February 26, 2005 Austin American Statesman "Prison alternatives back in fashion"

When Jerry Madden first came to the Texas House in 1993, state prisons were brim full and legislative leaders were in high gear for more. More rehabilitation programs. More probation. And, of course, more prisons — almost 80 new units during the next five years.

Texas tough on crime, they called it.

"The public wanted additional capacity to keep the most violent offenders behind bars longer, and we did that," said Madden, R-Richardson.

Since then, as the costs of operating the new prisons rose and the state budget slumped to the brink of red ink, Madden and many other law-and-order lawmakers slashed funding for most of the rehabilitation and probation programs. No surprise, then, that the number of prisoners soon grew.

Fast-forward to today. State prisons are full, and legislative leaders, including Madden, who chairs the House Corrections Committee, are promoting rehabilitation and drug treatment programs again. But not new prisons. Even Gov. Rick Perry says he thinks that is the way to go.

"Two years ago, everyone came to the same conclusion almost simultaneously — that we couldn't afford to keep building new prisons, and that we needed to look at viable, cost-effective alternatives," said Madden, an insurance agent and former manufacturing engineer. "That's what's driving this."

Back in 1993, then-Gov. Ann Richards championed plans to build a network of substance-abuse treatment prisons — 12,000 beds, intensive treatment for a year, even after-care to ensure that offenders stayed on the right track once they were released. Today, there are just 2,400 beds, most offering a 90-day program — with a long waiting list — and no after-care, according to officials.

"These programs were created but never nurtured," said Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley, who was involved in the legislative negotiations to establish the programs a decade ago. "It's been limited in its success because they didn't follow through with the funding."

Much the same happened with probation, drug treatment and community reintegration programs that were launched during the 1990s, other officials said. Some of those programs have been cut as much as 40 percent in recent years.

Probation programs today receive less funding than they did in 1994, said Tony Fabelo, a national criminal justice consultant who formerly headed the state's now-disbanded Criminal Justice Policy Council, a statistical office that tracked justice and prison trends in Texas.

At the same time, Texas has more than 432,000 people on probation — more than any other state, according to federal statistics.

"You can't reform the probation system very well just by putting additional money into it because it's too large, and that money will probably be swallowed up by the system," Fabelo said. "In order to make this work, we're going to have to shrink the number of people on probation; we're going to have to invest more in getting people back into their communities after they complete their sentence and help them succeed."

State Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, agrees that a new direction is needed, rather than just building more prisons. He is chairman of a House Appropriations subcommittee that has proposed expanding probation, rehabilitation, drug treatment and community programs by $87.7 million — with incentives for tens of millions of dollars in additional funding if Texas counties reduce the number of felons they are sending to prison.

On Thursday, the House Appropriations Committee approved the subcommittee's recommendations, noting that the cost of building one new prison is about $85 million. "We're turning around the entire way we run the criminal justice system," said Rep. Pat Haggerty, R-El Paso, a former chairman of the House Corrections Committee and member of the Appropriations Committee.

Under the House plan, which Senate leaders have indicated that they support in concept, county-run probation programs would receive a transfusion of state funding to reduce caseloads, and drug treatment, parole and an assortment of community justice initiatives would be bolstered — many to levels recommended during the early 1990s.

"We have the opportunity now to succeed at what we tried earlier," said Turner, who came to the House in 1989. "We built the facilities, and then we didn't have the money to operate them and all the programs we created . . . This time, we're not going to do things like before. We know we have to invest in these programs to make them work."

Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, who has chaired the Senate Criminal Justice Committee at various intervals for more than a decade, grins when asked why the same community justice programs that were created, then decimated by budget cuts, are suddenly back in favor.

"That's what happens up here sometimes," he said. "We're now in a position to make some of these programs work because we're trying to be smarter on crime and tough on crime at the same time."

His colleague, Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos, D-Austin, is more blunt. "The chickens have finally come home to roost," said Barrientos, who has been in the Senate since 1985 and served in the House for a decade before that. "We should have recognized years ago that we can't just build prisons and solve our problems, that we have to provide programs, as well."