2025 Achievements

Legislative & Policy Wins

• Drafted and successfully passed Maternal Health & Mortality Rider. This Rider mandates the state regulatory agency over county jails to collect and report data for one year on outcomes of pregnant people held in our 244 county jails. This is the first of its kind in the country and we are hugely proud of it. This was a natural progression to all the groundbreaking work we have done in 9 legislative sessions across 16 years to ensure basic rights and protections for pregnant people in jails. 
• Drafted and successfully passed Mental Health Continuity of Care Query Data Rider. This is another huge win for data on how the state’s public mental health system is failing and pushing its clients into the criminal punishment system. 
• Forced the state regulatory agency TCJS to create a policy to report and count out-of-state custody deaths when people are shipping out pretrial to Louisiana and Mississippi. This was a huge win because until now, after 4 years of “outsourcing” we had no official accounting of the deaths that were occurring out of state
• Forced the state regulatory agency TCJS to create a system for reporting essential information on its website (See Law Enforcement Appointments) in custody death investigations which are conducted under the Sandra Bland Act
• In coalition with criminal justice advocacy allies, successfully defeated Police Secrecy Bill SB 781/14/15/HB 2486/14/15 on the final day of the final special session three hours before Sine Die. This bill would have prevented us from getting any records connected to jailer misconduct in jail custody deaths.
• Harm mitigation on constitutional amendment on automatic bail denial SJR 5 (Prop 3) which mandates access to counsel on bail hearings. 
• Successfully defeated bad bail bills SJR 87 and SJR 1.
• We were successful in getting our public health fellow Caroline Crain from The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, appointed to the Administrative & Rules Advisory Committee of the state regulatory agency Texas Commission on Jail Standards. This doubles our presence on this important committee that is tasked with writing rules and minimum standards for all the 244 county jails in TX.
  
  Caroline is a 4th yr med student whose fellowship with us ended earlier this year, but our time together was so incredibly fruitful that we found a way through this Committee to keep her engaged in the most meaningful way possible. She represents the community member spot on this committee while I represent a statewide advocacy group working on jail conditions. We have two votes now!!!

Successful Media Pitches in 2025

This live page is an ongoing collection of all our media stories this year. Here’s a quick list of some recent high profile media:

• My Democracy Now Interview from a couple of weeks ago, on the launch of the New Yorker documentary short ‘Criminal’ in which our work on Harris county jail and my interview is featured
• Here’s my letter to the Houston Chronicle Editorial board against Prop 3 published day before the elections. 
• Here’s our successful pitch with one of our mental health cases to the TX Observer against Prop 3 from a couple of weeks ago
• Here’s my interview with KXAN-Yahoo news last Friday on Prop 3 issues 
• Here’s a CBS interview that aired two days ago (trigger warning: horrific assault by male officer of female prisoner in suicide watch) with my interview on mental health issues in jail. (If that link goes to live news try this one please.)

Truth-telling & Organizing

• In Smith county we are organizing against 287 G in a big way. Please check out our FB livestream tonight! See attached 287 G Travel Advisory map that we co-created. And here’s a news story about it from yesterday.
• We brought over 100 testimonies to the Texas Commission on Jail Standards quarterly meetings and their committee meetings this year. We livestreamed all those meetings when the State refused to do so. And we recorded and published many of these testimonies on our YouTube Channel. This is the one thing we are most proud of this year. 
• We also brought over 15 public comments to county commissioners courts in two different counties and board meetings of county jail medical and mental health providers
• In Harris County we built a diverse coalition – Communities Not Cages – comprising six organizations, family members of people who died pretrial in custody, formerly incarcerated people, youth and community advocates united in their vision of shrinking the carceral footprint along with increased investments in social services as a means to shrink the carceral footprint. The coalition has 193 members on its listserve, conducted 38 meetings including work parties, four community teach-ins and mobilized over 150 registrations for public comment at Commissioners Court since 2024.
• In Tarrant county, a three year organizing effort with faith groups and directly impacted community members to show up at County Commissioners Courts and other stakeholder meetings has led to the formation of Peoples Court.