NEWS

May 29, 2010
More programs, fewer beds could help prisons' bottom line

During an initial round of budget cuts for many state agencies this month, the Texas prison system took a lesser hit.

On Friday, though, state leaders directed agencies — including the prison system — to propose an additional 10 percent in cuts that may be necessary to balance the budget when the Legislature reconvenes next year. How to do that without cutting programs? Consider closing a prison or two.

That's the suggestion of a growing number of officials who admit such a notion would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. If that happens, it would represent a significant shift in the state's criminal justice policy. For decades, Texas focused on building more prisons in the name of public safety, tripling the size of the system in the 1990s alone.

But in recent years, the state has found that greatly expanded treatment and rehabilitation programs can reduce the number of people in prison — and save money. "One in every 22 Texans are in the criminal justice system — on probation, on parole, in prison," said state Rep. Jim McReynolds , who chairs the House Corrections Committee . "Because we invested in treatment and re-entry and rehabilitation programs starting several years ago, Texas is in a position to have those drive the discussion for the first time that I can remember, instead of just incarceration or building new prisons. That's a big change from the past."

Whereas the average cost of keeping one felon in prison is about $47 a day, the cost of alternatives is much less, according to state statistics. Probation costs an average of $1.24 a day; parole supervision is $3.74. Various community-supervision programs range from $5.56 to $47 or more, depending on the type of program and whether secure housing is provided.

McReynolds remembers when the tide began to change. Seven years ago, with Texas' economy in a downturn and its budget awash in red ink, lawmakers were forced to whack funding for probation and rehabilitation programs in the 112 state prisons. "The result was that our prison population went up, and it ended up costing us more in the long run," said McReynolds, D-Lufkin, explaining how cutting community-based programs and recidivism-reducing programs drove up the prison population.

Now, with the Legislature facing a possible $18 billion budget shortfall in 2012-13, McReynolds said he hopes his colleagues remember that lesson: "This should be a no-brainer. We can't afford to do that again."

Unlike 2003, Texas now has empty prison beds, about 2,000 of them, for the first time in years, along with in-prison treatment programs that have roughly tripled in size in three years and community-based probation and rehabilitation initiatives that are reducing the number of nonviolent offenders sent to prison.

"Right now, Texas is in a position like no other state — a good one," said Tony Fabelo, an Austin-based researcher who tracks national criminal justice trends. "The linchpin of any successful (criminal justice) system is probation and treatment programs." In many other states, officials are closing prisons, cutting community programs designed to keep people from ending up in prison and releasing thousands of convicts to save money.

But the drastic program cuts, such as those for mental health and drug treatment, can be self-defeating, driving up the prison population that is so costly to maintain, officials there say. In the past two years, crime rates and incarceration rates have fallen nationally, according to federal statistics released this month. Texas' prison population follows that trend. Instead of housing 163,312 convicts by 2009, as officials had forecast six years ago, Lone Star prisons housed 154,183 in 2009.

Instead of needing perhaps as many as 17,000 additional beds, as officials once thought, Texas has more than 2,000 empty bunks, if all beds are counted; 1,200 if some are left open for operational flexibility. "Contrary to the conventional wisdom that locking people up makes communities safer, the data is clearly showing that crime is going down as fewer people are being put in prison," said Tracy Velasquez, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, an organization that monitors national justice trends.

"Rather than spending more money unnecessarily on policing and incarceration, we recommend states increase their investments in people and communities, rather than prisons." Better treatment and diversion programs are not the only reason for lower crime rates.

Depending on where you live, better policing, lifestyle changes, changing demographics, effectiveness of tough-on-crime laws passed a decade ago and other factors all have an influence, criminal justice experts say. "When (politicians) do polling of voters now, crime doesn't even come up," said state Sen. John Whitmire , a Houston Democrat who has been chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee for more than a decade. "It was the No. 1 issue in the '90s."

For Texas, a state that officials say has never closed an entire adult prison, a public discussion could be coming to do just that. Prisons mentioned as possible targets for closure include the Central Unit in Sugar Land, surrounded by suburban sprawl and sitting on land that is now worth tens of millions of dollars; the Dawson State Jail in Dallas, located in the Trinity River bottoms on land now wanted for development; the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville that is relatively small and expensive to operate; and the privately run Mineral Wells Unit, a pre-parole lockup that has been plagued by contraband problems for years.

"We should not close any prison just to save money," Whitmire said. "If we can do it for efficiency and maintain public safety — which should be the No. 1 priority for anything we do — then you'll see us getting serious about it. We may be in the position at some point where we may not need one, two or three units. It's a place I can't ever remember Texas has been in."

McReynolds said he thinks possible closures "will definitely be on the table for discussion." New projections due out in June will forecast the number of prisoners Texas will see in coming years, and if they show an uptick in felons, then all bets are off to close any prisons.

Even so, Whitmire, McReynolds and other lawmakers acknowledge the mushrooming costs of maintaining Texas' massive prison system promise to figure in the budget debate — from health care costs that are approaching $1 billion a year, to operational costs near $2.5 billion a year, plus other costs that increasingly are competing with education and public health programs for law-abiding citizens. They agree that additional efficiencies must be found.

"We're reaching the point where costs are making us ask: Are we punishing the taxpayers more than the criminals to pay for such a large system?" McReynolds said. "I think that's a good question, recognizing that the violent criminals must be in a prison."

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