News & Commentary

I had my first child in the custody of a county jail. I was arrested for possession of a controlled substance just after learning I was pregnant. When my son was born, I was able to spend two days with my baby in the hospital. Leaving him to go back to jail was the hardest day of my life.

Visit our Legislation Tracker to learn more about the bills that will make a huge impact on Texas during the 2019 Texas Legislature.  

If you are accused of a crime and arrested in Galveston County, Texas, you better hope you can afford to pay the preset bail amount to get out of jail. If not, then you will join hundreds of other people who are incarcerated simply because they cannot afford to buy their freedom. In Galveston and communities across the country, there is one pretrial detention system for the poor and an entirely different one for everyone else.

We asked candidates running for State Representative in House Districts 115, 113, 104, and 47 about their positions on 13 key pieces of legislation affecting civil rights and civil liberties in our state. We then studied the results to determine which candidates were supportive of ACLU of Texas priorities. The scores below reflect how current state lawmakers voted during the 2017 legislative session. For challengers, the scores indicate how they would have voted, as indicated in their responses to our candidate questionnaire. Here are the bills we analyzed in each section. Click the header to find out more about each category:

On this date -- some 231 years ago in Philadelphia -- 39 delegates from the fledgling nation known as the United States of America came together to sign the final iteration of its Constitution.

This article originally appeared in the Dallas Morning News.

At sentencing, they kind of saved me for last. I had just turned 21. It was 1998. I remember the judge saying, “Jason, I’ve thought about this all week. … I’ve written Congress about these sentencing guidelines for crack-cocaine but my hands are tied.” After, he starts reading my sentence off to me: “life without parole …” After life without parole, I didn’t hear the other part.