by Arnold García Jr.,
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Frankly, I didn't think I'd live long enough to see the Texas Legislature
questioning the value of locking people up.
People love to hear politicians wax eloquent about law enforcement's
two functions: 1) Locking up crooks and 2) throwing away the key. So, off Texas went on a multimillion dollar construction
spending spree in the 1990s. We became cement-mixing fools. We got so cement happy, we built more prisons than the Russians.
Texas prisons had a bigger prisoner count than California, even though the Golden State's overall population is much larger.
The state's investment in prisons yielded a very expensive set of big
boxes that are superb crime colleges. If the state had spent as much money on real colleges and training programs as it did
on prisons, the social payoff would have been higher. The prison lobby, however, out-muscles higher education champions all
day long. There's a lot of money in the cement, steel, plumbing, wiring, security and other penitentiary contracts. Once you've
got a prison population, moreover, someone's got to feed them, clothe them and watch them.
Prisons make a lot of paydays for a lot of people. In rural Texas, prisons
became a lifeline to dying communities. So, there was plenty of incentive to build more prisons, rationalizing them as crime
busters.
Sounds good — but it's just not so.
Prisons do not deter crime. If prisons really were crime busters, they
wouldn't fill up as fast. They would be empty. The reason is fairly simple: crooks don't think they're going to get caught.
A lot of crime is committed to support drug or alcohol addiction, and
people held hostage by substances aren't very likely to sit around debating the pros and cons of crime with their colleagues.
So our prisons are full again, and it's costing us $40 per convict per
day. Legislators decided to step back and take a look.
It is deja vu all over again, but this time, lawmakers are taking a different
approach, one that emphasizes probation, rehabilitation and treatment. None of that is fresh insight.
In one of a long string of editorials produced here during the '90s prison
boom, we wrote: "Prison construction money could be better spent on intervention, needed drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs
or improvements to the juvenile justice system, which is becoming a training ground for adult felons."
That line of thought was not unique to us, but it was relatively easy
then to dismiss prison skeptics as criminal-coddling, woolly headed do-gooders.
Moreover, holding the criminal justice system accountable was dangerous
political business. Democrats, starting to feel the leading edge of the Republican wave in which they'd eventually drown,
shied away, fearing they'd be labeled soft on crime. Republicans, in the role of challengers, didn't have to do anything except
talk about the jail keys they were going to throw away.
Now that they're in charge, Republicans are wondering why prison bills
are so high and what they're getting for all those bucks.
Legislators have decided to spend smarter this time. "What is not going
to happen this legislative session is another big prison construction program like we did 15 years ago. We're going to find
a way to do this intelligently this time," declared House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, R-Plano.
Let's be clear, though. No one advocates turning vicious violent offenders
loose after their knitting lessons. Some criminals need to be separated from the rest of us, and for a long time, in secure
facilities.
A smart society, however, should be able to discern the difference between
that kind of offender and one who would benefit from drug treatment and rehabilitation programs.
Spending money on telling that difference makes a lot more sense, state
leaders now realize. "There are better, more efficient ways to deal with this prison population than going and building more
prisons," said Gov. Rick Perry.
Good for him and good for Madden and good for everyone else who helped
get us to this point.
It's about time — and money.
