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The D.C. Council unanimously voted today to approve a bill that would make sweeping reforms to the city’s juvenile justice system.

Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, chairperson of the judiciary committee, introduced the Comprehensive Youth Justice Amendment Act of 2016, along with six other councilmembers in April. It mirrors President Barack Obama’s executive action to ban solitary confinement for juveniles.

There are as many as 100,000 people held in solitary confinement across the country—including juveniles—and as many as 25,000 inmates “are serving months, even years of their sentences alone in a tiny cell, with almost no human contact,” President Obama said in a Washington Post op-ed in January. “Research suggests that solitary confinement has the potential to lead to devastating, lasting psychological consequences.”

In addition to this reform, D.C.’s bill will “help keep our children out of the justice system, reduce overincarceration, ensure age-appropriate sentencing, improve conditions of confinement, and expand oversight,” McDuffie said in a release. This opportunity for youth rehabilitation “not only improves their lives, it improves public safety as well,” he continued.

Twenty-eight local and national organizations and advocates have banned together to support the local bill, which also shares similarities with the national Supporting Youth Opportunity and Preventing Delinquency Act, which passed the House of Representatives in September.

The D.C. Council will vote a second time on the bill before it’s officially passed.

Juvenile Justice One Pager by Christina Sturdivant on Scribd