October 18, 2006
The high cost of getting tuff on crime

Grits reads the staff report and the self-evaluation (both PDFs) from the Texas Sunset Commission on the Department of Criminal Justice so you don't have to. For those of you who think that the answer to our current crime problems is to lock up more bad guys, consider this:


Recruiting, hiring, and retaining enough employees to run several new prisons will be difficult for TDCJ. Currently, TDCJ faces significant staffing shortages at many prisons. In July 2006, the TDCJ officer shortage was 2,746 officers, down from a high of 3,406 in October 2001. TDCJ’s LAR anticipates that the State would operate two of the three new prisons and contract with a private vendor for the third. If the State runs two of the three new prisons, it will have to hire an additional 1,050 employees. Since TDCJ cannot fill existing vacancies, the agency would likely have difficulty filling newly created positions.

When you can tell me how the state can address that problem, then we can talk about building more prisons. Until then, maybe we ought to think about some alternate solutions that would incarcerate the right people and cost a lot less money. The choice is yours.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on October 18, 2006 to Crime and Punishment | TrackBack
Comments

Kuff - alternatives to prison? Good grief, man - this is Texas. We love our prisons and will spend ourselves into bankruptcy, close down the schools if we have to, just to keep the prisons going. You just watch. The election is three weeks away and the Republicans - tough on crime, remember? - will win big.

Posted by: Dennis on October 18, 2006 9:26 AM

For those of you who think that the answer to our current crime problems is to lock up more bad guys

Yeah, it's wacky! Let 'em all go and put 'em on the honor system, I say! What the heck?

Posted by: Kevin Whited on October 18, 2006 10:26 AM

Did you even read the rest of the post, Kevin, or are you just incapable of addressing the issues of cost and staffing?

Posted by: Charles Kuffner on October 18, 2006 10:35 AM

It's the usual Republican response, Kuff:

Ideology trumps reality.

the new motto for the new Republican party ought to be:

"Facts? We don't need no stinkin' facts! We already know what to do..."

We lock up more people, per capita, than anyone else. Does that mean:
1. Americans are more criminally-inclined than any other nation on earth
2. Many of our laws are unjust, putting those in prison who shouldn't be there
3. Our political system values incarceration more than any other social intervention to deal with not just crime, but a variety of social problems.

Posted by: Locutor on October 18, 2006 12:18 PM

Kevin's brand of big government conservatism is par for the course - BlogHouston's bread and butter. But it's actually Republican legislators in Texas pushing the alternatives route, including the current chair of the House Corrections Committee and his two GOP predecessors.

From the 1836 revolution until Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, TX went from 0 to less than 30,000 beds. From 1980 to 2002, when the GOP took over state government, we added 127,000, and now need 11,000 more in the next five years. The Dems are responsible for the prison buildup (especially the late Ann Richards), and ironically, at the Lege it's mostly Rs trying to manage the crisis Dems policies caused. Kevin's comments reflect a lot of knee-jerk assumptions, but not the real world politics of who supports prison building in Texas, and who doesn't.

Posted by: Gritsforbreakfast on October 18, 2006 12:19 PM

For those of you who think that the answer to our current crime problems is to lock up more bad guys....

I think the problem is that we place too many folks in that category already. We're pretty good at locking up the really, really bad guys (and gals), but we also lock up way too many folks who's "badness" was pretty mediocre, often turning them into the really, really bad sort in the process.

The obvious examples are non-violent drug users, of course. Sure, maybe you shouldn't be smoking pot or snorting coke, but is that really something so evil, so abominable, that we have to throw you in a cage (taking away your livelihood in the process) to try to stop you from doing it?

But there are plenty of other examples too. Back on Oct. 2, the DMN had an article about small-time violators of Texas's "zero-tolerance" sex crime laws. Exhibit A: a 19-year-old who is now facing 20 years in prison plus lifetime registration on Texas's sex offender list for having consensual sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend. Sure, she's underage, so what he did was wrong. But he's clearly no pedophile.

There's case after case like this in Texas, with punishment so clearly out of proportion to the offense that no one with half a brain could support it. But still we hear from knee-jerk "lock-'em-up" advocates like Kevin that our problem is that we just haven't locked up enough "bad guys" yet, despite overwhelming evidence that our true problem is almost precisely the opposite.

Posted by: Mathwiz on October 18, 2006 1:10 PM