About Me

Grits for Breakfast is the private weblog and nom de plume of Scott Henson, a former journalist turned opposition researcher/political consultant, public policy researcher and blogger. Here's the short version of how I got here:

In college, I worked at The Daily Texan and afterward co-founded an alternative magazine called Polemicist with a max circulation of 15,000 that featured investigative journalism aimed at the university. For this work, my co-editor Tom Philpott, Jr., and I were inducted into UT-Austin's Friars Society.

After leaving UT Austin without a degree to become associate editor at the Texas Observer, as well as freelancing for a number of publications along the way, I grew weary of journalism and turned to more exciting electoral politics, performing opposition and defensive research for a total of 68 political campaigns in Texas between 1991-2004, as well as performing technical writing for several government agencies and nonprofits. In a brilliant stroke of planning, in 1995 a partner and I launched a startup firm called Paper Trail Research Services - an ill-fated name that seemed perfectly suited before the internet made "paper trails" an anachronism.

I also served a brief stint in the mid-'90s as a data specialist (or some such title) at the Texas State Medicaid Office, where I was primary author of the second edition of a publication called "Texas Medicaid in Perspective," colloquially known as "The Pink Book," essentially a 150-primer for legislators, staff and opinion leaders on the sprawling, byzantine, multi-billion dollar program. (That's where many of those "technical writing" gigs came from.) For about five years during this period, I authored a column on health care finance for a now-defunct publication called The Good Life. I also performed contract research on behalf of Texas environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Save Our Springs Alliance, including an early public policy report critical of the low-level nuclear waste dump in West Texas..

Most of my criminal-justice reform work over the years was performed as a volunteer, and mostly in the political off-season. I became engaged in the subject after helping victims respond to a serious police brutality incident in my own neighborhood in Austin in 1995. That got me engaged at the city level, and in 1997 I created a now-defunct website called the Austin Police Department Hall of Shame, which published excerpts from police disciplinary reports procured under the Open Records Act, as well as weekly media roundups of police misconduct cases. Later, as my interests expanded beyond police misconduct, the now-shuttered site was renamed the Texas Police Reform Center and was in many ways a proto-blog, just hand-coded in html.

In 1998, I was a co-founder of a local political action committee, the Sunshine Project for Police Accountability, which successfully campaigned for Austin's current Police Monitor and Oversight Board, for all the good it did. On behalf of that group 1999 was the first year I began monitoring criminal justice legislation at the Texas Lege, where over the years I've helped promote and/or negotiate a number of important pieces of reform legislation and fought (with mixed results) to kill bad legislation. From 2000 to 2006 I was director of the Police Accountability Project at the ACLU of Texas, at first part-time, working on statewide issues and promoting several pieces of successful legislation on their behalf. 

In 2004, I stopped accepting electoral campaign clients and began to focus exclusively on criminal justice reform work. It was also that year that this blog was launched. In 2006, I left ACLU and began taking contract and freelance work for private clients, continuing the blog as a personal effort. In 2007, largely due to work on this blog, I was named the ACLU Central Texas Chapter's Civil Libertarian of the Year.

My next regular, paid gig related to criminal justice politics came in 2008 when I became a consultant for the Innocence Project of Texas, lobbying on their behalf at the Legislature in 2009 and 2011 to help (successfully) secure expanded compensation for exonerees, reforms in eyewitness identification procedures, corroboration for jailhouse snitches and other public policy reforms. I still work for them today. I also began to take on a handful of political campaign clients and performing policy research on criminal-justice topics as well as other subjects (notably water rates) for various clients, including periodic research and writing assignments for the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition.

Grits for Breakfast remains an uncompensated hobby: All opinions are my own unless otherwise specified. (I also maintain a personal blog called Huevos Rancheros.) I've maintained Grits independently from any group or party because I want it to be place to discuss ideas in all their nuance, not just a spokesblog for this or that organization. The problems facing the criminal justice system are enormous, and we need unfettered, creative thinking to identify solutions that can work for everybody and keep us safe and free. It's my sincere hope that Grits contributes to that process in some small way.

Thanks for stopping by. 

Last updated January 27, 2012