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| Holliday Unit, Huntsville ,Texas |
I appreciated Scott Henson’s
recent Grits for Breakfast post related to prison release rates in Texas (see “The
arithmetic of de-incarceration: TDCJ edition”). Scott has a way communicating about complex
issues that paints a simple and easy to understand picture for the reader. It’s
one of the reasons why his reporting often leads to tangible policy changes,
like the recent adjustment of property offense penalty thresholds. That measure will likely decrease the number
of felony theft cases and shift additional cases into community supervision,
hopefully leading to treatment and services for people with addiction and
mental illness.
In Scott’s recent post, he
provides a graph comparing the number of people sent to prison each year to the
number of people released. You can
immediately see a problem that could stall progress on criminal justice reform
in Texas.
If the number of people received into the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is not equal to or less than the number of people released from prison each year, we will soon have to build more prisons.
Texas prison populations have
declined, but only by 3.6 percent. We
have a long way to go before we come close to the reductions in prison
populations achieved by New York and other states. Most advocates believe that Texas should
decrease its prison population by at least 30 percent.
There has been undeniable
progress. The number of placements into
pretrial diversion programs has nearly doubled since 2005, with a 63 percent
increase in felony diversion. Also,
thanks to the leadership of the outgoing Chair of the Board of Pardons and
Paroles, Rissie Owens, with support from former Governor Perry and the
Legislature, the number of people approved for parole release has increased by
several thousand each year.
Also, the Parole Board decreased
the number of parole revocations each year by 30 percent. This happened because the Board was given
additional options in terms of treatment and intensive supervision, allowing
TDCJ to address higher levels of risk and need in the community instead of in
costly prisons.
But the numbers illustrated by
Scott Henson bring up important concerns.
The number of people sent to prison each year remains relatively stable
when it should be declining along with crime rates and greater use of diversion
programs. Further, even with increased parole approval rates, the number of people
released from prison each year remains fairly low. There are at least three issues that need to be
addressed by the next Legislature to prevent criminal justice reform from going
backwards:
1. Increase
the number of people sentenced to community supervision instead of prison;
2. Reduce
probation revocations; and
3. Increase
parole release rates.
I’ll follow with three posts to a discuss each of these issues. As an introduction, I should emphasize why this is important. Despite all of the progress, there remain
150,000 incarcerated people in Texas, a staggering number. The prison population in Texas increased by
200% during a period when the actual population increased by only 48%. Prison
stopped being the last resort for those who commit violent offenses, and the
state created an assembly line to process more than 70,000 new prisoners each
year.
If you pass by one of the prison units built rapidly in the 1990s, you’ll see a half mile stretch with two rows of buildings that look exactly like warehouses.
The state spends $6.2 billion
every two years on this out-sized system.
It separates families, often forcing parents and children to travel 600
miles across the state for a brief weekend visit with their loved ones. Even
prison officials argue that the system is too large, making it nearly
impossible to adequately address the factors that led to criminal involvement in
the first place. There is a better way to deal with crime in this state. Stay tuned
for the next post on more effectively addressing social issues through
community supervision instead of prison.
