Second Look in Texas

Key Points

• It costs $25,000 a year to house each inmate.
• As of 2020, over 1,400 individuals were serving life or a sentence of at least 40 years in Texas for a crime they committed while under the age of 18.
• In states that have passed Second Look legislation, recidivism has been extremely low.

Texas has the harshest parole eligibility guidelines for juvenile offenders of any state, allowing some to be imprisoned without the possibility of parole for 40 years. Even worse, many of these youth are convicted through the Law of Parties, meaning they were merely an accessory to the actual crime and never pulled the trigger. Science proves that continued brain development allows a healthy brain to mature and make more logical decisions far before someone completes a 40-year sentence, and recidivism rates for these offenders is extremely low.