Jason Robinson was sixteen when he was sentenced. He is forty-eight now, thirty-two years into a life sentence that requires him to serve forty calendar years before a parole board will so much as look at his file. That means eight more years, at minimum, before anyone in Texas is legally obligated to ask whether the sixteen-year-old who committed that crime and the man who has since earned a college degree, with honors, are the same person the state locked up.
“I made the conscious choice to become a better person,” Jason Robinson says now. “My mistakes don’t define who I am.” It is a claim easy to make and hard to prove from inside a cell, which is exactly why the next eight years matter so much to him, and why the number governing them is worth examining closely.
In California, a person convicted of a comparable offense at the same age would have already had that conversation. In Louisiana, they’d have had it seven years ago. Texas’s 40-year floor, the minimum time a person must serve before a parole board will even consider release, ties Nebraska for the harshest among states that abolished juvenile life-without-parole outright; only two outliers, Oklahoma and Delaware, have higher minimums.
How Other States Handle Parole for Juvenile Offenders
California’s approach, built through a series of laws passed after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Graham and Miller decisions limited harsh sentencing for juveniles, sets parole eligibility on a sliding scale tied to sentence type. Someone convicted of an offense committed at 25 or younger and given a determinate sentence becomes eligible for a youth offender parole hearing in their fifteenth year of incarceration. State law requires the parole board to “give great weight to the diminished culpability of juveniles compared to adults, the hallmark features of youth, and any growth or maturity shown since the offense.”
Texas offers no such scale and no such hearing. When the sixteen-year-old Jason Robinson was convicted in 1994, his offense carried an automatic life sentence that set his first parole review at the forty-year mark. For a life sentence like his, California would have required a first look between his twentieth and twenty-fifth year, at least fifteen years sooner than Texas.
Louisiana law falls between those two: it took longer than California to move, and its floor is still higher, but that floor is nowhere near Texas’s. Following the Supreme Court’s 2016 Montgomery v. Louisiana ruling, the legislature passed Act 277 in 2017, creating parole eligibility after 25 years for juveniles convicted of second-degree murder, and the state’s revised statutes now extend that same 25-year threshold to most people serving life sentences for offenses committed before age eighteen. Advocates in Louisiana still argue that number should be lower.
But the number Louisiana’s advocates consider an unfinished compromise is fifteen years shorter than what Texas guarantees as a minimum.
The Bill That Almost Closed the Gap
Texas lawmakers have tried to narrow this distance more than once. The most recent attempt, House Bill 200 in the 2025 legislative session, would have cut the 40-year threshold to twenty for juveniles convicted of most felonies, including capital murder cases that don’t involve killing a police officer or multiple victims. It required parole panels to formally weigh the same developmental factors California mandates: diminished culpability, hallmark features of youth, and a person’s growth and maturity since the offense. The bill’s own analysis noted that roughly 1,222 youthful offenders currently serve extreme sentences that make them ineligible for parole until late adulthood under existing law. Jason Robinson is one of them.
HB 200 passed the Texas House by a wide bipartisan margin: 102 to 45 on final passage. It was sent to the Senate on May 8, 2025, but it never came up for a vote there. The 40-year threshold Texas set stayed exactly where it was.
This was not the first time. A version of the same bill, HB 213, cleared committee scrutiny in 2023 and was left pending. A version before that, HB 2177 in 2021, met the same fate. Each one has run the same course: bipartisan sponsorship, a House vote or committee approval, and a stall point somewhere before the governor’s desk. All while 1,222 youthful offenders grow into adults inside a cell.
What This Means for Jason Robinson
Jason Robinson’s case sits squarely inside the population HB 200 was written for. He was convicted of an offense committed at sixteen and has already served thirty-two years. Under current law, he still owes the state eight more before a parole panel is even required to consider him. He has spent that time earning his GED, an honors college degree, and an HVAC certification.
Had Jason been sentenced in California, parole review would have begun years ago, at year fifteen or twenty depending on his sentence structure, and he would already know the outcome. Had he been sentenced in Louisiana, he would have known seven years ago. And had HB 200 passed the Texas Senate rather than stalling session after session, he would have known twelve years ago.
“I’ve made peace with that sixteen-year-old kid,” Jason says. “I understand where he was at and the mistakes he made. I don’t justify anything. I just know mistakes happen.”
A parole hearing is designed to weigh the gap between who someone was and who they’ve since become. In the majority of the other 49 states, that distance gets measured years before it will in Texas.
What 40 Years Costs
The Texas Center for Justice and Equity’s cost analysis puts the actual price of that stall in plain terms: incarcerating one person for life costs the state roughly $2.5 million, compared with about $626,000 for twenty years, a difference of nearly $1.9 million per person.
A cost-based case for reform, unlike most criminal justice debates, does not require anyone to take a side on forgiveness. It only requires comparing what a state like Texas and its taxpayers pay to keep someone in a cell for decades longer than states like California or Louisiana would even consider.
The Right to Be Considered
None of this suggests that every person serving a juvenile sentence in Texas should walk free at year twenty. Parole eligibility is not parole itself. It is only the point at which the state is required to re-assess the sentence. California and Louisiana’s laws don’t guarantee release; they guarantee a hearing, which would produce evidence about growth and maturity if it exists. A hearing leads to a decision.
What HB 200 proposed, and what its predecessors proposed before it, was never early release. It was the right to be asked, twenty years sooner than Texas currently allows, whether someone convicted as a child is still the same person the state sentenced.
Texas has now had three chances to grant that right, and has let all three lapse.
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This story was produced as part of Incomplete Sentences, a year-long investigation into the human cost of juvenile sentencing in America. A collaboration between the Millbrook Companies and the Lone Star Justice Alliance, the initiative examines what is lost when the justice system reduces complex lives to a single verdict and what becomes possible when we insist on the full story. For more information, visit lonestarjusticealliance.org, incompletesentences.org, and millbrookcompanies.com.
