A Message from our Executive Director:
Season's Greetings Utah Justice Partners!
The year 2025 has been one filled with perseverance and grit! Our team here at the Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice has made great strides in accomplishing our goals and objectives as outlined in our 2024-2027 Strategic Plan.
Beginning with another record breaking General Legislative Session, our office tracked 265 unique criminal and juvenile justice related legislation which represents 27% of all 959 publicly numbered bills!
We continued to stay busy and are proud to share that in this past year our team has facilitated 12 judgeship nominations including a supreme court justice; advanced research on prison capacity and spatial analysis of juvenile justice referral rates across Utah census tracts; distributed millions of federal and state grant dollars to crime reduction programming and victim services; connected in 3.4 billion rows of data records from criminal justice partners including the Courts, jails, arresting agencies, corrections, and prosecutors; carried out the Governor’s Executive Order on the Criminal Justice Strategy Taskforce; and implemented new responsibilities brought forth from justice policies passed by the legislature and Governor.
As we enter the new year, our agency is evolving. We are implementing structural updates to better support our expanding responsibilities, ensuring we remain a neutral, trusted partner while advancing collaborative criminal and juvenile justice policies.
Please navigate the below page to learn more about our major accomplishments!
- $37.86 Million awarded statewide
- $22.78 Million invested in victim-related services
- $7.38 Million invested in indigent defense
- $7.7 Million of Federal and state grants served the following areas:
- $927K in treatment and reentry
- $1.4 M in crime prevention
- $2.2 M in law enforcement and corrections
- $2.4M in system diversion
- Assisted the Governor with the appointment of twelve new judges in FY 2025
- Led 2025-02 "Enhancing Utah's Criminal Justice Strategy" Executive Order and HB 353, which created a task force to assist criminal justice efforts in Utah and requires certain state agencies to review criminal offenses contained in statutes.
- The Quantitative Research Team expanded its impact across the justice system.
- We developed a prison projection data tool for the Department of Corrections, released an Senate Bill 213 report on habitual offenders to help break the cycle of reincarceration, and revisited prison length of stay to guide cost-conscious policy—work now expanding to other agencies.
- We also launched the Juvenile Justice Statewide Geospatial Study to support delinquency prevention and strengthen community protective factors across Utah. Using court referral rates and hot spot analysis to pinpoint priority neighborhoods, we're now collaborating with local criminal justice coordinating councils across the state to build place-based response systems driven by data and community engagement.
- The Public Safety Portal is LIVE! Utah Code §63A-16-1002, delegated CCJJ to oversee the creation and management of a Public Safety Portal (PSP) for information and data required to be reported to the commission and accessible to stakeholders. Ultimately, the PSP will be the repository for the statutorily required data described in §63A-16-1002(4). The PSP currently houses over 3.4 billion rows of data, representing an unprecedented cooperative endeavor that empowers Utah with significant reporting capabilities and the ability to identify critical trends for informed policy formulation and enhanced outcomes.
Explore all 2025 Accomplishments