EDITORIAL BOARD

For years, the tough-on-crime crowd has maintained that crooks would straighten out if Texas built more prisons. After a decade of building more and more cells, that same crowd has discovered two things: It takes more than prisons to straighten out crooks, and prisons are mighty expensive.

Dismissed once as just more liberal feel-goodism, rehabilitation is making a comeback in Texas legislative circles, the American-Statesman's Mike Ward reported last week.

Not only is that good news, it's common sense. Criminals are a complex lot, so anyone expecting that a simplistic lock-em-up approach would work over the long haul was dreaming.

If you lock up a drunk or drug addict for committing crimes caused by their addiction without treating the addiction, you're wasting time and money, as any number of experts will tell you.

Even so, past legislatures have cut into rehab programs. But that's changing, and for the better.

In their proposed two-year budget, prison officials are asking for an additional $28 million for increased supervision of probationers, $27 million for additional local beds for probation violators who would otherwise end up in prison, and $10 million more for additional drug treatment for parolees.

Another strong signal of refocus is the department's creation of the Rehabilitation and Re-entry Programs Division last spring. The aim of the unit is to consolidate and coordinate existing state and local initiatives to help the 60,000 inmates who leave Texas prisons each year.

The effort mirrors a Travis County experiment designed to soften the re-entry convicts experience upon their release.

State Rep. Ray Allen, R-Grand Prairie, once the hardest of hardliners, has come to realization that throwing away the key involves throwing away a lot of money.

Allen, chairman of the House Corrections Committee, told Ward: "Tight budgets have forced fiscal conservatives like myself to ask the same questions liberals were asking 10 years ago. We're all at the same reality now on criminal justice, I think: We simply cannot afford to keep everyone behind bars."

Prisons are the state equivalent of the national defense budget — it's a sacred cow with a high-decibel moo. The prison system employs 45,000 and carries a $2.4 billion annual budget.

In the 1990s the prison system added 100,000 beds and became the largest penal system in the free world (if you'll pardon the expression.)

All that adds up. Contrast a $45 per day per convict price tag with the $2 a day it costs to keep a convict on probation.

No one would responsibly advocate putting everyone on probation because some people need to be in jail.

Paying for the knowledge to identify those convicts who should be locked up and those who could safely serve an alternative sentence would be money well spent.