Budget Choices: TDCJ needs more money or fewer prisoners



More detail emerged yesterday on Texas' budget crisis and the
implications for criminal justice policy. Reports the Austin
Statesman ("Proposed budget shows $3.7 billion shortfall," Jan. 21):
Maintaining basic state services over the next two years will cost
Texas almost $84 billion, $3.7 billion more in general revenue than
the state expects to raise during that period, according to the
Senate budget introduced Tuesday.
However, a proposed 20% pay hike for adult prison guards and parole
officers didn't make it into the draft budgets, nor did security
improvements aimed at reducing contraband flows:
Among the budget increases proposed for Texas' prison system were
$22.2 million for pay raises for correctional and parole officers,
and $10.4 million in bond funds to repair the Hurricane Ike-damaged
prison hospital in Galveston.

The proposed pay raises were far less than the $453.4 million sought
by prison officials, and the budget did not address the $176 million
needed for cost increases this year and the $66 million sought for
security upgrades.

It's not at all clear TDCJ could safely operate without a much larger
portion of the increases they've requested because past agency
decisions to underpay staff, skimp on healthcare and ignore needed
security improvements have backed officials into a financial corner.
TDCJ's cost per prisoner in recent years has been artificially low
and cannot be sustained at current levels.

I've said before, given TDCJ's understaffing crisis (they're around
3,000 guards short of minimum staffing), perhaps it's now time to
consider actually reducing the size of Texas' Prison Nation in order
to stave off rising incarceration costs.

If you add up every Texan currently in prison, on probation, on
parole, or sitting in a county jail, it totals slightly more than the
number of residents living in Austin - about one out of every 21
adults. At more than 737,000 people, they would make up the fourth
largest city in the state after Houston, Dallas and San Antonio.
Indeed, that's more than total 2004 populations of Washington, D.C.
and four US states: Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.

Can we really afford for the corrections system to supervise the
equivalent of a major Texas city? According to TDCJ's official budget
request, the agency needs around $1.2 billion extra over the next
biennium to safely house the same number of prisoners it has now.

Other states facing budget crises are looking to reduce prison
populations to save money, and if Lone Star legislators won't pony up
enough to safely guard the 112 prison units TDCJ operates, Texas
should do so, too. It wouldn't be that hard, since fully 2/3 of Texas
prison inmates are parole eligible.

Alternatively, a bipartisan group of judges from Houston recently
suggested another way to diminish new prison entries - reducing to a
Class A misdemeanor charges against low-level, nonviolent drug
offenders who possess less than a gram of a controlled substance.
There are quite a few ways the Lege could skin that cat.

The Texas Legislature should at least ask the question: How many
fewer prisoners would we have to have for the Department of Criminal
Justice to a) live within its means and b) still provide adequate
security and staffing?

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