Texas spends almost all criminal justice dollars on prison beds and law enforcement.
Texas’ criminal justice dollars generally
flow through the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ)
or the Governor’s Criminal Justice Division (CJD).
State tax dollars are spent on TDCJ, and the Governor's
CJD generally handles federal grant money.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ)
spends billions of our state tax dollars each year, but
spends less and less of its funds on proven treatment and
diversion programs.
TDCJ gets about $5 billion from the Texas Legislature every two years. TDCJ spends 90% of those funds on prison beds or "hard incarceration" and only 10% on community based programming like substance abuse treatment
and other probation programs. Over the past ten years,
TDCJ funding of programs outside of the prison walls has
actually decreased.
The Governor’s Criminal Justice Division (CJD)
distributes federal criminal justice dollars that come
to Texas including the federal Byrne grant program. Each
year, $20-30 million comes to Texas from the federal government
in Byrne grant funds. The CJD can choose to spend the Byrne
funds on substance abuse treatment, drug courts, prison
diversion programs, and/or other programs that work to
reduce crime.
Instead, the CJD gives almost all of the money to multijurisdictional
Drug Task Forces – failed law enforcement programs
whose goals are simply to put more and more people in prison for petty drug offenses each year. Even after the well reported
corruption and scandals that surround this flawed law enforcement program, the CJD has failed to divert the $30 million per year in federal dollars to "what works" treatment programs that would break the cycle of crime in Texas.
There is a serious need in Texas for special programs
that are not being funded. According to the US Department
of Health and Human Services, over 1.3 million Texans need
but do not receive treatment for alcohol abuse, and over
400,000 Texans need but do not receive treatment for illicit
drug use.
Meanwhile, Texas pays the price for not having these
needed programs in place. More people placed on probation
are failing and being sent to prison. From 1994 to 2000,
technical revocations (people who were sent to prison for
failing probation with no new offense alleged, just failure
to follow rules) increased 58%, and revocations for committing
a new offense increased 9.6%.
People sent to prison for technical revocations
in 2000 will cost state taxpayers $220 million to incarcerate. If
these probationers could successfully complete their probation
and not go to prison, these hundreds of millions of tax
dollars could be invested in programs that work instead
of prison beds.
The cost of failing to provide Texans with the help
they need extend far beyond the criminal justice system.
The direct economic cost to American society of drug abuse
in 2000, including health care costs attributable to drug
abuse and other costs which include the cost of goods and
services lost to crime and social welfare costs, was over
$50 billion. The indirect economic cost to American society
in 2000, including productivity losses due to incarceration,
institutionalization, hospitalization, premature death,
drug abuse related illness, productivity loss of victims
of crime, and crime careers, was over $110 billion. That’s
in addition to direct costs of arrest, prosecution, probation,
incarceration and parole.
The cost of our criminal justice strategies falls
on families, communities, and taxpayers.
In Texas, the total economic cost associated with
alcohol and drug abuse in 2000 was estimated at $25.9 billion.
Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, Annual Report, 2003.
