At 32 years old, Elizabeth Henneke had built the kind of career most academics spend decades working toward. She was teaching law at the University of Southern California in 2013, on track for tenure in just three more years. Her studies had taken her across the world, from teaching English in South Korea to clerking at a justice’s office in South Africa. She served on boards of nonprofits that worked to reduce youth incarceration, shaped public policy, and even co-led USC’s post-conviction clinic.
Then, one afternoon, her phone buzzed with a link to a news story from her home state of Texas.
The article detailed a landmark political shift. The Texas Association of Business, the state’s largest business lobby, had for the first time added criminal justice reform to its powerful legislative agenda. A professor friend in Austin attached the link to a simple message: “You should come home.”
It made no sense to come home. She was at the top of her career. But she couldn’t shake the feeling a rare door had just cracked open.
“There’s something here,’’ she remembers thinking, “and this is where I should be.”
That article led Henneke to leave academia in southern California to serve as a microphone for kids in the most dire situations across Texas.
The 46-year-old created and now leads the Lone Star Justice Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit that combines case work and policy advocacy with direct community programs like youth centers and job training. LSJA helped expose the revelation that some kids incarcerated in Dallas’ juvenile justice system were isolated in their cells 23 hours a day and denied showers, exercise, and education. A state probe followed, which found evidence that staff routinely falsified check-in logs.
LSJA condemned the conditions at the Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center while acting as advocates for impacted families. About three years after triggering a reform of the system, Henneke’s group is now scaling up statewide, buoyed by new research that its model of pre-trial diversion — paired with services like mental health treatment and job training — can reduce recidivism among young people. The public sector is taking notice: The city of Dallas this year awarded the group $300,000 to expand its violence interruption efforts locally.
“Her name precedes her, her reputation precedes her,” says Dallas County’s Director of Juvenile Services H. Lynn Hadnot, who began the role in 2025. “If you work in juvenile justice, especially as a chief, as soon as you get involved in public policy at a state level, Elizabeth’s name will eventually circulate to you.”
Less known is that Texas’ criminal justice system is, quite literally, in her blood.
Henneke spent much of her childhood on her family’s small farm in Huntsville, a notorious prison town 50 miles north of Houston. The site of the state’s first penitentiary in 1849 now houses seven prison units and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s headquarters. Seven relatives worked in Texas prisons and law enforcement: Henneke’s father was a prison guard; her grandmother, a sheriff’s deputy; her grandfather, an assistant warden of the unit that held executions. She befriended women awaiting trial who cooked in the jail’s kitchen and watched soap operas with detainees. “Other people went to summer camp,” she says. “I went to the jail.”
As a child, her family marked the years by having her pose for mock mugshots. They even recreated the normal jail booking process, down to taking her fingerprints. “Looking back, it’s a strange thing to do to a child,” Henneke says. “The prison was so woven into daily life that nobody thought twice. It took me years, and this work, to see it clearly.”
Other people went to summer camp. I went to the jail.
Elizabeth henneke
She became interested in the systems around her as she watched criminal trials in the courthouse. She noticed that many defendants were people of color, and that few had adequate legal representation. “I would see all of this harm, and no one asking why,” she says. “Why did these things happen? What got you here? How do we address it? It was just harm, and we were burying people in their own trauma.”
She also discovered her family life wasn’t all that different from their histories of poverty, mental health, and substance abuse. Her parents split when she was young, and Henneke traveled between Georgia and Texas to spend time with each. Often left alone at home, she helped raise her half-brother, who was 14 years younger, while her family navigated financial and behavioral health challenges.
“Maybe when you look at me, you don’t see somebody who grew up in a trailer with a hole in it or on a swing set on the prison grounds,” she says. “But that is where I come from, and it’s where I’m most comfortable.”
Her questions about the disparities behind bars never left her. She became the first in her family to attend college, studying history at Yale University with a focus on race in the justice system. She studied in South Korea for a year after graduation, then returned to Texas to work on death penalty investigations with a nonprofit legal group. She enrolled in law school at the University of Texas at Austin and became a 28-year-old instructor almost immediately after graduating. Then, she clerked in South Africa before the prominent Williams & Connolly criminal defense law firm hired her away to Washington D.C.
When she returned to academia, she scored a coveted position teaching law at USC. But when she read the 2013 article, she couldn’t ignore that her home state still didn’t have any robust community-based alternative to incarceration for young adults.
That need is backed by research. The Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute has declared community-based infrastructure a critical gap in Texas; many juveniles are trapped in the system not because they pose a public safety risk, but because local communities lack resources and mental health frameworks to support them.
Henneke left California mid-semester and moved to Austin. She spent three years in nonprofit criminal justice policy work, but her ultimate goal became reality in 2017 when she used $75,000 in savings to start the Lone Star Justice Alliance. She quickly hired Yulise Reaves Waters, a city of Dallas attorney who co-founded Texas’ first young adult community court. “We got connected, and the rest is history,” says Reaves Waters, now LSJA’s chief innovation officer.
Now with 17 full-time staffers, LSJA is guided by data, and those numbers can be stark. Nationally, up to 75% of young adults in the justice system are arrested again within three years of their release. These “emerging adults” — ages 18 to 24 — are LSJA’s primary focus, though the organization hopes to use the city’s grant to accept kids as young as 12.
Research cited by the group shows that as of 2022, the Dallas-Fort Worth area had roughly 127,000 “disconnected youth” — young adults ages 16 to 24 who are neither in school nor employed. About a third, 43,000, live in Dallas County.
The nonprofit surveyed 344 young people, including 108 in Dallas. Most had some involvement with the justice system, and their needs were consistent: housing, food, mental health support, a permanent address for benefits and jobs, mentors. “They really needed adults who were in their lives that weren’t judgmental,” says Reaves Waters.
LSJA partnered with judges and prosecutors in rural Williamson County, north of Austin, and Dallas to connect with young people and enroll them in programs to avoid incarceration.
But as those efforts took off, Henneke’s personal life encountered the same problems she was working to reform. Her 17-year-old brother, Kevin, was arrested in Georgia for smoking marijuana. Like Texas, Georgia is one of only four states that prosecutes 17-year-olds as adults.
Kevin’s life spiraled, Henneke says. He lost his financial aid, and his dream to become a U.S. Navy rescue swimmer became impossible because of the conviction. His light dimmed, Henneke says, and he was arrested twice more. She helped him join the military, but he left the service in his mid-20s.
She recalls a moment in 2022, a decade after his first arrest, when the two sat on a couch at home. Henneke’s effort to pass a Texas law to allow juveniles tried as adults to become eligible for parole after 20 years, instead of 40, had failed. Her brother comforted her. “I don’t need that bill anymore,” he told her. “I’m finally starting to see myself getting past this.”
Two days later, he was killed in a motorcycle accident.
“I was already in the fight before then, but after that, I’ve been relentless,” Henneke says. “We don’t have 10 years, right? LSJA doesn’t have 10 more years to slowly grow. We are losing people. I’ve watched clients die. I’ve watched us lose participants.”
Her work took on added urgency. In LSJA’s surveys, youths asked for a “third space,” a safe place where they could play and converse openly. So, in 2024, the nonprofit opened a physical hub near Deep Ellum called the HYPE Center, an acronym for “Helping Young People Exceed.”
Designed by the young people it serves, the center is open to anyone between the ages of 18 and 24 who is “justice-involved, justice-impacted, or at risk of disconnection.” They are linked to a transition coach within 72 hours of their referral, and can walk in whenever. Each gets an individualized care plan, which can include family support, professional certification, occupational training, and GED programs. The program aims for housing stability within 90 days and provides legal advice and representation. (Henneke says they had 1,172 requests for legal assistance from 2022 to 2025, and LSJA took on 796.)
LSJA reports it has served more than 200 young people at the HYPE Center in Dallas, 154 of whom were placed in jobs. About 68% remained in those jobs six months later. In Texas, about 48% of youth in community supervision are arrested again within three years; LSJA’s rate is 11%. The nonprofit’s results echo the business argument in the article that convinced Henneke to move back to Texas: The group spends around $10,000 to help each participant, compared to the $281,243 it costs to incarcerate a juvenile for a year.
The court diversion model seemed to work outside of Dallas, too. At Henneke’s behest, Texas A&M conducted a randomized controlled trial of 146 young adults in Williamson County and found LSJA’s participants were more than 35% less likely to re-offend than those in the standard process. The county now runs the program itself.
Marc Levin, chief policy counsel for the national nonprofit Council on Criminal Justice, says such an impact is uncommon. He met Henneke while pushing for state policy changes like expediting parole eligibility. “She’s really brilliant,” he says, adding she navigates a tricky balance of advocacy with litigation. Many young people need more structure than probation, he says, but with problems in residential facilities and youth prisons, LSJA offers the “best of both worlds.”
Hadnot, Dallas’ juvenile director, says Henneke has helped bring community voices to the table, particularly those who have a history with the system. The Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center is being renovated and its operations are undergoing reforms. That includes switching food vendors — a concern, he says, that was raised by LSJA and reinforced by detained children who reported being hungry because the food was terrible.
There is no “usual day” when the work can range so widely, says Henneke. She completes paperwork on bus rides from her Austin home to the back house she stays in when she’s in Dallas. She visits prisons statewide to meet with people sentenced before they turned 17.
Multi-tasking is a specialty. On a recent afternoon at the HYPE Center, she greeted a reporter as she picked up a platter of 300 Raising Cane’s crispy chicken tenders.
The building was busy. Five young adults sat around a table in one room for a driving academy lesson. In an adjacent office, a peer advisor leaned forward in a chair to mentor a young person. Past a food pantry and computer lab, two young men on beanbags whispered behind closed doors — so at ease that they seemed startled when Henneke walked in. A couple played with a young girl in a different room; participants bring their kids often, the CEO says. The nonprofit pays for participants to commute there.
“It’s bursting at the seams,” she says. “We’re feeling overwhelmed by how many people we’re having to turn away.”
By 2036, Henneke plans to open 18 similar hubs across Texas. She hopes to partner with local groups that would operate them.
Henneke’s personal stamp is indelible. One wall in the HYPE Center features a list of “sparks,” incentives for good behavior like a free coffee with a transition coach or verbal affirmation. She says the initiative helps her remember the “spark” her brother had before his arrest.
This work, she says, grows more urgent. Although crime is down in Dallas, she’s noticed more unmet needs among young adults after COVID-19 interrupted school and other routines. Her organization has been connecting more young people to mental health support.
She aspires to reach 15,000 young Texans in the next decade. This model can improve public safety statewide, she believes, as those thousands could end up incarcerated for decades without their help.
“A lot of people would vote that Texas will not make those choices, that inertia and apathy will win the day, and I just disagree,” she says. “I believe that if given a path forward, we’re going to take it. And I think that since we launched LSJA almost 10 years ago, we’ve bet that every time — and every single time we’ve been right. So I’ll keep making that bet.”
Kelli Smith is a staff writer for The Lab Report. kelli@labreportdallas.com.