandates the creation of a public website detailing D.C. juvenile crime statistics.
Byron Donalds
Representative
FL-19
The DC CRIMES Act of 2025 significantly reforms the treatment of youth offenders by lowering the age eligibility for youth offender status to under 18. It also mandates the creation of a public website managed by the Attorney General to transparently report detailed, monthly juvenile crime statistics. This legislation streamlines facility planning for youth services and requires the sharing of previously protected juvenile records to populate the new data portal.
| Party | Total Votes | Yes | No | Did Not Vote |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Democrat | 213 | 31 | 178 | 4 |
Republican | 219 | 209 | 1 | 9 |
DC Bill Removes 18-24 Year Olds from Youth Offender Status, Mandates Public Juvenile Crime Website
The DC CRIMES Act of 2025 is a two-part bill that significantly changes how the District of Columbia handles young adults in the criminal justice system and how it shares data about juvenile crime.
The End of Youth Offender Status for Young Adults
Section 2 of this bill rewrites a core part of D.C.’s criminal code by slashing the age limit for “youth offender” status under the Youth Rehabilitation Act of 1985. Previously, this status applied to anyone 24 years old or younger. The new rule strictly limits it to individuals under 18 years old. This is a huge shift, as it essentially removes all 18-to-24-year-olds from the specialized treatment and rehabilitative focus that comes with being a youth offender. For this group, sentencing and facility planning will now treat them as adults, full stop. The bill also tightens the age range for court-ordered community service under probation, limiting it to 15-to-18-year-olds, down from 15-to-24. This change means young adults who might have previously benefited from youth-focused programs and less severe sentencing options after turning 18 will now face the full weight of the adult system.
Mandatory Public Transparency: The Juvenile Crime Dashboard
Section 3 focuses on transparency, requiring the D.C. Attorney General to launch and maintain a public, machine-readable website detailing juvenile crime statistics. This isn't just a basic overview; the site must be robust, showing monthly data on total juvenile arrests broken down by age, race, and sex. It also needs to track repeat offenders, prosecution rates (including non-prosecution decisions), and sentencing outcomes, such as how many juveniles were tried as adults and the types of sentences handed down. The Attorney General must get this site running within 180 days of the Act becoming law and must archive all historical data indefinitely for bulk download. This level of mandated transparency is significant for anyone—from researchers to concerned parents—trying to understand the true scope of juvenile crime in the District.
Privacy vs. Transparency: Who Pays the Price?
To make this public data dashboard work, the bill includes a critical provision that overrides existing privacy rules regarding juvenile records. Custodians of juvenile case records, social records, and police files must now share that information with the Attorney General specifically for the purpose of populating the public website. While the bill mandates that no personally identifiable information appears on the public site, forcing the sharing of sensitive social records—which often contain deeply private family and psychological data—is a major protection removal. This creates a tension: the public gains transparency, but the price is paid by the individuals whose private juvenile records are now subject to mandatory sharing with a government entity for public data aggregation. The challenge here is ensuring that in the push for data, the aggregation of highly detailed statistics doesn't inadvertently lead to the re-identification of individuals in smaller, specific categories.