Nominate Texas worst jail "hellhole"

Here are a few disparate items that deserve Grits readers attention:

"Hellhole" nominations
The Texas Jail Project is seeking nominations for which county jail deserves the appellation "worst hellhole" in Texas. Let 'em know which county jail you think is worst. (My guess: Dallas will be hard to beat.)

Drug court trend expanding across Texas
The Texas Observer has a feature interviewing drug court judges in Travis, Dallas, Nueces and Montgomery Counties.

TYC pepper spray policy temporarily changed
At least until next week when a new policy comes before a public hearing on Monday, the Texas Youth Commission has agreed to a temporary new pepper spray policy. See Grits testimony submitted for Monday's hearing, and a just-published public policy report from the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition.

Re-entry group expands scope
See a nice profile of re-entry work by the Dallas-based Mothers (and Fathers) for Advancement of Social Services, and their recent expasion to Fort Worth.

New duds
Texas prison guards will get a new uniform.

Prison Museum to Host Forum Featuring Texecution Witnesses on Lethal Injection's 25th Anniversary

Via The Back Gate, a press release from the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville lets us know about an event next week that I hope The Back Gaters will attend and blog about:

To mark the 25th anniversary of lethal injection in the United States, and to help shed light on an issue up for Supreme Court review in early 2008, Bill Crawford (the Austin-based author of Texas Death Row: Executions in the Modern Era) will moderate a panel discussion on Friday, December 7, 6:30 p.m., at the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville, Texas, titled “25 Years of Lethal Injection: What Have We Learned?”

The featured panelists include reporter Michael Gracyzk, who has viewed over 300 executions during his career as a journalist; former Public Information Manager with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Larry Fitzgerald, who has witnessed over 200 executions; Texas State Prison Museum director (and former warden of the Walls Unit) Jim Willett, who has witnessed over 90 executions; and Paula Kurland, a victims’ rights advocate who served on the Death Penalty Initiative with the Constitution Project in Washington, D.C..

“Since recordings of executions aren’t maintained, the memories of those who have witnessed executions are critical to understanding lethal injections,” said Crawford. “In only a few months, the Supreme Court will determine whether lethal injection violates the Constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Though the panel is timed to coincide with the first lethal injection 25 years ago, it’s also coming at a time in which Americans are increasingly aware of the controversy surrounding this method of execution.”

The panel discussion event in Huntsville is part of an exhibit at the Texas Prison Museum entitled “Texas Death Row: Executions in the Modern Era,” which will be on display at the Texas Prison Museum throughout the month of December.

The good news, says tiny Elsa PD: None of our officers have been arrested for smuggling drugs this year

Since I try to track drug-related law enforcement corruption along the Texas-Mexico border on this blog, it's worth putting a bow on a story Grits first described last year, via DRC Net:

In McAllen, Texas, a former Elsa police officer was sentenced November 21 to seven years in federal prison after being caught in an undercover bribery and drug string. Herman Carr, 46, had earlier pleaded guilty to taking $5,000 in August 2006 to provide protection for a vehicle he believed was carrying 11 pounds of cocaine. The drug dealers were actually FBI agents. Carr is the second former Elsa officer to go down in the sting: In May, Ismael Gomez, 27, got an eight-year sentence for taking $2,500 to protect a supposed 22 pound coke shipment.

Elsa PD was also the subject this year of a federal consent decree (pdf) over sexual discrimination and retaliation charges.

Describing the sentence, the McAllen Monitor optimistically concluded, without apparent irony, "Elsa’s police department has had considerable turnover since the men’s arrests; however, none of its officers has faced drug-related charges this year." That last line sounds almost like bragging, given what's happened in the last year at the tiny, rural department!

Defending the Damned on the Cheap: Do Public Defenders Deserve Bigger Budgets?

Via Gideon, Radley Balko has a book review at Reason in which he argues that public defender offices, far from deserving scorn, arguably deserve bigger budgets in light of what we've learned from dozens of recent DNA exonerations about how innocent people come to be convicted.

Yes, that's a senior editor at Reason magazine, the small "l" libertarian bastion, calling for increased spending on a government program. (I've been scanning science articles on Google News ever since looking for the inevitable story about genetically engineered, winged pigs.) Writes Balko:

underfunding, coupled with the threat of mandatory minimum sentences and an increase in the number of crimes on the books, results in an overwhelmingly high number of plea-bargained admissions of guilt, as prosecutors look to pad conviction rates and defense attorneys have no choice but to slough off burdensome caseloads. A 2005 report from the Texas Office of Court Administration, for example, found that less than 1 percent of felony cases in Texas ever make it to trial. The rest are resolved by plea bargains. The federal courts aren’t much better: Only about 10 percent of felony cases go to trial. In state courts across the country, it’s 7 percent.

“I can confirm from my own experience as a judge that indigent defendants are generally rather poorly represented,” the federal appeals court judge Richard Posner writes in his 1999 book The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory. But Posner, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit and one of the country’s most renowned legal scholars, isn’t much bothered by this. “If we are to be hardheaded we must recognize that this may not be entirely a bad thing,” he says. “The lawyers who represent indigent criminal defendants seem to be good enough to reduce the probability of convicting an innocent person to a very low level. If they were much better, either many guilty people would be acquitted or society would have to devote much greater resources to the prosecution of criminal cases. A barebones system for the defense of indigent criminal defendant may be optimal.”

Posner’s position is widely shared. Indeed, most advocates of limited government would probably instinctively resist the idea of devoting more public resources to the legal representation of indigent defendants. But perhaps it’s time to reconsider that resistance.

The fundamental function of government is to secure the rights of its citizens. There has never been much problem generating support for the law enforcement side of that responsibility: courts, police, prosecutors, and prisons. The government seems eager to protect us from criminals. But it’s also obliged not to violate our rights in the process.

If we’re serious about giving everyone a fair crack at justice, indigent defendants need access to the same sorts of resources prosecutors have, including their own independent experts and investigators. If we’re going to generously fund the government’s efforts to imprison people, we need to ensure that everyone the government pursues is adequately defended and protected from prosecutorial overreach. The ongoing stream of exonerations in felony cases suggests we’re a long way from that goal.

Of course, in most of Texas indigent defendants are represented by private attorneys, who in some cases are paid more for entering into a plea bargain than for seeking a dismissal of the case!

Balko quotes Judge Posner declaring that poor-quality indigent defense may not be a bad thing "if we are to be hardheaded." What he left unsaid is that to be hard-headed about providing quality defense counsel, we must simultaneously be hard-hearted toward innocent people caught up in the system who do not receive a zealous defense.

There is little middle ground here - the overarching design of the adversarial system assumes each defendant receives an attorney's competent and zealous representation, but at the micro-level, underfunding thwarts that goal and makes mockery of claims to sure justice. Since Posner wrote those words at the end of the last century, advancements in DNA technology and the resulting exoneration of more than 200 people (so far) put the lie to his assumption that our system has "reduce[d] the probability of convicting an innocent person to a very low level."

Much has changed since then. We now know to a certainty that eyewitnesses frequently misidentify suspects who they didn't know previously, and that the failure to use "double blind" lineups can cause police assumptions to influence witnesses. We know that crime labs make errors and that forensic science is not the same as objective science. We know that informants will lie to reduce culpability for their own crimes, and that the average person only recognizes a lie when it's told to them about half the time, including prosecutors, judges and jurors.

Finally, as Balko points out, we know that public defenders and private counsel for indigent defendants are underfunded and frequently fail to adequately vet the system for flaws.

All of the primary reasons for wrongful convictions - faulty eyewitness testimony, mendacious snitches, sloppy crime lab work, slacker defense counsel, police or prosecutorial misconduct - inarguably occur in other cases besides the few where DNA evidence was gathered or preserved. (Jeff Blackburn, Chief Counsel at the Innocence Project of Texas, tells me he expects more exonerations to come before the Texas Legislature reconvenes in January 2009.) With more than 150,000 adults incarcerated in Texas prisons alone (more than 2 million nationwide), who believes the same flaws in the justice system haven't trapped hundreds or even thousands more people whose names were never cleared?

We need procedural reforms in all these areas, but Balko's right that the one element holding them all together is quality defense counsel. Creating new procedural tools to protect innocence won't help if defendants' lawyers don't aggressively avail themselves of them.

When even Reason magazine thinks government is underspending on one of its functions, it's hard not to think we might have reached a tipping point in regards to changing public perception in the wake of 200+ DNA exonerations.

Serious question, flippant answers: What would Jesus do about the death penalty?

Via Doc Berman, the Chicago Tribune's political blog has the story of GOP presidential candidates responding to a question from their "YouTube" debate: What do you think Jesus' position would be on the death penalty? The candidates punted on the substance, but it's a damn good question. Said Baptist minister and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, "Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office. That's what Jesus would do."

That's a smarmy politician's answer, dodging a legitimate query instead of addressing it seriously. (The Texas Moratorium Network has the video.) What would a more honest response look like?

Let me start by admitting we cannot know for sure. The Old Testament emphatically supported the death penalty, and certainly Jesus declared he did not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it.

At the same time, New Testament teaching replaced the morality of "an eye for an eye" with "turning the other cheek." Certainly Christ intervened to stop the stoning of an adulteress, but without knowing more, can we universalize from that one example? On the cross Jesus forgave the thief next to him, but despite his divine powers over death, still allowed him to perish. Trying to divulge Jesus' position on capital punishment from these philosophical hints is like guessing the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin.

As Doc Berman pointed out, Jesus himself was subjected to capital punishment at the hands of the Roman Empire, though Christians believe he died sinless. If that is the case, then Jesus was an innocent man executed wrongfully. One imagines, then, at least at some point on Good Friday as he hung innocent on the cross, paying with his life for the sins of others, Christ must have endured some misgiving about the death penalty. Why, I wonder, didn't Rev. Huckabee mention that?

At a minimum, I wish this question had sparked a debate among candidates about the bevy of recent DNA exonerations and the likelihood that more innocent people are still on death row or rotting away in prisons.

Another clue: Early Christian societies considered snitching in death penalty cases an act that justified permanent, lifetime excommunication, damning the informant's soul to eternal hellfire.

Without question we can say that Jesus would not have supported capital punishment (or any criminal penalty) without at least two witnesses supporting charges against the defendant. Both Christ and the Apostle Paul affirmed the tradition from Mosaic Law that "two or three witnesses" were required to convict someone of any offense. Given that, and assuming the verity of the biblical passion story, I don't believe Jesus would have supported executions based on a single person's testimony or on the testimony of a compensated informant (like, say, Judas).

From the Sermon on the Mount, we learn that Jesus considered merely holding anger against someone as grievous an act as killing. (Matthew 5:21-26)

You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, 'You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.' But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.

So while this passage insists that murderers should be "liable for judgment," so should those who carry anger in their hearts. The same judgment? Who knows? While we don't know what "judgment" Christ considered proper for murder, we can say Jesus would not support retributive arguments in favor of the death penalty. He would have considered the emotional component that causes people to demand retribution antithetical to the tenets of peace taught in the Sermon on the Mount.

What do the major Christian denominations believe about the death penalty? I found this useful compendium of the positions on capital punishment for the major US denominations. Roman Catholics, American Baptists, Methodists, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Reformed, Eastern Orthodox, and the United Church of Christ all officially take an "abolitionist" or anti-death penalty stance.

I don't honestly know what Jesus' position would have been on capital punishment, but I do know this: Whether Jesus supported the death penalty, without question he established a requirement that his followers visit those in prison, including the condemned - perhaps one of Christ's least-regarded dicta among modern Christians, sad to say.

I like the YouTube debate format. Average people ask questions the professional journalists would never even think to bring up, and the results are frequently telling even when the questions get dodged. While the YouTuber's theological question remains unanswered, it's obvious that Christ had more empathy for prisoners and the condemned than Huckabee and the other pols on the stage demonstrated last night, that's for sure.

MORE/BLOGVERSATION: On Huckabee, Christ and the death penalty, from A Blog From Hell:

Well, Jesus may not have sought public office, (like being King of the Jews or something), but he seemed to have something to say about the death penalty, something to do with only those who haven't sinned should be "casting the first stone." ...

Huckabee tried to say that "forgiveness" doesn't mean you don't punish people. The hell it doesn't! Forgiveness doesn't mean anything if you're still punishing the person you are "forgiving." Saying you are doing both is Orwellian bullshit. The New Testament has a kind of economic model, forgiving sins is like forgiving a debt. You can't make someone pay a debt and forgive the debt at the same time. Forgiveness is not about you not feeling angry when you end someone's life.

Perhaps when Huckabee got off the dais he found a better answer to the question on his voice mail - the incident reminded Think Progress that Huckabee occasionally receives phone calls from God. At the Atlantic Online, Andrew Sullivan says "To use such a cheap line to score a laugh in a political debate is not something I find particularly admirable." Arkansas Blog recalled another instance where then-Governor Huckabee responded with similar flippancy to the same question, declaring that Jesus' silence on the topic implied his approval, which AB points out is a unique form of biblical exegesis, indeed. What kind of theology are they teaching out there at Ouachita Baptist University, one wonders?

Pepper Spray at TYC: A Report from the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition

The Texas Criminal Justice Coalition's Juvenile Justice Initiative has released a detailed public policy report entitled, "Pepper Spray in the Texas Youth Commission: Research Review and Recommendations" (pdf). I've not had a chance to read it yet, but wanted to post a link to make it available to Grits readers. Congrats especially to report author Leah Pinney, a past intern of mine gone on to bigger and better things, for her hard work on the project.

Lawsuit: Private mercenaries, police trainers in Iraq abuse steroids

If steroid abuse is a problem among police officers, who is surprised to hear allegations that up to 1/4 of private mercenaries employed by the Blackwater Corporation in Iraq may use illegal steroids or other "judgment altering substances"? Those charges arose in a lawsuit filed against the mercenary firm in Washington, which claims that the firm tolerated "widespread steroid abuse" among its designated "shooters" in Iraq.

Blackwater denies the allegations, but plaintiffs' attorneys say company employees have confirmed the company's knowledge of employee steroid use in depositions under oath. See the news story from CNN.

I'll bet this isn't just a problem at Blackwater. One of Blackwater's principal competitors, Dyncorp, operates US anti-drug operations in Afghanistan and South America and is the most likely beneficiary of President Bush's proposal to send private mercenary firms to train Mexican police. One wonders if Dyncorp employees faces similar problems with illegal steroid use?

Do we really want to send a bunch of juiced up mercenaries to Mexico only to suffer some 'roid-rage induced public relations fiasco?

More and more I think it's absolutely absurd that Texas plans to steroid test high school athletes but doesn't require testing for police officers, which I've argued previously "leaves officers open to coercion, blackmail, or at a minimum wrongly divided loyalties." The exact same argument can be made for steroid-using mercenaries if the US decides to send them to Mexico. But at least that offensive lineman in high school won't get an unfair advantage in a football game. Talk about misplaced priorities!

Bexar County can't keep contraband out of bricks and mortar jail: Would 'tent jail' be secure?

Reacting to news that a Bexar County Jail employee allegedly sold cocaine, marijuana and cell phones to inmates, Sam over at Man O' Law makes an excellent point: If they can't keep drugs and contraband from being smuggled into a jail built of bricks and mortar, what makes the new Sheriff or County Commissioners think they can keep a "tent jail" secure?

As I've written before, there's a reason prisons have walls.

Justice system should focus resources on "power few" criminals who drive most crime

I wonder if these two items are related?

First, over at Corrections Sentencing, Michael writes that:

A new study suggests that too much money is wasted on low-risk crime targets. Both crime and prison populations could be reduced dramatically by focusing on the “power few” criminals who commit the most crime, according to Lawrence Sherman, Director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor of Criminology at Cambridge University, UK.

Using data across a wide range of research, Sherman shows that most crime is committed by a small fraction of all criminals, at a tiny fraction of all locations, against a tiny fraction of all victims, during a few hours a week. By focusing police, probation, parole, rehabilitation, security and prison resources on these “power few” units with the most crime, the study shows how society could stand a far better chance at crime prevention without raising costs.

“Billions of dollars in criminal justice costs are wasted each year on people and places with almost no risk of serious violent crime,” said Sherman, “while the high-risk targets receive far too little attention.” Citing rising homicide rates in Philadelphia since 2002, his research shows how more rehabilitation for a tiny number of offenders may have been able to prevent many of the murders.

The study shows that the key to making the most out of these extreme concentrations of crime would be to test prevention strategies aimed only at these few crime locations, times, situations, victims or offenders.

Then, in the Dallas Morning News, I find this item: "Man held in hundreds of Dallas County burglaries." Certainly focusing on suspects who police believe committed hundreds of similar crimes makes a lot more sense than some of the more random enforcement tactics police engage in, e.g., conducting "fishing expeditions" at traffic stops.

OTOH, this could be emblematic of a different problem - the periodic tendency for Dallas County to charge and convict innocent people. "I've been late paying my mortgage every month for the last three years," said the suspect. "If I broke into 200 homes, I wouldn't be in bankruptcy. ... I'm barely eating." Good point.

Whatever the truth of the charges against this one defendant, it struck me as interesting to read both of these items and realize the Dallas burglary case, if the fellow turns out to have done what police say he has, more or less exemplifies the empirical data and theoretical conclusions in the study described by Science Daily ("Less is more in fighting crime," Nov. 26).

In any event, prioritizing enforcement resources and incarceration space for more serious offenders makes enormous sense from a public safety perspective. I've never understood why the idea is often portrayed as such a radical thing - as former House Corrections Chair Ray Allen used to say, it's smarter to focus limited criminal justice resources on people who we're afraid of, not on those whom we're only "mad at."

Vote for Grits in ABA Blawg Poll

Thanks to the editors of the American Bar Association Journal for selecting Grits for Breakfast one of the nation's Top 100 Law Blawgs, out of a field of 2,000-3,000 law-related blogs identified. To make matters more interesting (or perhaps in a clever, likely successful effort to drive traffic to their list), the ABA Journal pitted their just-named Top 100 into several categories and asked their readers to vote among them. The category in which they placed Grits - "Crime Time" - includes some powerful competition, including some of my own routine reads and some good looking blogs I'd not seen before. But I think Grits delivers a pretty strong product, given the state of the blawgosphere, and if you agree please vote for this blog here. Vote early and often, as they say (or at least from as many different individual computers as possible); the online plebiscite ends January 2.

TYC Documentary Project Launches Website

Say "Howdy" to Emily Pyle and Co. over at their new website, the TYC Documentary Project. The film, which last I heard is scheduled to come out in January 2009, tracks the stories of four kids incarcerated in the Texas Youth Commission. I hope they come up with a catchier title before the movie opens! - just kidding, Emily. :)

Use of county jail by Smith County for child support scofflaws contributes to overincarceration

Smith County District Judge Carole Clark writes in to the blog Smith Counth: Tell the Truth to explain under what circumstances the county incarcerates probationers for non-payment of child support, a practice the county began in 2002. The optional program puts child support scofflaws on a "civil" probation that uses the county jail to enforce payments. Judge Clark said the program is:

aimed at the thirty percent of the population who do not pay their child support as ordered and for which there had not previously been adequate tools to enforce these obligations. The program uses laws currently in place which allow for people who have been found in contempt for failure to pay child support when able to do so to be on probation. This probation is civil probation but has many of the same requirements as criminal probation. They report to a probation officer regularly, pay a fee to support the program, work and pay their support.

The program began with 100 people and one probation officer. It now has six probation officers and appx. 1100 persons. The history of this program is quite amazing. For many of the persons on probation, working and paying support are new experiences and many owe tens of thousands of dollars in delinquent support.

If someone on probation does not comply with the probation requirements, their probation officer , after attempts to remediate the situation fail, will ask the Office of the Attorney General to file papers with the court requesting the probation be revoked. The maximum jail time is 180 days.

The most common conditions of probation I see violated are reporting to probation and paying the child support. An arrest warrant is issued and when arrested the person is brought to court on a Monday or Thursday afternoon. I see people twice a week as the law requires me to see them quickly.

If after hearing, I find a person did violate their probation and has no reasonable excuse for doing so, some jail time is awarded as a means of "getting their attention." Some of these people are not regulars in the jail and for them, it is usually a "wake up call." For some, unfortunately, jail for violation of probation is a familiar story.

After a time in jail, I call the person over to court and let them go to the AIC for more intensive monitoring. However, a number of these folks violate criminal laws while they are not paying child support and I cannot deal with their case until the criminal case is handled.

If AIC [ed. note: the Alternative Incarceration Program, discussed here] is appropriate, I send them. The results are very gratifying. Many are now working and paying. Last Friday, 149 were in the AIC. Not all are child support. Of those, 110 were working. Many have never worked at a legal job.

If AIC doesn't work, the law provides referral to the DA's office can be made for criminal prosecution for a state jail felony.

All in all, the programs are collecting in excess of 3.5 million dollars per year, plus fees for probation, court costs and child support.

Here's the problem: It costs more than $6,000 to incarcerate someone in the Smith County Jail for 180 days, more than $7,000 if they're housed in rented beds. So if the county jail handles a significant volume of extra inmates revoked under this "civil probation," there's an extra cost to the taxpayers in addition to the benefits to child support recipients.

If prosecutors put scofflaws behind bars for a state jail felony, that's a mandatory two-year sentence at an additional cost to taxpayers of $32,000. The county doesn't pay that money, but taxes paid by Smith County residents sure do, and it doesn't matter to the taxpayer, at the end of the day, which governmental hand is in their pocket.

Judge Clark's rendition of the process has her using jail to "get the attention" of civil probation violators the very first time they fail to meet their obligations and come before their court. I'm sure that does get their attention, but it's a big contributing factor to local jail overcrowding, and it's a lot more aggressive approach than other counties take with the same population. After all, if you incarcerate a person for any significant period of time, they leave jail unemployed and with no income to make child support payments.

It makes a lot more sense to use the AIC to keep these folks employed than in jail, even if the county has to pay their wages. Think about it: Is it worth up to $40,000 to the taxpayers to force compliance with child support payments that wouldn't come close to that amount over the same period? If you're going to do that, a cheaper approach might be for the county to just pay the child support and place a lien on future income.

I commend Judge Clark for explaining the program to a local blog, and recognize the good intentions behind the use of the county jail in this fashion - but they are the type of intentions with which the road to hell is paved, as these offenders have become a significant contributor to local jail overcrowding. Now that the AIC is in place (it wasn't when the program started), it should be the first-line sentence for these offenders instead of requiring "get attention" jail time. And given the cost of incarceration, it would behoove the county to create public works jobs, WPA style, compared to the cost of incarcerating those same folks.

This is a great example of how much of the overincarceration in Smith and other counties is mostly volitional, based on choices made by elected officials, not on population increases or big-picture demographics.

Getting people to pay child support is smart. Filling up Texas jails and prisons with non-criminals isn't. There has to be a way to achieve goals in civil society without only ever resorting to incarceration as a stick to compel behaviors we want.

RELATED: See "Greg Abbott's Cash for Kids," from the Austin Chronicle.

Lack of accountability explains why Texas counties dropping UTMB jail healthcare

The UTMB-Galveston Faculty Association blog identifies the common reasoning between Jefferson County's recent decision not to hire UTMB for its jail healthcare (discussed on Grits here) and Dallas County's decision to end its contract with the Galveston medical school: UTMB wants "to make mistakes and have the contracting county eat the resulting lawsuits."

Bingo!

UTMB recently obtained a contract to provide healthcare at the Galveston County Jail, and supplies health services for inmates at the Texas Youth Commission and for most Texas prison inmates, much of it via "telemedicine.

Libal supplies front-lines blog report from Burnet County uprising against private jail

It sounds like grassroots opposition to an entrepreneurial jail proposal in Burnet County (between Austin and Waco in Central Texas) may be as strong or stronger than in Tyler, where county jail bonds recently failed by a 69-31 margin.

So many people packed the courtroom for a town hall meeting last week, reported the Burnet Bulletin (11/21), that the fire marshal had to ask some folks to leave. "Residents spilled out of the courtroom doorways, stood in the back of the room, coveted the jury box, and lined up down the stairs and out the front door waiting for a chance to speak." The intrepid Bob Libal reports from the front lines at the blog Texas Prison Bidness after attending a boisterous community meeting on the topic at the Burnet County Courthouse.

I arrived for the 7:00 p.m. meeting around 6:30 to find the old courthouse nearly full. Opponents of the jail, who seem to be very well-organized, told me they'd mailed out 7,000 fliers and placed by an ad on the local radio station announcing the meeting. I was pleased to see that audience members were being handed Considering a Private Jail, Prison or Detention Center, a pamphlet developed by Grassroots Leadership and South Texans Opposing Private Prisons, as well as a chart explaining the jail's proposed financing.

By 7:00, the courtroom was spilling well into the halls with at least 500 people, nearly all seemingly opposed to the private jail scheme. The plan, similar to those increasingly common in many Texas counties, is to finance the construction of a new county jail by floating revenue bonds (through the Public Facilities Corporation) and paying back the bonds by profiting from the importation of federal U.S. Marshals or Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees.

Opponents of the jail were allowed to speak first. Five Burnet citizens laid out the case against the jail, including the pitfalls of private jail companies, potential dangers in floating debt for private jail expansion (perhaps county officials should look into Willacy County where every resident is currently a staggering $8,700 in debt due to prison expansion), and a general sense that shipping inmates into Burnet County wasn't necessary or good for the county.

See the rest of Libal's story for more on the corporate players behind the Burnet County deal. With jail bonds going down in Houston and Tyler, this opposition bodes ill for local pols who support issuing jail bonds without asking voter support.

Stay tuned for more on this developing local movement in Burnet County against entrepreneurial jailing.

Overtime Pay for TYC Renewed: Full 2-year OT budget spent in first 2 months, now cannibalizing vacant positions

Good news for Texas Youth Commission employees: TYC yesterday reinstated overtime for Juvenile Correctional Officers (JCOs), reported the Austin Statesman ("Youth commission resumes overtime pay for guards," Nov. 28):

Extra hours worked during the past month since overtime pay was suspended will be paid in a special check to be issued by mid-December, agency officials said in a statement.

Acting Executive Director Dimitria Pope suspended overtime payments in October after top Youth Commission officials were shocked to learn that the agency had used most of its annual overtime budget in just two months. At the time, agency officials said that they could not properly track overtime payments and that they were investigating why so many extra hours had been logged.

The move angered many employees, who questioned why Pope and other Austin officials were so surprised by the cost, considering chronic understaffing in Youth Commission lockups in many parts of the state.

In the statement, the agency attributed that large overtime bill to "the shortage of juvenile corrections officers at numerous TYC facilities. ... Another factor was the lack of a uniform staff schedule throughout the institutions."

Pope said that a uniform staffing plan will be completed by early January to ensure that all overtime worked is evenly distributed among staff and to "develop strategies to work overtime more efficiently and consistently given the realities of current staff shortages."

The cost of overtime during the period it was suspended: $1.4 million, about what it was in the previous month.

The statement said that pay for all the extra overtime will come from money budgeted for staff positions that are vacant.

Three words come to mind: Gross. Fiscal. Mismanagement. Then after that, two more: Tick, tock.

When is that new conservator and permanent commissioner coming, Governor Perry? This is really getting out of hand.

OTOH, before now TYC officials claimed they didn't have a staffing crisis, and insisted at legislative hearings that they were meeting their 12-1 youth-staff ratios without difficulty and required no expanded staffing. This crisis has put the lie to that myth, and forced TYC administrators to publicly acknowledge that understaffing lies at the root of many if not most of the agency's problems. You can't fix problems you won't admit, so maybe this new revelation (known previously to everyone but the TDCJ transplants running the Youth Commission) will lead to new policies down the line that remedy the underlying problems instead of just the cosmetic ones.

That's a grim silver lining (that and the fact that TYC employees will get their overtime checks in time for Christmas). After all, the agency's problems are quite immediate, and as John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run, we're all dead." But in the current dysfunctional environment, one begins to thank heaven for small favors.

Grits comments submitted on TYC use of force policy

The Texas Youth Commission's "Spray First" policy remains in the spotlight this week, with ongoing litigation at the Travis County courthouse and the comment period closing on a new use of force policy.

This morning I compiled and submitted comments and questions on the proposed TYC use of force policy published in the Texas Register earlier this month, including input from Grits commenters as well as a compilation of critiques and questions from past Grits posts. See the submitted comments here, and let me know what you think.

UPDATE: Mike Ward at the Austin Statesman reports there has still been no deal struck on lawsuit settlement negotiations related to TYC's pepper spray policy.

NIMBY opposition to East Austin counseling center threatens needed treatment

This is a personal request to Grits readers living in Travis County - it's my birthday today, so consider it a birthday gift - contact the Travis County Commissioners Court to ask them to support a proposed new East Austin counseling program to be operated by the adult probation department. (You can find phone numbers and emails for members of the Travis County Commissioners Court here.)

NIMBY infighting among long-feuding East Austin neighborhood interests threatens to delay or even stop creation of a much-needed outpatient drug counseling center. The Travis County probation department wants to open the center in a complex operated by Ebeneezer Baptist Church, a 125-year old black church which has been working toward building community service facilities in the area for more than two decades.

The area has been gentrifying, though, as a result of the recent in-city housing boom, and a handful of new residents, clustered in the Guadalupe Association for an Improve Neighborhood (GAIN), showed up at the eleventh hour last week to oppose the project. Said GAIN representative Buck McKinney, "the neighborhood has already voiced its opposition to this day treatment center and unless we see something in these materials that indicates otherwise, we are opposed" ... "emphatically opposed," he later added.

(See the video of last week's commissioners court hearing, as well as the hearing Nov. 13 where the project was discussed in greater detail.)

The center is part of new, specialized probation services funded this year by the state Legislature and discussed at inordinate length on this blog during the legislative session. East Austin needs this counseling center; the proposed location is ideal; the partnership with Ebeneezer Baptist Church makes a tremendous amount of sense. According to the Travis County CSCD (see their fact sheet on the topic, uploaded here, responding to questions from GAIN), there's a tremendous need for the services that would be provided:

Our waiting lists show that about 1000 individuals per year are required by the Courts to participate in treatment, but are they unable to get access because of a lack of treatment slots in Travis County or because of their inability to pay. This program will provide substance abuse counseling to approximately 1000 individuals on probation in the course of a year. In addition, we will provide short-term cognitive classes for about 500 people.

GAIN's McKinney claimed at length they had no opportunity for input, but Precinct Two Commissioner Sarah Eckhardt easily established a timeline showing the neighborhood had plenty of opportunity to get involved; the problem was they only ever gave the input, "We're opposed," failing even to fill out a questionnaire the probation department sent out asking for their specific concerns about the project.

Commissioner Davis said during the previous week's Nov. 13 meeting that he'd personally notified GAIN as soon as he saw the item on the agenda, but they didn't show up. Even so McKinney contradicted Davis, claiming GAIN had never been informed. Eckhardt rightly pointed out that other neighborhood associations had gotten involved in the process, the commissioners court agendas were public, that much of the information GAIN claimed not to have was posted publicly on the website, and other individuals from different neighborhood groups had attended the previous week's meeting.

A representative from Ebeneezer Baptist Church said the strategy of GAIN has been to "stall, stall, stall and delay" and oppose all development of community services at that site. Frankly that's been my observation as well regarding nearly every important community development project in the area, which is not far from my own home.

To me, at that point the commissioner's court should have just voted. GAIN was informed just like everybody else, they simply opposed the project and there's no significant chance they'll change their mind. The request for delay was made in bad faith, and granted purely as a function of form, bending over backwards to project an aura of inclusiveness.

Such annoying, 11th hour NIMBYism ignores the best interests of the broader community because of over-hyped fears of crime, as though living within a rock's throw of I-35 they can behave like they live in some elite, gated community. I've lived about a mile or so east of the proposed site for nearly two decades, and frankly I'd much prefer to have the counseling center behind my house than the cheap-ass condos they just constructed there on the Featherlite tract.

I understand why a politician would curry favor with a neighborhood association in his district, but in this case it seems like Commissioner Ron Davis is cutting off his nose to spite his face. (In the interest of full disclosure, Ron is a former campaign client.)

By enabling opponents of the counseling center, he's going against the best interests of the overwhelming majority of his district's residents to mollify a uniquely gentrified pocket of East Austin. GAIN wants to pretend that an area with myriad urban problems can be transformed through pure denial into some sort of suburban enclave - next they'll want a gate. It can't happen, and those folks who thought it could should never have moved there.

Travis County's money from the state for this counseling center was approved for spending by TDCJ-CJAD seven weeks ago. The county already has employee applicants for the new slots waiting in limbo to whom they'd like to offer positions. Discussions at last week's meeting over when the state "required" the center to open were frustratingly circular. Commissioner Davis said he felt "handcuffed" by not knowing how much time the county had to open the facility, but Nagy said several times that the county was supposed to begin Oct. 10, and had promised the state to begin operations at that time. In the previous biennium when operating funds weren't used, she said, counties had to return a portion to the state, and she anticipated that's what would happen to unused funds the county was supposed to have been spending since Oct. 10.

In other words, the county, at this point, is losing treatment funds every day they wait. If it goes on much longer, Nagy said, the state has said it may divert the funds to counties with existing, active programs who can immediately use it.

If you live in Travis County, please contact members of the Commissioners Court to let them know you support the 11th Street counseling facility. It'd be a shame if after all the effort to secure new funding for probation services Travis County didn't get our share.

Travis County Commissioners need to step up, ignore GAIN's rank NIMBYism, end these harmful delays, and support the new counseling center next Tuesday. Any other decision would harm public safety, worsen jail overcrowding, add red ink to the criminal justice budget, and sacrifice the public interest in ways I think most Austinites don't support.

Bits and pieces: Important but low-profile Texas criminal justice stories

Just a quick roundup of Texas criminal justice stories that I haven't had time to post on but which deserve Grits readers' attention:

Did Plano police conspire to set up motorist for phony DWI?
Robert Guest at I Was The State points to a troubling situation in Plano where officers allegedly falsified police reports and the city attorney is covering up for them. According to the Plano Star-Courier, three officers allegedly conspired to arrest a man as harassment on behalf of his estranged wife. Officers "claimed they had never met Sarah Boswell despite records showing the calls between the officers’ personal cell phones, both before, during and immediately after Boswell’s arrest." The city attorney defending such conduct in the story is a fool: With such a clearcut case of conspiracy, she's just going to add to the city's liability, IMO, by claiming their behavior was acceptable within their official capacity.

Jail deaths raise questions
North of Houston, the Montgomery County Courier is raising questions about three deaths in the county jail this year, one suicide and two alleged drug-related deaths. Five inmates have died this year at the much-larger Travis County jail.

Juvenile advocate profiled
Here's a nice profile of Mike Griffiths, Dallas County juvenile services chief and a respected, hands-on expert on juvenile justice matters who was an adviser to Ann Richards. He'd be an excellent choice to lead the Texas Youth Commission, if he could be convinced to take the thankless job.

Guv grants go to juvenile justice
I'm glad to see the Governor funneling criminal justice funding to incarceration alternatives and juvenile justice programs, but many of these services should be provided in state or county baseline budgets, not as one-time specialty grants. Still, the Guv deserves credit where it's due. (And I'd love to give him a lot more bloggerly credit if he'd appoint somebody like Griffiths to run TYC.)

Ne'er-do-well makes good

If readers will forgive an off-topic point of personal privilege, congratulations to my father, Tom Henson, for his recent selection as president-elect of the Texas Association of Defense Counsel (that's civil, not criminal defense attorneys). Reported the Tyler Morning Telegraph:

The TADC is a statewide association of more than 2,000 private practice attorneys specializing in civil defense trial law. Henson, who practices primarily in complex toxic tort and commercial litigation, is admitted to practice in the Southern, Eastern and Northern Federal Districts of Texas, in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and in Texas and U.S. Supreme Courts.

I suppose that means I'll be seeing the old man in Austin more frequently. I'm proud of you, Dad, good job, and good luck.

Expanding mental healthcare in schools would reduce crime

Though this blog focuses on the Texas justice system, the reality is the justice system is the dumping ground for failures of state and local government in other arenas, particularly education and mental health treatment. When the education system fails, when mental health problems or childhood traumas go unaddressed, those systems' funnel all their failures into Texas jails and prisons.

So I'm thrilled to see the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Steve Jacob present an excellent and informative article yesterday ("Mental health: Class dismissed?," Nov. 25) focusing on the need to improve front-line mental healthcare in schools, raising the profile of an issue that underlies quite a bit of criminal conduct. (I don't know comparable figures on the juvie side, but thirty percent of adult Texas prison inmates are former clients of the state's indigent mental health system.)

Here are some of the highlights of Jacob's article, but really you should go read the whole thing:

A 1995 study called schools the de facto mental health system for children and adolescents. Between 70 and 80 percent of children with mental health problems were seen by school personnel -- usually guidance counselors and school psychologists -- and for most of them, school was the sole source of care.

Yet that raises the question of whether school personnel with limited mental health expertise can adequately meet the clinical demands of treating emotionally and mentally disturbed children.

And funding? The Texas attitude seems to be: "Don't even try to go there."

An estimated 75 percent of children in the Texas juvenile system have behavioral health issues, and 30 percent of those in the juvenile system will end up in the adult system. An increase in the number of U.S. juvenile delinquents has been blamed in part on diagnosed and undiagnosed mental illness. Since 1991, there has been a 33 percent increase of children 7 to 12 years old appearing in juvenile court.

The relentless imperatives of the federal 2001 No Child Left Behind Act -- and the associated state standards such as those of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills -- have school administrators focusing on little else. They cannot afford to acknowledge -- let alone address -- the fact that a significant percentage of the nation's schoolchildren have often-undiagnosed mental disorders or are mentally scarred by their inability to deal with life's insults: broken homes, hopeless living conditions, abuse by adults and peer intimidation. A 1999 U.S. surgeon general's report said that the rate of suicide by those 10 to 14 years of age increased 100 percent from 1980 to 1996. During the same period, the rate increased 14 percent for ages 15 to 19.

About 20 percent of children have a diagnosable disorder at any given time, and 5 percent have serious, ongoing disorders.

School is considered a natural setting for mental health services. School is a familiar setting for students, easing the stigma and intimidation often felt in more traditional mental health settings. Cost of care has been found to be less in schools, compared with private or community-based services.

Convenience is also crucially important. Less than one-third of children who need mental health services are receiving them. But researchers discovered that when mental health services were introduced in a school setting, 98 percent of referrals obtained service, compared with 17 percent of students referred to traditional clinic-based programs

A 2004 Texas Education Agency survey of school-based mental health and substance abuse programs statewide showed just how outgunned school counselors are in dealing with these problems. The survey of 8,000 public schools showed that elementary school counselors spent about 33 percent of their time on mental health issues, declining to 18 percent in middle school and 12 percent in high school.

A 2003 study that found 71 percent of Texas public schools had guidance counselors, but only 28 percent employed licensed mental health professionals.

Jacob declares the state is "crippled by a shortage of mental healthcare providers," particular in the Rio Grande Valley and areas outside the I-35 population corridor.

In the story's final paragraph, Jacob puts his finger on the main reason Texas fails to focus resources on this problem: Though he doesn't use the words, basically stupidity and ignorance on the part of the general public:

There are myriad reasons for such paltry mental health spending. The chief reason likely lies in a survey that showed 71 percent of Texans believed mental illness was the result of emotional weakness; 43 percent said victims of mental illness bring it on themselves.

If we were truly engaged in a "War on Crime," this underlying fallacy would be the equivalent of the period before the Iraq War when the majority of the public believed Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11. It's not just a misguided conception, but a starkly dangerous one.

For a "tuff" state whose leaders frequently adopt the mantle of "victims rights," this is an especially disturbing phenomena, since in more than a few cases the system punishes victims after the fact. All evidence shows victims themselves easily become predators when they cannot find justice or relieve their emotional pain, and that's even more true of juveniles. Practically speaking (i.e., setting aside for the moment what "should be" and focusing on what "is"), societal norms cannot reasonably be enforced on people with either an organic mental imbalance (like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder) or an extreme situational one (like post-traumatic stress disorder from physical or sexual abuse), at least not without honestly considering the situation as it faces each individual. To adopt such a callous attitude invites increased crime and recidivism.

It's not "soft" or "liberal" to think that failure to finance juvenile mental health care contributes to crime. You just have to read past Grits posts on the Texas Youth Commission to see how frequently mental health services, or their lack, crop up in juvenile justice discussions. In many cases, those unmet mental health needs are big contributors to criminal behavior. It's not the only factor, but it's a major one, especially for the most chronic and difficult offenders.

The Exonerated

Having driven to Dallas Saturday night with a friend to attend a benefit for the Innocence Project of Texas (see AP coverage of the event), I got to meet quite a few exonerees from Big D and beyond, so I was pleased to return home to find Texas Monthly's Evan Smith on his blog pointing to a New York Times feature on DNA exonerations:

[The] New York Times has a long feature about the more than 200 prisoners who've been exonerated by DNA evidence in the U.S. since 1989. Not surprisingly, a disproportionate number of them are from Texas (the first two words of the story are the name of an exoneratee from Austin: "Christopher Ochoa"). Nice multimedia extension online: Go here to listen to them tell their stories in their own words. You'll surely get mad and depressed, as I did.

For a cold, rainy Saturday night on a holiday, I was gratified that several hundred people showed up at the DNA Blues Ball in Dallas. Jeff Blackburn, Chief Counsel of the Innocence Project of Texas (IPOT), told me at the end of the evening they'd raised enough to pay for 15 more inmates to get DNA tests to try to prove their innocence.

In addition, IPOT has formed an "exoneree council," Blackburn said, that intends to push for innocence reforms at the 2009 Texas Legislature.

Governor's fixer profiled, panned

Different people view Texas A&M administrator and former TYC conservator Jay Kimbrough in quite different lights. Emily Ramshaw offers up an almost ritualistic hagiogoraphy of the Governor's fixer in the Dallas News, while a letter writer in the Austin Statesman found recent comments by Mr. Kimbrough about an alleged insider deal on a questionable TYC contract "shameful."

Prison guards' blog: No more adult prison transplants to TYC; Is TDCJ-OIG asleep at the switch?

I swear if I knew how to hack into The Back Gate's new website and give their front-page articles permalinks, I'd have done it weeks ago, no doubt. I'd drive up to Huntsville and beg if I thought it would help. But in the meantime, I can only suggest you go read TBG's top article right now, pithily headlined:

Officer's are sleeping with inmates. Prison based violence is up statewide, drugs muled in by employees. Guess where TDCJ OIG will be this holiday season. If you guessed passing out car theft prevention information to the public at businesses, you guessed right!

With a title that specific, I don't have to tell you what the article is about, just go read it.

Another headline a couple of articles below will also interest Grits readers concerned about the Texas Youth Commission:

TYC Admin told to stop hiring TDCJ employees

If it's true, I guess better late than never. According to anonymous sources cited in the piece:

In no uncertain terms, TYC admin have been told to stop hiring their administrators from TDCJ. This request, which was said to have been directed towards current TYC director Demtria Pope's office ties in with the obvious halt in hiring from the adult prison agency by the TYC. The source, which has direct knowledge of the news, confirms that legislators, and others in high places have made the request based on the past incidents that have occurred within the TYC with TDCJ transplants.

Nothing like anonymous blog rumors to stir the pot, is there? Good stuff, TBG! Let's just get these articles some permalinks!

Houston PD to employ unmanned spy drones?

That's the report from a Houston TV station, via Wired Blog Network. And what, exactly, is the purpose of this device but to snoop in places where the law would otherwise require them to secure a warrant?

An assistant chief told reporters "the unmanned aircraft would be used for 'mobility' or traffic issues, evacuations during storms, homeland security, search and rescue, and also "tactical." She admitted that could include covert police actions and she said she was not ruling out someday using the drones for writing traffic tickets." I wonder if it will be armed like in Afghanistan so the unmanned spy plane can take out bad guys from the air?!

This is a great example of why I could never write fiction. I can never think of things more ridiculous, strange and bizarre than what we see in reality every day. Unmanned spy planes operated by the Houston PD? Chief Harold Hurtt has always had a surveillance fetish, but you just can't make this stuff up.

UPDATE: I've put up a reader poll in the sidebar asking whether folks thinks this is a good idea. If you vote "yes," let me know in the comments how you think these could be used to improve public safety without diminishing privacy. If you vote "no," let me know what problems you foresee with the technology.

NY Times: Small number of Houston neighborhoods receive most of cities' prison releases

A handful of Houston neighborhoods receive most inmates returning to that city when they leave Texas prisons, reports New York Times criminal justice correspondent Solomon Moore today("Trying to break the cycle of prison at the street level," Nov. 22 - click on the map to expand the image).

Relying on research that partially drove the expansion of new treatment resources by the Texas Legislature this spring, Moore adumbrates the results of a research and mapping project in Houston that identified neighborhoods most in need of ex-offender re-entry services. Reported Moore:

Last year, 32,585 prisoners were released on state parole in Texas, and many of them returned to neighborhoods where they live among thousands of other parolees and probationers.

Sunnyside is one of 10 neighborhoods in Houston that together accounted for 15 percent of the city’s population, yet received half of the 6,283 prisoners released in Houston in 2005, according to the Justice Mapping Center, a criminal justice research group.

That same dynamic is true in nearly every large city, and it makes all the sense in the world, both economically and morally, to spend money proactively in those neighborhoods on re-entry and diversion programs to prevent crime instead of paying to imprison folks after the fact. For now, though, reports Moore:

new parolees keep coming. Every few weeks, several dozen inmates assemble in the chapel of the state prison in Huntsville on the eve of their release for a two-hour orientation program by Christian outreach workers. The prisoners are offered phone lists of clinics, churches, shelters and drug treatment programs. Then they file out of the chapel and back to their cells for one more night of restless confinement.

It is a shoestring program and most inmates do not participate, said the Rev. Emmett Solomon, a prison minister who leads the classes. “Most of what they get to prepare them for their release, they get right here,” Mr. Solomon said. “But it’s probably too little, too late.”

Mr. Taylor, the Sunnyside drug dealer, was in a recent class. He left for the bus station the next morning, with about 40 other men, wearing tattered, unfashionable donated clothes and carrying their possessions in mesh bags.

As Mr. Taylor got off the bus in Houston later in the afternoon, a passing stranger who called himself Ice welcomed him home.

“Hey man, I know how it is,” he told Mr. Taylor. “I just got out, too.”

Texas Jail News Roundup

I wanted to reference readers to several important Texas jail-related news items I noticed recently:

Dallas Sheriff to commissioners court: Jail labor isn't free
Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez responds to criticisms that her jail is too generous giving low-level offenders good time credit, declaring the policy was in place long before she got there, and that she'd be happy to change it if county commissioners (one of whom, Kenneth Mayfield, was the main critic of the policy) would fork over a few million dollars extra per year to pay for it. Bully for her. The biggest irony: It'd be a lot cheaper to pay free-world workers for road cleanup than to fill up the jail solely for the purpose of extracting "free" labor that actually costs a lot more in the big picture. Another irony, at the same time county commissioners are berating the Sheriff for not keeping enough low-level offenders in jail to staff work crews, they're financing new, progressive jail diversion programs aimed at keeping just those type of offenders out of jail in the first place. Go figure.

Bexar jail strip search policy challenged
Bexar County has been sued over the jail's policy of strip searching every single inmate booked into the facility. Reported WOAI radio: Attorneys in the case "said they've tried cases like this before in other parts of the country and won. The most recent case was in New Jersey, where the attorneys said their clients were awarded millions of dollars."

Bexar Sheriff corruption may pave way for 'tent city'
An unexpected consequence of the resignation of the Bexar County Sheriff on corruption charges: The Commissioners Court has appointed as an interim replacement someone who supports their pet "tent jail" proposal which the previous Sheriff opposed. I've written before how foolish this is from a pure public-safety perspective: There's a reason jails have walls. Commissioners should wait until Bexar has another elected Sheriff, and not use the opportunity of a lame-duck puppet Sheriff to push through a bad idea.

Burnet residents oppose entrepreneurial jail
In Burnet County, local officials say they've outgrown their 98 bed jail, and so want to build a new facility six times the size of the current one, with the stated intention of turning it into an entrepreneurial enterprise housing out of county inmates. Problem is, people who live where they want to put the new jail don't want it:

Local residents are opposed to the new facility, which primarily would house violators awaiting trial in the county or serving out sentences on county offenses. So many people turned out to debate the possible new jail Monday night that the fire marshal had to get involved. A decision whether to use the site for a jail should happen sometime early next year.

Building a jail so much bigger than the county needs makes the county reliant on the current jail and prison boom continuing ad infinitum, or at least over the next 15-20 years while they're making bond payments. Maybe it will. So far other counties making that assumption have been lucky. But personally I don't believe the current growth in Texas' incarceration rate is sustainable, either pragmatically, socially or economically, so Burnet County: If 10 years down the line you find yourself making large debt payments on a half-empty jail, don't say nobody warned you. It's a bad idea, and not just for NIMBY reasons.

UTMB rejected for Beaumont jail healthcare contract
In Beaumont, Jefferson County Commissioners rejected a bid by UTMB Galveston to operate jail healthcare, relying instead on a company called NaphCare. The reason given: "UTMB doesn't offer indemnity protection, which NaphCare does, and CHM's best offer was $500,000 more than NaphCare's price." I'm interested in this because, in my opinion, UTMB's record providing healthcare in carceral settings has generally been very poor at the state prison system, at the Texas Youth Commission, and when they operated the jail healthcare in Dallas so poorly it drew down federal litigation. Whatever reason Jefferson County rejected UTMB, I think other counties and ultimately the state should revisit whether UTMB is up to the task. Their experimental reliance on "telemedicine" generates poor outcomes, and when they're questioned about poor results, all you hear are mealy-mouthed excuses.

Third time likely not a charm for Smith County Jail
Voters have rejected new jails two years in a row in Tyler, but County Commissioners are already making plans to put the idea on the ballot a third time. Personally, I think Smith County Commissioners are taking the wrong message from these two ridiculously lopsided votes against new jail building. I once predicted that votes rejecting a new jail in Smith County may become an annual affair, kind of like Tyler's Azalea Trail, and that may indeed turn out to be the case.

Seliger: Max probation for most crimes should be five years

Legislation passed in 2007 reducing probation lengths for state jail and third degree felonies is working well, but now the same changes need to be applied to a broader array of crimes, Amarillo state Sen. Kel Seliger told the Midland Reporter Telegraph ("Texas Senate mulls probation reforms," Nov. 21). He supports reducing probation lengths for most criminal offenses to five years, and expects legislation to that effect to be introduced at the Texas Legislature in 2009:

House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, R-Plano, sponsored a bill to shorten the maximum probation for third-degree and state jail felony theft and narcotics offenses from 10 to five years.

With 4,000 drug criminals put on probation for longer than five years in 2006, Seliger said the changes didn't go far enough.

"Probation officers around District 31 say they know in three years if a probationer will re-offend or not," the Senate Criminal Justice Committee vice chairman said.

"Some under a super long term have a technical violation, but it doesn't protect the public to fill up the prisons with technical violators. New prisons are expensive and it could be we'd be better off to raise the salaries of correctional officers and take care of our understaffing first."

Seliger is presently considering reforms in general terms and wants more input from legal officials before getting specific.

When asked if voters might be more concerned about crime, he said, "We conservatives are trying to get the most bang for the buck and take as little of people's hard earned tax money as possible."

He said Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston, has indicated he may support '09 legislation to limit probation for most offenses to five years.

The Midland DA raised a common fallacy about Seliger's proposal: "Midland County District Attorney Teresa Clingman is concerned about crime spawned by the oil boom and doubtful the system should be less strict." Perhaps it's counterintuitive, but the irony here is that long probation terms are what has made probation "less strict." Statewide, general probation caseloads are still well over 100 probationers per officer, meaning most probationers don't receive significant oversight and their P.O.s spend most of their time doing paperwork.

By moving to shorter, stronger probation, P.O.s can do home and work visits, check to enforce curfews, give more help to probationers who need to access job placement or other services, and generally provide a lot more oversight during those first three years when data shows all probationers are most likely to re-offend. That's the approach to public safety the Amarillo Republican is advocating, and the reality is Seliger's suggestion would make probation substantially more strict.

Though it seems relatively minor, this is one of the most important changes that could be made to reduce unnecessary incarceration and improve public safety. Offenders who succeed for 5, 6, 7 years or more on probation shouldn't then be revoked on felony charges for technical violations or minor offenses - they're just taking up bed space that could go toward housing more dangerous offenders.

The more important benefit, though, will be to improve safety by more closely supervising probationers during the period when they're most likely to re-offend, and ensuring Texas has ample prison space to house more dangerous offenders. That approach is both smarter on crime and easier on the pocketbook.

Reflections on Turkey Day at TYC's Giddings unit

I wanted to record a few observations from my Thanksgiving Day trip out to Giddings to visit the Texas Youth Commission's violent offender unit there with Ombudsman Will Harrell. Nothing I saw particularly surprised me, but the visit confirmed and reinforced quite a few impressions garnered from watching TYC politics over the last year:

Thanks to Gidding staff for a great visit
First, the staff I met, to a person, were wonderful, both welcoming and professional - it was a LOT different from interacting with staff at TDCJ units. I can't say everyone who works at Giddings is that way, but from all the grousing by employees on Grits, I think I expected folks to be a bit more alienated in their jobs. (Also, incidentally, most staff I met had never heard of Grits for Breakfast, so some of you TYC folks need to do a better job of spreading the word among your co-workers about this blog!)

Because of the holiday, I was disappointed not to get to see the metal shop and the chapel, both of which I was told were usually "must see" stops on the nickel tour, but both kids and staff were particularly proud of their welding/trades program and praised it in glowing terms.

Shut up and have a Happy Thanksgiving
As for the Thanksgiving dinner - because after all isn't that what's most important about the holiday? - the kids at Giddings had a hearty, traditional meal including both turkey and ham, yams, stuffing and cranberry sauce, with pecan and pumpkin pie for dessert. And it was good! If they'd served me the same thing in the Luby's I'd have felt just fine about it. Will Harrell tells me he's never had a bad meal at a TYC unit, though the portions are usually smaller than yesterday's holiday spread.

However fine the food, though, an odd atmosphere hung over the cafeteria since kids were forced to eat their "special" meal in silence within 20 minutes. Holiday meals emphasize the universal fact that eating in human culture is not only about sustenance - eating is a social event, a bonding ritual performed by social animals. A dog may take a bone and go hide alone to eat it; humans gather to eat with those they care about.

The rule against youth talking during meals supposedly is for the benefit of security, but it's not like the kids don't have plenty of chance to communicate with each other elsewhere. Seeing it imposed during Thanksgiving dinner especially emphasized to me the thoughtless bureaucratic cruelty of this regulation. The holiday message sent seemed to be: "Here, shut up and be thankful."

No 12-1 staffing ratio at Giddings
Much has been written here and elsewhere about staffing ratios at TYC, and yesterday's visit confirmed that understaffing continues to be a problem. I wished later I'd counted heads in each one, but not a single one of the pods we visited met the 12-1 youth to staff ratio required by law. Twenty to one was more typical from what I saw. Yes, it was Thanksgiving, but it's not like SB 103 said TYC must maintain a 12-1 ratio except on holidays. And since both employees and youth complained that Giddings regularly lacks sufficient staff, I suspect what I saw wasn't just a reflection of the holiday.

Pragmatism limits pepper spray effectiveness
I asked a lot of kids about the pepper spray question: Without exception, the first reaction of each of them was to laugh out loud.

Every kid knew the use of force policy had changed to allow more frequent use of pepper spray, and they could describe exactly how and when OC spray was applied on the continuum. In fact, they all knew the rules and the impact of new "Spray First" procedures much better than the administrators in Austin, who keep botching decisions on use of force in ways that keep dragging them back to court.

One kid in the capital offenders pod described to me an instance that shows the on-the-ground absurdity of the "Spray First" policy, which says that staff are required to use pepper spray before putting their hands on youth to control them. Since staff could not manually restrain him first, he said (while several other inmates giggled and added details that would embarrass the storyteller), when an overweight staff member tried to spray him, he ran to get away. (Shocking, huh?) He ran around the room, jumped over cots, bobbed and weaved around a table, and did all he could to keep from being sprayed. All the while the corpulent JCO vainly chased him about the pod, attempting to spray him but instead filling the air with a mist of OC spray that affected the other kids more than the offender.

The worst part, one of his giggling cohorts added, was that the event left several kids' cots soaked in pepper spray, and the sheets, he said, were only washed once per week. I can only imagine what it's like to sleep on pepper-spray soaked sheets, but the anecdote confirmed my sense that TYC administrators in Austin have not thoroughly thought through the new use of force rules (for which they will head back to court on Monday).

The truth is that several of the kids I spoke to would do a much better job of crafting a workable use of force policy than Dimitria Pope and "Bronco" Billy Humphrey have done. They knew exactly what worked, what didn't, and how youth responded to different situations. Maybe they should be given a little more input, and former TDCJ wardens should be given a little less.

Euphemism of the Day: Behavioral Management Program
As the juvie corrections field has professionalized, a pseudo-professional jargon has arisen, employing a variety of euphemisms that take the edge off of the harsher but more accurate descriptions of particular prison tactics. One of those euphemisms is the "Behavior Management Program," or BMP.

Kids "on BMP" are in solitary confinement. They live in what amounts to a dungeon, in small individual cells secured by thick metal doors with a slot at knee level for passing through food trays. It's known as a "Behavior Management Program" because supposedly kids earn their way out of solitary through improved behavior, at first being allowed to spend pockets of time with other kids, then slowly being integrated back into the general population. Six kids at Giddings (out of a total of approximately 450) were on BMP when we visited.

Most kids on suicide watch need mental health care
The same dungeon setting where the BMP kids are held also houses kids on suicide watch, though thankfully no one was there when we visited. The fellow watching over this section said that, in his experience at Giddings, most kids on suicide watch had a significant mental health problem. They either were there waiting for space to open up at the TYC mental health facility in Corsicana, or they had transferred from the Corsicana unit and probably needed to go back.

His observations reminded me of the situation in Coke County where a TYC youth was in suicide watch for weeks waiting for space to open up in Corsicana. By the time the facility was closed down over poor conditions, the youth was smearing his own feces on the wall and licking it off. Acting TYC executive director Dimitria Pope told a legislative committee last month she was unaware of a problem with delays in transferring mentally ill youth. However this JCO's comments made me think that wasn't just a problem at that Geo Group run facility in Coke County, but that Corsicana may just not have adequate capacity to handle kids in TYC with significant mental health needs. Or if it does, the bureaucracy cannot identify kids who need these services or transfer them quickly enough once they do.

Lack of programming worries youth
Ironically, I spent a lot less time asking questions of kids at Giddings than I did answering them, and the #1 concern expressed to me by youth was the lack of specialized treatment programs, especially sex offender and chemical dependency treatment. They wanted to know, basically, why it didn't exist or how they could get into those programs, which in many cases are required as part of their sentence.

One fellow told me his minimum two-year stay would be up in just a couple of months, but that his sentence required him to complete a sex offender treatment program that he hadn't even begun. And he wasn't alone - I was asked over and over by kids how they could get the treatment services they needed to complete their incarceration stint. These kids understood exactly what was expected and required of them, and for the most part they were willing to comply. But they were extremely frustrated that they weren't being given a chance to meet those expectations.

* * *

Those were the broad highlights. Thanks to Will Harrell for letting me tag along yesterday, and to everyone I met at Giddings for an enjoyable and informative visit.

No holiday for TYC news: Should confession be a condition of release for youth who plead "not guilty" and lost at trial?

With Kathy out of town, I'm leaving in just a bit with my former ACLUTX boss and current Texas Youth Commission Ombudsman to spend Thanksgiving with the kids and staff at the TYC unit in Giddings. (Thanks to TYC PR man Tim Savoy for hooking me up with a media pass.)

On the subject of TYC, Holly Becka has a great article in this morning's Dallas News ("Confession a condition of release from TYC facilities") about the policy of requiring a confession from youth of the crime for which they were sentenced as a condition of release. Her lede describes the case of a:

McKinney youth [who] insists he's innocent of the attempted rape charge that landed him in TYC, and his case is on appeal. But the only way he can go home soon is to confess to the crime as part of his TYC treatment.

This is a longstanding policy, not something created by the new administration, and I'm glad to see Becka casting light on the topic. OTOH, TYC passed a rule this summer allowing waivers for youth who didn't complete treatment programs (part of their effort to reduce overall inmate populations) so the youth could still be discharged if the Director of Treatment and Case Management approved it. I'm not sure how that new rule fits into the picture, or why the Director of Treatment didn't provide a waiver for the kid from McKinney.

In any event, Happy Turkey Day to all.

More waiting on TYC pepper spray lawsuit outcome; Austin Chronicle piles on TYC media disapprobation

The Texas Youth Commission was back in court today over pepper spray, but hadn't yet come to an agreement with Advocacy Inc. and Texas Appleseed. Austin District Judge Gisela Triana gave the parties until Monday to come to an agreement, reported the Statesman on its blog.

Meanwhile, the Austin Chronicle has a new story out on TYC declaring there is "Little evidence of reform at state schools." The Chronicle's Richard Whittaker reports that:

While Senate Bill 103, the TYC reform bill, was crafted to protect youth inmates, it was also supposed to create a safer working environment for staff. But the changes only provided the tools for reform. Five months later, TYC is massively understaffed, with almost a third of all posts empty. "We're trying to get as many qualified people as possible into training," said TYC's director of public affairs, Jim Hurley. "We're down in numbers considerably from where we want to be, and I can't give you a hard and fast deadline. It's going to take time."

The Legislature ordered TYC to hire an additional 516 juvenile correctional officers, one for every 12 inmates, plus teaching and administrative staff. However, the money to hire them did not become available until Sept. 1, meaning TYC hadn't even hired its four new recruiting officers until Nov. 1. As of Oct. 23, TYC had 3,984 employees but 2,024 unfilled positions, including 382 of those new juvenile correctional officers. Even when those positions are filled, there may not be enough staff. The Ameri­can Correctional Association, a prison accreditation body, sets no standards for juvenile inmate-officer ratios but works facility by facility and has yet to assess the reformed centers.

The shortfall means facilities are working staff longer and harder. "You have frustrated staff, tired staff. They dread coming out there," said Love. Some, afraid of being fired if they complained, would call in sick. "You have people out there for whom this is their sole income, so they don't make waves. The call-ins are their only way of striking back." According to Love, this means some shifts at Crockett struggle on five or six corrections officers, less than half the number recommended. The new hires may not solve the problem, since they are just replacing staff who are on medical leave or quit. "It's a revolving door," Love said.

TYC employees are supposed to work a 40-hour week, with eight-hour shifts and five days on, two days off. But with staff levels so low, Love said, it's not uncommon for officers to work five 12-hour shifts and only get one day off. Staff pulled a combined 116,890 hours of overtime in February, a figure that shrank to 30,487 for September, but there's a catch. They weren't being paid for all of it. In Septem­ber alone, TYC paid out $735,933 in overtime, equal to 55% of the normal annual sum.

TYC spokesman Hurley said the cash wasn't the issue, just further reform of the system. "This wasn't about budget," he said, "but the fact that they didn't have any institutional controls in place to ensure that all the overtime being worked was necessary. Since we couldn't ensure that, we suspended paying overtime, but this is almost surely a temporary measure." He said that hours worked were still being tracked, but for Love, that's not enough. "That's my money they're earning interest on," he said.

Privatize the death penalty? Victims who "need killin'," or why probation for murder may not always be such a bad idea

Last week's Dallas News series on murderers sentenced to probation left me at a bit of a loss concerning what message to take from the story overall. An impressive piece of paper-trail journalism, Dallas News reporters Brooks Egerton and Reese Dunklin identified 120 people who'd received sentences of probation for murder - either from a plea deal or a jury verdict - between 2000 and 2006.

Unfortunately, the series suffered from a bit of a breathless tone that invited readers to conclude, "Can you believe Texas is soft on crime? We should get tuffer!" To me, that's decidedly not the conclusion I draw from the evidence they've presented, but what if any larger lessons may be drawn from their work? Houston defense attorney Mark Bennett's observation on the subject IMO hits closer to the mark:

The truth is that Texas's propensity for killing its citizens, and its leniency with some murderers, are both expressions of the a single principle. Texas doesn't execute murderers to show its regard for the value of life; it does so because some people (as the parable says) need killing. Sometimes the guy who -- in the eyes of Texas -- needs killing is the accused, and sometimes he's the complainant.

"He needed killin', and my guy was the guy to do it" has long been a viable defense in some Texas murder cases. These are cases in which the State often couldn't secure convictions despite being technically murder; it'll be even less able to secure convictions in the future from juries that know that, if they convict, prison will be the only option.

That strikes me as an accurate assessment of the general public's attitude toward intentional killing in Texas, whether by the state or by individuals. Looking at specific cases analyzed by the News, that analysis explains quite a few of them. As I wrote in a "first impression" about the series, it's possible to:

identify several recurring situations where murderers frequently received probation: a) Prosecutors had weak or circumstantial cases and the defendant may not have done it, b) the defendant was guilty via the "law of parties" but didn't actually kill anyone themselves, c) the defendant was elderly, sick or incapacitated to the point where they were no longer a threat, and d) the victim was a worse person than the murderer and basically "needed killin'," so juries sympathized and gave the defendant another chance.

While Dallas News columnist Gromer Jeffers identifies what's wrong with reason A for granting probation in murder cases, who thinks reasons B, C, or D are not sometimes justified? Following Bennett's lead, let's think more closely about category D, in particular, the ones whose victims "needed killin'." Consider the case of Synnissa Gabriel who murdered Hosia Abdallah, her estranged boyfriend:

She told police in 2005 that Mr. Abdallah had stalked her and vandalized her home, in violation of a protective order. Then she tracked him down and shot him several times.

Heath Hyde, who prosecuted the case, said he offered a deal because the victim had a long history of violence against women. That made it unlikely jurors would sentence his killer to prison, he said. Defense attorney Nancy Ohan described her client as "the classic case of the battered woman ... there was a definite mental break."

So a battered woman who continued to be stalked and harassed in violation of a protective order finally took matters into her own hands and gunned down her assailant. Why'd she get probation? Because prosecutors believed jurors would conclude the victim "needed killin'" - in other words, that justice had been served by the defendants' actions. It may not be true under the law, but in the gray-area balancing act jurors do in their own minds while making life or death decisions, it's true in point of fact.

In some other cases, defendants had possibly viable self-defense claims or otherwise could credibly portray themselves to a jury as protecting themselves. Not all the cases find a sympathetic killer and a much-scarier victim, but when they do, is it wrong for a jury to sympathize with the defendant?

Isn't that what juries are about, letting members of the public come to their own conclusions about what constitutes justice?

I've described before my own mixed feelings on the death penalty: It's not that I don't think there are bad folks out there who "need killin'," I just don't trust the government's ability to distinguish between them and the rest of us. (If Texas hasn't already executed an innocent person, at the rate we're going it's only a matter of time.) Bureaucratic mistakes that we tolerate at the drivers license bureau are unacceptable in deciding whether someone should live or die, so I'm troubled by placing such an irreversible decision in the hands of government bureaucrats, even ones with "J.D." after their names.

The "needed killin'" defense and the possibility for receiving probation for murder (after Sept. 1, prosecutors can still plead to deferred adjudication, though juries may no longer grant probation) basically recognize, pragmatically, that many Texans hold similar sentiments, that some murders occur amidst shades of gray, and that the prosecutor may not always be right just because they work for the gub'mint.

From a public interest perspective in these cases, at least in a pro-death penalty Texas jury's mind, the existence of the death penalty assumes it is possible for intentional killing to promote justice. If you believe that (and capital juries must be "death penalty qualified," so sometimes they are REQUIRED to believe it even to serve), you might well believe, upon hearing the facts, that the victim had it coming, as prosecutors feared they would in Ms. Gabriel's case.

In that sense, the punitive mentality that supports the death penalty may also be a two-edged sword for prosecutors in ways that aren't very often discussed. Texas juries may well decide it's just fine to essentially privatize the death penalty, to decide that the killer's vigilante justice was the right justice and give the defendant a pass. (The mentality perhaps harks back to Texas' frontier days, when Mexican alcaldes assessed penalties for theft at four times the amount stolen, but left justice for murder to the friends and family of the deceased.)

The more I think about it, the idea of defendants getting probation for murder on a case by case basis for the reasons described in the series really doesn't bother me save that, upon reflection, I think the Legislature should revisit the question to reinstate juries' authority to give that punishment.

The missus thinks I'm going to "get in trouble" for writing this, but I think, as a practical matter, I'd prefer a death penalty privatized on a case by case basis at the discretion of 12 jurors than operated by the government itself. What do you think?

More from the Dallas News:

• Probation for Murder: The Series
  
• Reporters discuss the story
• Gromer Jeffers: Probation tactic renders Watkins less a crusader
• Dallas News Reader Forum on the series
  

BLOGVERSATION:

• Defending People: Here and here
• The Defense Perspective
• Simple Justice
• Greg's Opinion
• Concurring Opinions, and a response
• Over the Cliff, Under the Rocks
  

NY Times: Stop the "Rush to Criminalize Children"

Thanks to UNLV Prof. Bill Bush for pointing me to this editorial in The New York Times, "Raising Children Behind Bars," depicting a national trend that accurately describes what's happened here in Texas. The efforts:

to remake often barbaric juvenile justice systems, ... [u]nfortunately, ... have been steadily rolled back since the 1990s when states began sending ever larger numbers of juveniles to adult jails — where they face a high risk of being battered, raped or pushed to suicide.

The Times called it "incredible" that kids as young as ten were sent to youth prisons, and that's legally possible in Texas, but not common - the number of ten year olds in TYC is usually in the low-single digits or sometimes zero, depending on when you check.

Twenty-five years ago all youth offenders in Texas were handled through county jails, just like anyone else who's arrested. However on this Texas deserves credit. Now, all 254 counties have somewhere to take juvenile offenders (though for the most remote rural counties that means a contract bed in a county more than 100 miles away). It sounds like from the Times editorial that's not the case in many other places.

If we are to believe the Times' estimate that "as many as 150,000 young people under the age of 18 are incarcerated in adult jails in any given year," I'll bet relatively few of those (except perhaps some 17 year olds) are in Texas.

As the national paper of record, the Times lays the blame for expanding juvenile prisons at Congress' feet:

The rush to criminalize children has set the country on a dangerous path. Congress must now reshape the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act so that it provides the states with the money and the expertise they need to develop more enlightened juvenile justice policies. For starters, it should rewrite the law to prohibit the confinement of children in adult jails.

Perhaps the JJDPA played a role, but in Texas our own pols bear most responsibility for the biennial expansion of newly criminalized or more harshly punished juvenile and adult conduct. After all, this is a state where some officials think a sixth grade girl writing "I Love Alex" on a bathroom wall deserves felony charges.

Changing federal law will help, but Texas' own state law is the main source of TYC's growth in the past 15 years, just like the ongoing decline in Texas' youth inmate population similarly results from recent changes in state law and agency policy.

"DNA Blues Ball" in Dallas Raises Money to Identify, Exonerate Innocent People in Prison

Since Kathy will be out of town over the holiday, I'm thinking I'll head up to Dallas Saturday night to attend the 2007 DNA Blues Ball, a benefit for the Innocence Project of Texas described thusly:

The Innocence Project of Texas invites you to attend the 2007 DNA Blues Ball, an evening of music and enlightenment to benefit the wrongfully convicted.

Since 2001, 13 men have been exonerated in Dallas County after DNA testing conclusively proved their innocence. The proceeds of DNA Blues Ball ticket and merchandise sales will directly support the efforts of the Innocence Project of Texas in our mission to seek justice for those who have lost their freedom at the hands of wrongful convictions.

It looks like a great musical lineup. And you probably won't find that many DNA-exonerated men in the same room in many other settings; that alone deserves commemoration. Consider attending if you're in the Dallas area or donate online as part of their Justice Delayed fundraising campaign.

Chief Counsel for the Innocence Project of Texas is a long-time friend of the blog and crackerjack Amarillo-based attorney, Jeff Blackburn, who also was the lead barrister representing the ultimately freed and pardoned clients in the notorious "Tulia" drug stings.

More waiting for TYC pepper spray lawsuit resolution

TYC's day in court Monday over its moving-target pepper spray policy sounds somewhat anticlimactic. Instead of ruling herself, Austin District Judge Judge Gisela Triana ordered the parties to come to an agreement by Wednesday, when supposedly push will finally come to shove. (In the interest of full disclosure, Triana is a former campaign client of mine from back in the day, though I've never communicated with her about this case.) Here are a few excerpts from the MSM coverage:

"Pepper spray used more liberally on kids," Mike Ward, Austin Statesman, Nov. 20

"Incarcerated teenagers in the Texas Youth Commission system are getting pepper-sprayed by guards when they refuse to follow routine orders and while on suicide watch, not just when they pose a threat, a Travis County court was told Monday."

"pepper spray is being used a lot more than just a few months ago. So far this year, just over 1,200 reports of spraying have been logged, compared with only 196 last year. In June, a month before Youth Commission officials allowed broader use of pepper spray to control misbehaving or noncompliant youths, 66 cases were reported. In October, 207 spray reports were logged."

"Suit says TYC breaking pepper spray rules," Lisa Sandberg, Houston Chronicle, Nov. 20

"'Pepper spray is the high-tech equivalent of old-fashioned corporal punishment,' Steve Martin, a longtime expert on corrections who has been hired by the advocacy groups, said outside the Travis County courtroom. He said it was ludicrous for the agency to suggest that pepper spray did not cause injuries. 'It causes intense burning and pain and panic,' he said.

Regrettably, it doesn't sound like the court discussion got too deep into the who, what, when and why of TYC's non-compliance with the agreed order. That's too bad, but advocates may still get their chance to go back to court if TYC won't agree to a reasonable policy that they'll stick to, and by reasonable I don't mean the "Spray First" policy they recently proposed in the Texas Register.

"After Care" Key to Overcoming Addiction, Say Winners Circle Conference-goers

New treatment beds for addicts aren't enough, say members of "Winners' Circle," a non-denominational religious ex-offenders' self-help group based in Houston, without additional help with re-entry when they leave confinement. In the clip below, ex-offenders at a recent Winners Circle conference talk about the need for expanded treatment beds and especially expanded "after care" services. Take a look at the short video, posted by Texas Criminal Justice Coalition:

When will the Governor replace TYC management?

A consensus appears to be developing among MSM observers that it's time for the current management at the Texas Youth Commission to pack their bags and hit the trail.

Not long ago, the New York Times urged the state of Texas to "raze" TYC and "start over." Now, declaring "TYC Adrift," the Houston Chronicle editorial board yesterday called on the governor to replace the agency's current management with juvenile justice experts:

Instead of automatically drawing executives from within the state prison system, the governor should push a nationwide search for the best-qualified commissioner and permanent executive director. Every effort should be made to get an experienced and expert governing board in place as soon as possible.

State officials claimed to be caught by surprise by the TYC scandal last winter. If the delays in reforming the agency lead to more problems, they will have no one to blame but themselves.

From your mouth to God's ear, Houston Chronicle, that's exactly the right suggestion. I hope somebody in the Governor's office is paying attention. How much longer will Rick Perry allow this to continue?

RELATED: Here's an overview of lowlights from the litany of self-inflicted wounds bedeviling Texas' youth prison system that corroborate the Chronicle's assessment of the agency as "adrift":

• Violating Court Order on Pepper Spray
• Ignoring Expert Advice
• Importing Adult Prison Managers with No Juvie Experience
• Kids' Healthcare Worse at TYC than Before Scandal
• Alleged Cronyism, Possible Corruption in Vendor Choices
• Retaliation by Management Alleged Against Field Staff
• Management Blames Staff For Their Own Failures
• Understaffing Plagues TYC Facilities
• Education Sub-Par for TYC Kids
• TYC Expects New Policies to Increase Recidivism
• JCOs Still Receive 1/2 Amount of Training as Adult Prison Guards
• Overtime Pay Halted, Worsening Understaffing
• Agency Fired Dozens of Experienced Employees Uninvolved with Misconduct
• Management Consultants Called New TYC Chiefs Poor Leaders
• Agency Shifting to Private Prisons for 10-13 Year Olds Despite Bad Problems

Reader Poll: Are Mexican cartels a serious threat?

In last week's reader survey Grits asked the following question, with the percentages who chose each answer in parentheses:

Which is the biggest public safety threat related to illegal drugs in America?

• Detrimental effects on users' health and lifestyle (8%)
  
• Crimes by drug users (14%)
  
• Organized crime gangs transporting and distributing drugs (18%)
  
• Mexican drug cartels (3%)
  
• Damage done by overincarceration and reduced civil liberties related to the Drug War (55%)
  

Though one commenter thought I'd worded the question in a way that biased answers toward the final one, I was actually testing a different theory with that particular query. I'm increasingly coming to believe that Mexican drug cartels, their US-side organizations and the potential, Mexico and Colombia-style corruption and violence they bring with them represent the most important, if not the most immediate negative effect of illegal drugs.

It turns out almost none of you agree with me. That's okay - all of us are guessing. However, my own best guess is that it's primarily the US-side infrastructure of Mexican cartels - not necessarily "Big American Drug Bosses" - who already supply regional US distribution systems to get most illegal drugs to retail markets (though I do not discount the possibility that US interests may siphon off some of the proceeds occasionally for their own side projects). Given the level of violence and corruption those groups create south of the border, it seems only a matter of time before such tactics escalate in the United States, and Texas is the front line.

To me, that's the biggest public safety threat facing this state in the 21st century.

As for detrimental effects on users, alcohol as a societal problem ranks as a much bigger concern to me, and without delving into the research pro and con in this post, the effects of marijuana use in particular IMO are often overstated. A larger number of readers (14%) were concerned with crimes committed by drug users, presumably to obtain money to buy more drugs. I agree this is a problem, and it's probably the one that receives the most media attention (oddly enough). Similarly, sometimes drunken homeless folks will steal copper from construction sites to sell to buy booze. But there's a reason more people commit crimes to buy illegal drugs than to purchase alcohol, and IMO the main reason is that black markets keep the price of drugs artificially high, while the price of legal booze, even when heavily taxed, remains relatively cheap.

A few more readers - 18% - thought the main public safety threat came from street level dealers and regional criminal networks, while the majority believe that collateral consequences of the Drug War are a bigger public safety threat than any of these others.

Keep in mind, I think all of these things are public safety threats - my only question was which is the biggest, and perhaps readers are correct that the collateral consequences of the drug war, of the choices on the list, currently causes the most harm. But for my money, the alarming growth of Mexican "mega-cartels" and their mass infiltration into the United States represents a threat not just to public safety but to the overall integrity of US political institutions and the justice system.

I believe we're at a crossroads, that if we continue on the current path for much longer these massive criminal organizations will become so powerful on both sides of the border that only a political, not only a martial solution can reverse the tide (if we're not already at that point). Sadly, if America is unwilling to seek meaningful political solutions in its real war in Iraq, it's hard to see the government being that clever in the (increasingly non-symbolic) Drug War.

Humor is the best medicine - okay, not for children with lead poisoning, but I'm sure it's helpful for other stuff

If readers will forgive a humorous but important off-topic post here entering the holiday season, I wanted to share with y'all a really cool web video and political action project on toxic imported toys, produced by the lovely and talented Kathy Mitchell (a.k.a., Mrs. Grits), who happens to run the national internet advocacy campaigns for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine.

Click here to see their Christmas song and video about the lonely toy inspector and his befuddled staff awash in a sea of Asian imports. The song was written and performed by the Austin Lounge Lizards, while the hysterical animation was created by Austin-based PowerHouse Animation. Enjoy, and share. The video parody is part of a Consumers Union netroots campaign to help convince Congress to improve health and safety regulations for imported toys.

I think the video is hilarious and I'm real proud of Kathy for putting together such a creative way to get people's attention in the all-too-distracting holiday season. You'll want to listen to this one a couple or three times, or at least I did, to catch all the jokes.

Marc Levin: What should Harris County do now that jail bonds have failed?

Kuff points to an article by Marc Levin of th Texas Public Policy Foundation in the Houston Chronicle ("How to survive without new jails," Nov. 17) suggesting alternatives for Harris County officials after their recent jail bonds failed at the ballot box by a narrow 51-49 margin. Marc's article details many of the most most obvious solutions to Harris County's jail overcrowding problem:

A new Texas law allows law enforcement officers the discretion to issue citations, instead of making an arrest, for some of the lowest-level misdemeanors.

Issuing citations with notices to appear does not reduce the ultimate punishment for these offenses, which include driving without a license and possession of an ounce of marijuana, but it could divert tens of thousands of these pretrial detainees from the Harris County Jail every year. This also keeps more police on the beat when officers are spared the three- to four-hour process of booking a suspect into jail.

The Sheriffs' Association of Texas and the Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas both supported this law. While other counties are successfully implementing it, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal has said he will not prosecute cases in which police issued citations for such offenses. Law enforcement agencies and officers in Harris County should be able to exercise the discretion given to them by the Texas Legislature with confidence that the citations they issue will be fully prosecuted.

As of Oct. 1, the Harris County Jail's inmate population included about 1,000 first-time offenders — more than four times any other county — serving sentences for possessing less than a gram of a controlled substance. A 2003 state law mandates probation for these state jail felony offenders, but Harris County prosecutors have instead invoked another law that allows them to reduce the felony charge to a Class A misdemeanor, which still allows up to one year of county jail time on local taxpayers' dime.

As of Sept. 20, another 411 inmates in the Harris County Jail awaited trial on misdemeanors. Many have no prior offenses but cannot afford to post bail. If the person is not a flight risk, they should be offered a less costly personal bond. Public safety, not an offender's financial means, should guide public policy.

Jail overcrowding can also be reduced by offering victim-offender mediation for first-time, nonviolent property offenders. A survey of burglary victims found that 81 percent wanted restitution, but only 41 percent wanted the offender jailed. The victim and the offender can voluntarily choose to enter an agreement for the offender to make restitution and perform community service in lieu of jail time.

It's certainly not for every offender or type of offense, but it makes sense in cases like graffiti and stealing a compact disc from a car.

Probation reform can also reduce jail overcrowding. Currently, 43 percent of offenders charged with misdemeanors for first- or second-time drunk driving choose the Harris County Jail over probation. As odd as that seems, it allows them to avoid probation fees and end their case in a month or two instead of two years. One way to encourage more offenders to choose probation would be to increase the availability of early termination for probationers who have fulfilled all their terms and whose conduct has been exemplary.

Be sure to read the rest because Marc's discussion is exactly the type of policy debate that should have occurred BEFORE Houston voters were asked to decide the question. Proposing expensive jail building projects that require new tax increases, as in Harris and Smith Counties in earlier this month, should be a last resort, suggested only after counties, including elected judges and DAs, have used other tools at their disposal to reduce local overincarceration.

Charles Kuffner summed up the overall message to take from Levin's column, so rather than seek to come up with a more clever denouement, I'll end quoting Kuff's observation: "We are not in this situation by fate. We are in this situation by choice. We can choose to do things differently, and in doing so we can allocate our scarce resources more efficiently. It really is that simple."

Let's hope Harris County officials accept that simple message from the voters as the '08 election season looms before us.

RELATED:

Exploring alternatives to local jail building

• Grits' best practices to reduce county jail overcrowding, Part One
• Grits' best practices to reduce county jail overcrowding, Part Two
• Texans' taxation revulsion vs. their Incarceration Addiction: Which will prevail on county jail building?

Harris County Jail Overcrowding

• Voters who rejected county jails looking for better justice policies
• Counties that rejected new jails now must get serious about diversion
• What they're reading at the Harris County probation department (series)
• State to Harris County: Pay the piper on overincarceration
• Whitmire: Houston doesn't need more jail beds
• Jailing drug offenders and the interests of justice
• Houston should fix current jails before building more
• Chuck Rosenthal looks vulnerable in '08 Harris County DA's race

HB 2391 - Cite and Summons for Low-level Misdemeanors

• Tuff on crime meet reality at the Nacogdoches County Jail
  
• Sheriffs more likely than PDs to welcome new arrest discretion
  
• Jefferson County works out kinks with new cite and summons authority
  
• How one Texas county will take advantage of new law to reduce jail overcrowding
• HB 2391 could save Bexar taxpayers $10,000 per day
• Bexar jail administrator: Stop arrests for nonviolent misdemeanors
• DA Susan Reed blocking key Bexar jail overcrowding solution
• Midland Sheriff's Captain: Cite and summons for low-level offenses would reduce jail overcrowding
• Cite and summons for low-level offenses could free up jail space
• Texas Lege approved new tools to reduce jail overcrowding, if police can change their thinking
• DAs thwarting jail overcrowding solutions

Are You Embarrassed Yet? Keller and CCA create new, absurdist rule on when cops can tamper with evidence

So after the recent Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruling, when can police officers hand out drugs to encourage people to become snitches?

A commenter complained yesterday that I'd written about the Clinton Stewart case - a police officer who gave a portion of confiscated marijuana back to a suspect to convince her to become a snitch - merely from news and blog accounts, which was true. So this morning I took a look at the opinions myself, only to find the ruling more insidious, even, than I'd previously believed. Certainly the case may offer significant, bad precedential value when similar, future cases of evidence tampering arise. Naturally, Presiding Judge Sharon Keller wrote for the majority:

the evidence appears to be legally insufficient to show that appellant had the conscious objective or desire to impair the availability of the marihuana as evidence. The missing marihuana bud would not have changed the category of the offense, and the remaining marihuana was certainly enough to convict Lavender, if the State was interested in pursuing a prosecution. Indeed, appellant's conduct appears to have been motivated by the belief that Lavender would escape prosecution by becoming an informant, and as a result, the entire quantity of marihuana would be destroyed anyway. (emphasis added)

So here's the new rule in Texas, as I understand it: Officers who confiscate drugs from a suspect may return a portion of the drugs to them - for whatever reason, in this case to convince them to act as an informant - without being guilty of evidence tampering, so long as the weight of the drugs left in police custody would not change the level of offense the person is charged with.

For example, possessing between 4-200 grams of cocaine is a second degree felony offense, garnering a potential 2-20 years. So if an officer confiscated 150 grams of cocaine, the COCA majority wouldn't consider it evidence tampering unless the officer gave away MORE than 145.99 grams.

The court raised the possibility that the officer might have been charged with Class B delivery of marijuana, instead. But that charge, to me, doesn't seem to convey the same gravity toward official misconduct as evidence tampering. He didn't just deliver marijuana to entice an informant, in the bigger picture he delivered evidence.

I agree with the four judges in the minority that this new standard enjoys literally zero basis in Texas statutes. The minority opinion authored by Judge Paul Womack shows why this new standard amounts to judicial activism:

The Court's grafting onto the required culpability a requirement that the tampering change the punishment category is not anything that the statute requires. The statute could have said that a person commits no offense if he destroys a portion of evidence that falls between the limits of a punishment category. But it doesn't, and this Court has no authority to amend it.

This amounts to judicial activism at it's very worst, pre-selecting an outcome based on judges' affinity for the defendant then concocting a new legal standard to erase his conviction.

Think about it - what if it were cash instead of drugs? Under this ruling, an officer would not be tampering with evidence to return ill-gotten gains to a suspect if the amount returned didn't affect the penalty category of the offense. Who believes that's right (I mean, besides five Court of Criminal Appeals members)?

We've been seeing more and more 6-3 and 5-4 CCA split decisions in the past year. I believe that's largely because quite a few members of the court are beginning to realize Judge Keller has led them into a jurisprudential snakepit of judicial activism, setting precedents conservatives will regret if courts ever change hands to liberals or moderates. In the comments yesterday, Doran Williams predicted just such an outcome from the Clinton Stewart case:

There is a long standing rule applied by both civil and criminal appellate courts that the jury is the final decider/arbiter of facts. They can believe a witness or they can refuse to believe him. In this case, the jury clearly did not believe the defendant witness' excuse or explanation. So they found him guilty as charged.

Generally, courts will not disturb a verdict which is clearly based upon the jury's [assessment of the] lack of credibility of a witness. Courts have discussed that rule in terms of the jury being right there, sometimes only 20 feet or so from the testifying witness, watching his expressions and listening to his voice. Demeanor "testimony" is what courts have called this, and they have ALWAYS deferred to a jury's decision against the credibility of a witness.

Until now, as this all Republican, 'lawn order,' pro-law enforcement biased CCA tosses those rules -- and the unimpeachable reasoning which underlie those rules -- into the toilet.

This all-knowing, all-seeing Court, without the benefit of having seen or heard the witness, just takes it upon their omniscient selves to decide that cop told the truth. What did they base this on? Not facts. They were not present at trial. They based it upon a bias in favor of law enforcement and against people who use drugs.

In short, the CCA cheated. ...

Here is the ironic kicker to come. When the tide turns, and there are again liberals and moderates on the CCA, they will have this opinion by some authoritarian, right wing Republicans to cite as authority for reversing jury verdicts. I hope to live to see it.

Yes, judicial chickens have a way of coming home to roost. I hear a lot of foment by GOP judicial candidates about their dislike for judicial activism, but this amounts to judicial activism of the worst sort, and the worst part it is, at "Texas' Worst Court," it's common as dirt. This is a horrible ruling that essentially approves low-level corruption and evidence tampering by officers.

Media criticisms unfair about Dallas jail good time policy

Because criminals and jail inmates aren't very popular with average folks, it's easy to spin stories in the MSM to imply to the public that the government is being too soft on criminals, and I'm afraid that's what happened with a story Kevin Krause reported in the Dallas News, mentioned earlier on Grits in this roundup.

An unsigned Dallas News editorial followed up Krause's story chastising the Sheriff's Department for an 11 year old policy on good time that gives offenders three days "good time" credit for every one served in the Dallas county jail, whether or not they participate in work programs. Tarrant and some other counties give two for one credit, Krause reports, and allow offenders to earn the third day by performing volunteer work, including on crews picking up trash and performing other work outside the jail.

Really, it's as though the Dallas News editorialists don't read their own newspaper. "If you plan to get arrested and/or sentenced to jail time for a misdemeanor offense," they write, "and you could choose where – wouldn't you pick Dallas County?"

Hmmm ... Duh ... I don't know, why wouldn't you pick Dallas County?

Maybe because for every month you spend in jail there you're more likely to acquire a staph infection than you would be to roll "snake eyes" shooting dice? After a scathing report last year, the feds finally sued Dallas County over poor healtchare for inmates last month.

Or perhaps because, once you go in, they might just lose your ass for a year or so?

Possibly because many jailers are young and untrained, making it among the more dangerous and overcrowded urban jails?

So why do Dallas News editorial writers think the Dallas jail is such a great place to be? Because offenders don't participate in work crews. But they've reported the reasons why before--not enough work-crew eligible inmates due to initiatives that reduce overcrowding by diverting low level offenders. State regulators ordered them to release low-level offenders by the hundreds earlier this year - precisely the category of offenders who might be eligible to work outside the jailhouse - and yet, the jail is still overcrowded.

Even so, you know what? Labor from jail inmates on road and bridge crews is nice to have, but it's not the purpose of the jail to provide the county free labor. Reported Krause:

Sheriff's spokesman Michael Ortiz said the department has always had trouble filling the trusty positions.

Each of the five jails has its own assignments and labor pool, he said. Some days, there are plenty of trusties. But because the jail population is always in flux, there are shortages, he said.

"Sometimes we'll have a good number, and the next day we'll be short," Deputy Ortiz said.

Some inmates realize it's too much work and would rather watch TV, he said.

"They apply for trusty status and get it and then realize they don't want to do it anymore," he said. "There's a high turnover rate."

Terry Grisham, a Tarrant sheriff's spokesman, said his agency has not had difficulty finding work volunteers. Those who work receive three days credit while everyone else gets 2-for-1, he said.

"It's the pre-eminent factor," he said. "They want to make that time as short as possible."

If that's the case, I've got a suggestion: Let them keep their 3-1, since changing it would worsen overcrowding and risk a federal court's wrath, and give jail inmates an extra day off their time if they participate in work crews. If they inmates used the new program, it would solve Mr. Mayfield's problem and help cycle more low-level offenders out of the jail more quickly. For that matter, I think participating in work crews probably contributes more to rehabilitation than sitting around the jail doing nothing, so it's really a win-win all around.

The Dallas jail is woefully overcrowded, with private and federal lawyers, not to mention state regulators, already breathing down their necks. Even if they build more jail beds the county can't find enough guards to staff them. So to cavalierly claim they're giving inmates living in squalor such a great deal ignores the obvious question: What would you do instead, Dallas News? On that difficult question, I guarantee, they'll have no snarky reply like their mocking editorial on the work program.

The Dallas jail doesn't have very many options at this point, and none of them include keeping low-level offenders in the jail longer so they can clean up roads in Commissioner Mayfield's precinct.

(Image via Proximo)

Texas Worst Court: Cops can hand out dope to create snitches

UPDATE: See more detail on the new rule established by the CCA here.

If court watchers didn't already have enough reasons to disdain the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which Texas Monthly famously called "Texas' Worst Court," now they've ruled that it's okay for police officers to distribute drugs to informants in order to convince them to become snitches.

Really? It's come to this? Cops can distribute illegal dope so they can recruit informants to catch people distributing illegal dope? What, exactly, is the point of that?

In what I hope she will make a regular feature, Anjuli Verma lists a bad Texas court decision among "This Week's Top Snitch Scandals" on the new national ACLU's blog about informant abuses:

The San Antonio Express News reported that Texas' highest criminal appeals court issued a decision that, in effect, allows police officers to give illegal drugs — even when the drugs are evidence in a case — to informants for their personal use! In this case, a police officer caught the potential informant with drugs, but before booking the evidence in her case he gave some of the drugs back to her so she could get high. The officer's defense to the tampering-with-evidence charge? "I was trying to create a snitch."

I'd written about this case on Grits when it was at the appellate court level, and I cannot believe the CCA overruled the Fourth Court of Appeals (by a narrow 5-4 margin) to declare that "creating a snitch" is a defense to police evidence tampering. The officer actually thought giving drugs to a snitch was okay, he said, because he'd seen it done on television cop shows. (No, really!)

Here's the problem: Not one Democrat has signed up to run for any of the three Court of Criminal Appeals seats up in 2008, and none of the potential candidates I've heard of panned out. This ignominious court, it appears, will remain entirely uncontested, so the same nine judges will be there after the next election, even if predicted Democratic presidential coattails secure other statewide seats. That would be an enormous waste of an opportunity.

Somebody needs to step up. Three somebodies, actually, with "J.D." after their names. Or this disgraceful bunch will just run the Texas criminal justice system without interruption with the same crappy outcomes for years to come.

* * *

In other CCA-disgrace-related news, the public complaint against Presiding Judge Sharon Keller was ultimately signed by more than 1,600 Texans, and was distributed Friday afternoon to the court and filed with the Judicial Conduct Commission. See:

• Video story of Friday's protest from FOX 7 News
• TMN: Court will stay open to accept demands for Keller's resignation.
• Complaint has more than 1600 signers.

Barry Bonds Perjury Indictment Is Pure USDoJ Media Ploy

Since Grits has discussed steroid testing quite a bit recently and did a reader poll on the topic, I wanted to comment briefly on the Barry Bonds' perjury indictment related to alleged (but extremely likely) steroid use. To be clear, from everything I've seen, Bonds is a big jerk. I don't like him much, and I wish Hank Aaron still held the home run record. But the much-hyped federal indictments seem unmerited, and if I were a betting man, I'd wager Bonds and his high-priced legal talent will win out at the end of the day.

Leaving aside the personalities and issues in the specific case, though, Bonds' indictments raise a number of other issues for me that deserve wider discussion.

First, why are my tax dollars even investigating steroids in professional baseball? It seems to me Congress and the DoJ got involved only because of the media hype. Isn't this taking the Interstate Commerce Clause a little far?

Second, I remain unconvinced that there's a serious health threat to steroid use that isn't taken on knowingly and with full consent from those taking them. Indeed, some of the admitted steroid users, like Marion Jones and some of the European cyclists, are among the best-conditioned athletes on the planet. It's one thing for Major League Baseball to ban steroids to protect the purity of competition (though if that's the case, they've failed, since hundreds of players besides Bonds have allegedly also used steroids in the current generation of athletes). But it's quite another for the long arm of the federal government to intervene when there's little health or safety threat. I mean, don't they have a war to run, or something?

Third, can we please stop pursuing pointless politicized prosecutions against high profile figures for "perjury" when no one was charged with any underlying crime? Bill Clinton, Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby, how many times have we seen this, now? Stop, please.

Fourth, media hype surrounding Bonds shows race still matters. The underlying issues are not racial, but the public's reaction has contained extra vitriol that you don't see when we're talking about Mark McGwire.

Fifth, as Kuff said, the statistics are simply a record of history. Talk of wiping Bonds' stats off the books makes no more sense than pretending games played by "Shoeless" Joe Jackson never happened. The advantage gained by Bonds using steroids wasn't nearly as great, IMO, as the advantage Babe Ruth enjoyed not having to face pitchers from the Negro League. But we see no asterisk on Ruth's stats, or other MLB greats from before league integration.

Finally, if we're going to prioritize law enforcement resources based on where they get the most bang for the buck, as I've argued before, the feds should be focusing on steroid abuse in law enforcement, not in professional or amateur sports. When police officers engage in black market activities it exposes them to blackmail and corruption opportunities that create a real public safety dilemma. There is simply no such public interest benefit from the government investigating athletes.

The New York Times quoted a law prof saying a "message has to be sent to the public” when a high profile person appears to get away with defying federal prosecutors and the grand jury. But in my experience, nearly every time someone tells you a lawsuit or a proposed law is intended to "send a message," the result is bad public policy because public relations goals inevitably override the pursuit of justice.

That's what's happened here, and it's why I hope federal prosecutors pursuing this wind up with mud in their eye.

Send Bonds to the Hall of Fame, forget all the talk of an asterisk, and let's start to have a more serious discussion about whether steroids do any demonstrable harm that justifies federal intervention, and whether there might be more serious problems out there to worry about.

MORE: Big Tom over at Houston's Clear Thinkers rounds up more Bonds-related editorializing in the blogosphere.

TYC Heads to Court: Like Sand In a Carburetor, These are the Days of Their Lives

I've heard nothing about how the depositions went this week of the Youth Commission's "Bronco" Billy Humphrey and others involved in the agency's decision to ignore an agreed court order restricting pepper spray use, but the Statesman has a short preview of Monday's court hearing:

Agency officials have been ordered into a Travis County District Court Monday morning to explain why they have not complied with an October court settlement in which they agreed to limit the use of pepper spray in juvenile lockups.

Under the settlement, Dimitria Pope, the Youth Commission's acting executive director, agreed to rescind her Aug. 2 directive allowing guards to use pepper spray more frequently before they try to physically restrain youths.

Attorneys for Texas Appleseed and Advocacy Inc. had sued the Youth Commission to block the expanded pepper-spray use, arguing the change violated state law. Then, two weeks ago, they asked a judge to force the Youth Commission to comply with the settlement — which it quickly promised it would.

It didn't, advocates say.

Each of the plaintiffs has a mental illness or serious emotional disability, and one suffered skin burns after being pepper sprayed three times to prevent him from harming himself, Texas Appleseed board Chairman Jim George said.

The agency has re-submitted the disputed pepper spray policy through the Texas Register process, and is currently in the process of accepting public comments. But as Grits has described before, ignoring the advice of experts, Pope, Humphrey and Co. have bypassed that process twice - both when they originally instituted the policy Aug. 2, and then in defiance of the agreed court order immediately after it was handed down. That's why the court has intervened.

This is really turning into quite a soap opera. Indeed, in asking the obvious questions I feel like I'm writing promo script for Days of Our Lives: What do you think will happen on Monday? Who will Humphrey and Co. try to scapegoat, and will they succeed? What do TYC'ers think will happen to "Bronco" Billy (or "The Humpster," as a number of commenters hilariously call him)? And in the bigger picture, will the Governor appoint a new conservator anytime soon, and with new scandals arising every week, will Dimitria Pope and the TDCJ transplants running the agency make it through the end of the year without being replaced?

Stay tuned to find out, or leave your predictions in the comments.

Seek Overincarceration Solutions

"If all the people in the Texas criminal justice system lived in a single community, it would be the fourth largest city in Texas," reported The Texas Observer in one of several related items regarding overincarceration that deserve Grits readers attention:

• Break the Chain, The Texas Observer (editorial)
• Education = Less recidivism, Corrections Sentencing
• Fewer $$$ for treatment = more recidivism, Corrections Sentencing

Briefings on Bush's Mexico Drug Plan Raise More Questions than Answers

I was hoping we'd learn more this week from Congressional hearings about the President's "Merida Initiative" to funel $1.5 billion to Mexico over three years to support Mexican drug interdiction, but from the official testimony posted on the House Foreign Affairs Committee website, I find more questions than answers. For now, then, let's run through some of the questions:

Helicopters for what?
A big chunk of them money will go to purchase helicopters and other equipment for Mexico, but as Chairman Tom Lantos in his opening statement questioned:

$208 million of the proposed $500 million package for Mexico is for helicopters. The question remains, what are the mission requirements of these helicopters? How will Mexico use the aircraft? What restrictions do we contemplate putting on the use of the aircraft? How will we monitor the use of the aircraft?

Indeed, Lantos pointed out, we've done this before:

This is not the first attempt to provide helicopters for counter-drug use. Twelve years ago, 73 helicopters were given to Mexico. They were used, and did not work well, and we ended up with the Mexicans giving them back to us. The Mexican military also singularly dislikes end-use monitoring requirements, without which Congress will not approve the measure.

I guess it's true that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Besides helicopters, the Bush administration proposes giving the Mexican government all sorts of additional high-tech equipment and assist creating national criminal databases comparable to in the United States. It seems highly unlikely such grand goals can be completed within budget.

Is there an exit strategy?
Lantos also questioned whether the initiative represents an open ended commitment or a finite one:

The reports in the media are that this is a three-year plan. We are currently in the seventh year of Plan Colombia with no end in sight. Is the Mexico plan equally open-ended? How will we define and how will we measure success? From where will subsequent money come for this plan? Latin American assistance budgets have been steadily declining and a very large portion of the amounts Latin America does get are taken up by Plan Colombia. Will ’09 money for this plan also be taken from existing Latin American funds?

I don't think anyone can credibly say drug importation will have ceased in three years since we've not accomplished that task in the last 82. The $1.5 billion shouldn't be considered the cost of the initiative, IMO - it's more like an ante required to get into a no-limit game.

Will we just be training more Zetas?
Finally, the chairman made a veiled reference to Los Zetas, Mexican paramilitary commandos trained by the US at Fort Benning, GA, who went on to work for the drug cartels, suggesting that the plan does not include sufficient safeguards to prevent that from happening again, declaring:

Training is an important part of this program, and training is a very important element in stemming the flow of drugs. But it is reported that prior counter-drug training resulted in a significant number of individuals, well-trained, becoming members of drug traffickers’ military units – and as a result of our training, using sophisticated military tactics, intelligence-gathering and operational training. Training can be dangerous because it can make corrupt forces more effective.

I'm glad Lantos raised this: How can America be sure we're not training and arming corrupt Mexican police and military personnel? Not only is it precisely the right question to ask, it should be asked first before we start training and arming Mexican police and military who we don't know and can't thoroughly trust.

Dallas News: Inexperienced TYC Vendor Got No-Bid Contract

Former state Rep. Arlene Wohlgemuth helped an inexperienced vendor with a troubled past get a no-bid contract with the Texas Youth Commission, reports Steve McGonigle at the Dallas News ("TYC hands contract to controversial ex-official," Nov. 16):

Top executives of the Texas Youth Commission awarded a no-bid contract to a former state official with a slim record in juvenile justice but a long history of controversial business dealings with public agencies.

Gregg Phillips, a former top deputy with the state Health and Human Services Commission, began working this spring to overhaul TYC's inmate classification system after his lobbyist contacted the agency's conservator, Jay Kimbrough.

Despite a lack of familiarity with Mr. Phillips, agency executives arranged a $275,000 contract for his company that bypassed standard procurement rules and the legislative funding process. Mr. Phillips said they did not ask for references or financials.

Read the whole story for details. The money quote came from former conservator Jay Kimbrough: "It doesn't matter to me if Gregg Phillips was on the grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas, if he has a solution that is good for the youth of TYC."

Really, sir? Because earlier this year you fired dozens of TYC employees for past criminal offenses that the agency knew about when they were hired. Said Kimbrough at the time, "If I have my way, and I bet I do, those people will not be employed by the TYC."

So why did those employees' past matter so much to you, Mr. Kimbrough, but when Arlene Wohlgemuth recommends a lobby client to you, you don't give a hoot if they assassinated JFK?!

UPDATE: This isn't the first contract Wohlgemuth has steered Mr. Phillips' way. See more background on Gregg Phillips' history in Texas and Mississippi state government from:

• Ramblings of an HHSC Employee
• Off the Kuff: Here and here
• The Red State
• Watch Your Assets
• Texans for Public Justice
• The Texas Observer
  

Valley papers axe Austin reporter who broke TYC stories

AAAAAAAaaaaarrrrggghhh!!!

South Texas Chisme brings the bad word: The Valley Freedom newspaper group, which runs the Brownsville Herald, the McAllen Monitor and the Valley Morning Star, has decided to shut down its capitol bureau which means adios for reporter Elizabeth Pierson Hernandez, who doggedly pursued and broke stories about problems at the Texas Youth Commission for a year before the rest of the state's media caught on.

Soon after the sex abuse scandal broke earlier this year, I called Pierson-Hernandez "the most astute reporter covering problems at the Texas Youth Commission." Long before the Texas Observer and the Dallas News were on the case, she was tracking TYC's troubles from a South Texas vantage point. Her work led to a still-ongoing federal inquiry at the Evins Unit in Edinburg.

Texans know a lot less about state government now than a couple of decades ago because there's hardly anybody left to cover it but part-timers and bloggers. The decline of the two newspaper town and the flight of broadcast media from Texas state political coverage both have contributed to the trend.

In a podcast earlier this year on the Texas Politics blog, Houston Chronicle political writer R.G. Ratcliffe reported about the decline in numbers at the capitol press corps. In 1991, he said, 26 news organizations had 66 credentialed capitol reporters in Austin. In 2006, 16 news organizations had 37 total reporters, and most of them were part time. Clearly those numbers have not completed their decline. The Valley Freedom group was the only media organization south of San Antonio with a reporter in Austin.

All that to say, Texas can't afford to lose many more talented, full-time pros like Elizabeth Pierson Hernandez from the capitol press corps. This is terrible news, and I wish the Valley Freedom group would reconsider its decision.

Federalism arguments favor border wall opponents

Yesterday I argued that the states rights baby shouldn't be tossed out with the bathwater of segregationism, and here's another example where the revitalized concept would come in handy. Reports Forrest Wilder at the Texas Observer blog:

With a stroke of his pen last month the Homeland Security chief suspended nineteen laws in Arizona that stood in the way of a two-mile section of border fence slated for the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area.

He’s threatening to do South Texas the same way, unless environmentalists win a recently filed lawsuit.

[Michael] Chertoff is using a tool granted to him by Congress in 2005 as part of the Real ID Act. In Section 102 of that act, Congress offered Homeland Security the power to waive laws conflicting with border militarization security. Congress also stripped the courts of judicial review except for Constitutional claims.

What an outrageous abuse! Here's a situation that, to me, cries out for strident claims of state sovereignty. I've said before a wall on the Texas-Mexico border amounts to the most imbecilic public policy I've ever heard seriously proposed. If it happens, we will be the first nation state in history of the planet to build a wall along a major river, and leave the river on the other side!

Overturning state and local laws with a stroke of a pen in Washington is an affront to federalism and the concept of local control, snubbing people on the front lines who have firsthand stakes in the border and border security. By all rights, opponents of a border wall should be waving banners with the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution stenciled on them. But since those arguments have been all but banished from polite society - after all, Bob Herbert might call you a racist - opponents find themselves falling back on weaker arguments. E.g., the Observer reports that:

residents on both sides of the border as well as environmentalists and birders are enraged over the fence.

The latest map released by the government shows segments of the wall slicing through critical habitat in Texas. The Sabal Palm Audubon Center in Brownsville will be completely walled off, leaving this rare, species-rich palm grove in a sort-of no-man’s-land. Many Texans probably do not know that the Lower Valley is the most biologically diverse region in the nation. Yet it has a global reputation. I’ve met people from as far away as South Africa who have never set foot in Texas but know about the Valley because of its fame as a birding and wildlife paradise.

Chertoff’s response to all this? “I have to say to myself, ‘Yes, I don’t want to disturb the habitat of a lizard, but am I prepared to pay human lives to do that?’,” he told the AP.

Chertoff's response is as clever as it is disingenuous (arguably building a wall will cost more lives by pushing migrants further out into the boondocks): If the debate is defense against Al Qaeda against bird habitat, I think the wall builders probably win. But if the debate is about federalist ideals laid out in nation's founding document, I think arguments against the wall gain more traction.

It's not that birds and lizards don't matter, it's that the environmental issues appeal to a fairly narrow and more liberal segment of the public, while even those without a personal or ideological stake in environmentalism can find reasons to dislike a fence that restricts Texans' access to a major river and was imposed by Washington against the wishes of the locals.

There are many good arguments for opposing a border wall, there's really no reason to limit yourself.

Get There Before Five: Rally Coincides with Filing Public Complaint vs. Judge Sharon Keller

Now that more than 1,300 Texans have signed onto a public complaint alleging misconduct against Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller, the Texas Moratorium Network brings news the complaint will be delivered to the court Friday afternoon, accompanied by a public rally in front of the high court in Austin.

We will deliver a copy of the complaint to the clerk of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for distribution to Sharon Keller and the other judges on the Court. We will also mail a copy to the State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

You can also bring your own personally written letter to the rally and deliver it to Sharon Keller urging her to resign.

The rally starts at 4:45. Don't be late.

RELATED: Why no one likes Judge Keller and she should quit and go home

MORE: From USA Today: In hours before last execution, a frenzied legal fight

Grievances filed against TYC's "Bronco" Billy Humphrey for retaliation

Reports the Dallas News. I know a lot of Texas Youth Commission employees have been waiting for the day this article showed up in the MSM - read the whole thing.

Advocacy Inc. will depose Humphrey on Friday to prepare for a court hearing next week on whether the agency violated an agreed court order retracting an illegally installed policy expanding use of pepper spray on youth.

Stop Snitching: God Said So

Those who know me well are aware of my long-time interest in early Christian history, but it's rare to find that interest coinciding with topics I cover on this blog. An occasional exception, though, can be found on the subject of "snitching," about which religious sources are both verbose and all over the map.

I had the opportunity today to read about the Synod of Elvira, an important provincial religious council in Spain that occurred sometime during the first decade of the Fourth Century, prior to Emperor Constantine's conversion and Christianity's formal, public acceptance in the Roman Empire. This was a period when Christians were harshly persecuted by the Romans, so I was unsurprised but certainly humored to find in the translated text an ancient, Christian version of the modern "stop snitching" code (here's the only web version I can find: Scroll down to see #73):

A Christian who denounces someone who is then ostracized or put to death may not commune even as death approaches. If the case was less severe, he or she may commune in less than five years. If the informer was a catechumen, he or she may be baptized after five years.

Refusing communion was the most terrible punishment early Christians could think of - far more awful, in the long run, than the death penalty for the unsaved soul.

The reference to a Christian denouncing someone in the context of the Elvira Synod meant ratting out a fellow Christian to the Roman authorities, which quite possibly could get them killed. In that case, their excommunication was permanent.

These Christians had read most of the same books of the Bible we do now (they probably had more, actually), and they knew the admonition to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's." But the Elvira Synod did not consider their truthful testimony about fellow Christians something that belonged to Caesar. Instead, snitching on fellow Christians was declared an offense against God by which a Christian risked everything, literally their eternal soul.

Context is everything, isn't it? Who'da thought early Christians may have been progenitors of a version of the "stop snitching" meme?

Grits to Bob Herbert: You still don't understand white southerners

If readers will excuse a slightly off-topic post, over at Talk Left a Bob Herbert column in the New York Times is billed as a must read that frankly punched some of my buttons, and not in a good way. So, having this forum, I thought I'd respond.

Reacting to navel gazing articles by two other New York Times columnists on the meaning of an obscure appearance by Ronald Reagan when he ran for president, Herbert argues that the event typified the ex-President's legacy as one of racial indifference. (An aside: Uh ... the "newshook" is 27 years old, and this is a "must read"?) In promoting "states rights," said Herbert, Reagan:

was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.

I think it's time to bust apart apart this stale, outdated meme that "states rights" is merely "code" for racism. There's some historical truth to it, but it's a truth that obscures many equally important ones, IMO damaging honest political discussion more than clarifying it.

My family were Reagan Democrats during that 1980 presidential campaign, and since my grandfather was an LBJ ally and county judge for 29 years in the Panhandle, our home was fairly politically minded. As I near 41 later this month, I've spent my whole adult life working in politics on issues related to civil rights, including performing a lot of the lobby legwork at the Texas capitol after the Tulia case Mr. Herbert wrote so much about (we met once in Tulia, though I doubt he'd remember).

Given that familial and personal history, I feel fairly qualified to speak about the ideology Herbert is criticizing. I believe in "states rights" today as strongly as I did when I cheered at a (different) Reagan rally in 1980 and volunteered for his re-election campaign in 1984 as a 17 year old.

It may be just "code" to you, Mr. Herbert, but to me it's an important part of the Constitution that's been defenestrated thanks to liberal smears that claim anyone who argues for state authority under the Tenth Amendment is a racist. To this day the Tenth Amendment (and the even more downtrodden Ninth) still animate many of my core beliefs:

I'm horrified by the abuse of the Interstate Commerce Clause to justify federal regulation in areas where it has no business, transforming what was intended to be a limited federal government into a nearly all-powerful one.

I consider the federal War on Drugs and the expansion of federal prisons, law enforcement and immigration detention a direct spite to the separation of federal and state powers articulated in the Constitution.

It infuriates me when the feds threaten to withhold highway funds or use other forms of coercion to make states do things like implement a national ID through the REAL ID Act, along with many other examples.

I'm mindful that regulating immigration before the Civil War was a states' right, another power seized by a newly all-powerful federal government during Reconstruction. (The first US immigration law, naturally, was racist in nature, restricting entry of "coolies" from China.) Thus all of today's immigration feuds, talk of a "fence," etc., to my way of thinking, directly result from stripping away states' power.

If states rights were only about slavery and Jim Crow - and Herbert's 100% correct those arguments were primary justifications by supporters for both - then I'd agree the phrase could be dismissed as mere "code" for racism and cast aside in polite company and official venues. But the idea that most governing rights should be reserved to the states had a much broader meaning both in antebellum America and in 1980, one that tapped into legitimate ideological streams of thought dating back to Thomas Jefferson, in addition to the racist ones Mr. Herbert highlights.

Speaking of Jefferson, in the Kentucky Resolution, the great man wrote that the Constitution, "delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force."

White southerners like my family believed that Jeffersonian creed to their core. It was Reconstruction, we understood, that shattered that founding constitutional principle through martial law and authoritarian decrees, launching a creeping expansion of federal power and domestic militarism, according to this view, that continues to this day.

Herbert's derision for states rights stems from his belief that it is purely a racially charged, rhetorical gimmick, a belief confirmed en toto, he thinks, by "the acknowledgment by the Republican strategist Lee Atwater that the use of code words like 'states’ rights' in place of blatantly bigoted rhetoric was crucial to the success of the G.O.P.’s Southern strategy."

States rights isn't only a mask for racism, it's part of an ideology of small government, limiting (and separating) state power, and above all, local control. Confusing those ideas, as does Bob Herbert's "must read" column, leads to misunderstanding people's motives and dumbing down the debate.

UPDATE: Jeralyn at TalkLeft agrees liberals shouldn't view states rights as a dirty word. Alex, at the Drug Law Blog, thinks I want to have my cake and eat it too, while Pete at Drug War Rant adds his two cents.

Say 'Howdy' to Deliberate Indifference; Catonya defines a 'snitch'

Say 'Howdy' to Deliberate Indifference at the Dallas County Jail, a new blog whose name is taken from an allegation in a federal lawsuit about the jail's attitude toward providing inmates adequate healthcare. Things are just getting started at DI, but initial posts look promising, including an item on inmate phone service, an annoying incorrect address for prisoner mail in official literature that got her letters returned, and a comment about what the feds are mad about at the Dallas Jail.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Deliberate!

Meanwhile, one of my Texas blogospheric favorites, Catonya, supplies a "retired outlaw's" definition of snitching, siding with those who distinguish uninvolved witnesses from a snitch or a rat exchanging testimony for leniency:

My definition of a “snitch” (aka CI, confidential informant, rat) is someone who gets caught breaking the law, then sacrifices someone else to avoid accountability for their own crime(s). They’re at the bottom of the outlaw food chain, have no loyalty to anyone, they will do anything to get out of trouble, and are usually the most strung out/guilty of their acquaintances. Yet this is who the courts promote as credible witnesses…

For me, the lines were always very clear.

You do your own time -period.

If you snitch and street justice catches up with you. I know nothing. sucks to be you…

If you abuse a child, the elderly, or an animal - I will call the appropriate agency and report your ass so fast it’ll make your head spin.

If you implicate or snitch on me or my partner (husband, significant other), - all bets between you and I are off.

Uninvolved witnesses and innocent bystanders are not snitches. Don’t blame them because your dumb ass wasn’t paying attention to your surroundings.

’nuff said?

I think that pretty much covers it, Cat, thanks! (And BTW: congratulations of recently getting off your absurdly long probation stint. Good job all around; keep up the good work on the blog and all else you do. It's funny, you and I have never met face to face, but I'm awfully proud of you!)

I love the blogosphere. There's a lot of schlock out there, but it's also really cool when people who have stories to tell just hop on the web and tell them. These two blogs are great examples of that.

Roundup: Public Safety Orphaned, Drug War Deja Vu, Jail Boosterism, and Probation for Murderers

While I'm occupied with other things, let's round up a few items from the news and blogs that deserve Grits readers attention:

Crack Sentencing Retroactivity
At the Lone Star Times and Sentencing Law and Policy (see here, here, and here) they're debating whether crack sentencing guidelines should be retroactive. The Lone Star Times editorial probably credits Grits too much on this topic, which is a federal concern and not something I've commented on much as a state-issues blog. However, the LST debate did give me the opportunity to get off this line in the comments:

When Rhetoric meets Reality in the politics of crime and punishment, the Tax Increase typically results as their fat, obnoxious bastard child, with Public Safety - thin, waifish, and orphaned - left to its own devices, scrounging for crumbs.

82 Years of Drug War Deja Vu and Counting
As President Bush proposes a $1.5 billion aid plan to Mexico to train its police and military, an astute DRC Net reader forwarded this old article from the New York Times (May 1925) to David Borden that could have been written today about President Bush's deal:

The drug treaty, which will be formulated in El Paso by the Commissioners of the United States and representatives of the Mexican Government, is expected to achieve two results -- elimination of the constant stream of drugs which is pouring into the United States through Mexico, and helping to clean out from the border towns several groups of Americans and foreigners who 'have made large sums of Money through the drug traffic.

Slate: Why the lethal injection protocols need changing
Death penalty politicking by supporters and opponents have made something that was relatively simple for the veterinary industry - changing lethal protocols for putting down animals - into an issue that requires a US Supreme Court decision to change for killing people. Slate reported:

If academics, doctors, and prisoners—as well as death-penalty supporters and the guy who invented the protocol—have been criticizing the three-drug protocol for years, why haven't the states switched methods? And once the court agreed to hear Baze, why didn't Texas simply change to barbiturates and keep its executions on schedule? You'd expect the states to choose doling out the barbiturates instead of acceding to a monthslong moratorium that will offer the public a chance to see that life without the death penalty may still be worth living. ...

The reason our death-penalty methods are old and rickety is that they were cobbled together on the fly and broadly adopted without care. They are being defended for political and strategic reasons, as opposed to pragmatic ones. And the whole argument is a bad proxy for a larger fight about capital punishment. If carelessness, raw politics, and inertia should be driving policy, the current lethal-injection system is a penalogical grand slam. One shouldn't have to be opposed to the death penalty, be soft on criminals, or be a liberal crybaby to insist that procedures that are hopelessly outdated and medically suspect should be fixed.

Jails, counties, rely on trusty labor from inmates who could be released
Reductions in inmate populations at the Dallas County Jail have exposed the extent to which Dallas and other Texas county rely on inmate labor to substitute for paid employees to operate their facilities. Kevin Krause at the Dallas News reports ("Dallas County reduces every sentences, so inmates refuse to work," Nov. 12) that Dallas has the

most generous good-time policy among Texas' largest urban counties.

It means someone sentenced by a judge to 90 days in jail actually serves only one month. The longest anyone can serve for a misdemeanor conviction in Dallas County is four months, even though state law allows a maximum sentence of one year in jail for a Class A misdemeanor.

Good time is a privilege, not a right. But in Dallas County it cannot be taken away, even for violating jail rules, unlike in other county jails. Instead, troublemakers in the Dallas County jails can lose visitation, commissary or telephone privileges.

The only thing Sheriff Lupe Valdez can offer to entice workers is extra food rations and extra changes of jail garb. She has had difficulty filling the 844 daily work assignments in her jails.

Dallas County Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, for one, thinks the good-time policy is too generous. He's been trying for the last year to use jail inmates for cleanup work on road projects in his district.

Mr. Mayfield says the pool of state jail inmates he has used has dried up. He is putting one of his road and bridge crew members through the sheriff's academy to become a jailer to supervise inmates working outside.

After setting up its newshook as a shortage of inmate laborers (as opposed to, say, the failure of the county to properly staff its programs), the article further down we find John Wiley Price, of all people, explaining why the policy was recently put in place:

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who heads up a committee that successfully reduced the jail's population this year, said other counties can offer good time to entice inmates to work because they don't have the problems Dallas County does.

Other counties like Harris, Bexar and Travis also have had jail-crowding problems. But low staffing as well as serious problems with sanitation and medical care have worsened Dallas County's jail situation, leading to repeated failed inspections and a federal lawsuit.

Bingo. Kevin's a good reporter, but MSM journalists sometimes seem to have short memories. It was just this spring that a federal lawsuit forced the Dallas jail to dramatically reduce the inmate population in a very short period of time, and it's the low-risk inmates, naturally, who head out the door first. And of course, you don't want the high risk ones out working on the side of the road!

Also, the article mentions the reduction in pretrial defendants as a source of the problem. But they don't have any sentence to work off, so how can they be working off their punishments through volunteer labor? Getting those folks out of the jail quicker is a good thing and shouldn't be framed, in my view, as contributing to the labor shortage. Inmates actually serving their jail sentences should be the main ones populating work crews.

If the county has improperly relied on a bloated jail population to make up for staffing shortages, then pay for actual staff and quit relying on jail labor. The solution is not to fill up the jail so there will be more people to pick up trash! The cost of hiring the additional workers will be de minimis by comparison to continued jail problems on the scale Dallas has faced. Get it through your head, Dallas officials: Fewer people in jail is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Jail Boosterism Run Amok
This is the wrong lesson for East Texas counties to learn from Smith County voters' recent rejection of new bonds for jail building! Reported (editorialized?) the Athens Review ("Counties struggle with jail issues, Nov. 12):

The vote of Smith County voters to deny a bond proposal that would have funded building a new jail could be advantageous to Henderson County and others who have jail expansion projects underway.

Officials in Henderson County are hopeful that the additional 304 beds in the expansion currently under construction will bring dollars into their coffers.

Excuse me? Talk about schadenfreude! Much of the article sounds like an advertisement for speculative for-profit prison building, praising local leaders for their wisdom using the county jail as a profit center by housing other counties' prisoners.

There are presently several counties in Texas with jail projects under way. According to the commission, some of the larger undertakings include: Bell County with 658 beds due to become available in 2009; Dallas County with 2309 expected to open in 2009; Fort Bend County which is building 760 for a 2009 opening; Harris County, opening 1,200 in 2009; Montgomery County readying 1,000 for 2008 and Travis County constructing 1,200 for 2009. Most of those are among the state’s larger counties and are anticipating their future space needs.

The Henderson County Jail expansion project first came under consideration in the late 1990s. An $8.5 million bond for the project was approved by voters in November 2005. County Judge David Holstein has commended the government officials and voters of Henderson County who moved the project to the forefront.

The voters of Henderson County are to be commended. When I look back I never would have thought, in my wildest dreams, we could move this fast on something this important without experiencing the turmoil other counties are having,” Holstein observed at the groundbreaking of the 49,000 square foot addition.

Those new Harris County beds got voted down last Tuesday, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the rest of those statistics.

Indeed, there is a difference between "local" and "parochial" coverage, and this article crossed that line. If the Henderson county jail were a private prison company and this anonymous writer had been assigned to pen a press release to impress shareholders about possible future jail-bed demand, this article might have been appropriate. As news ... ?

Probation for Murderers
The Dallas News has compiled all of their series yet published about murderers on probation here. More on this once their series is complete - perhaps I'll do an overview and analysis over the weekend - but offhand, going through many of their case studies I could identify several recurring situations where murderers frequently received probation: a) Prosecutors had weak or circumstantial cases and the defendant may not have done it, b) the defendant was guilty via the "law of parties" but didn't actually kill anyone themselves, c) the defendant was elderly, sick or incapacitated to the point where they were no longer a threat, and d) the victim was a worse person than the murderer and basically "needed killin'," so juries sympathized and gave the defendant another chance. In that sense, the title of the series "Unequal Justice" may be misleading. "Justice Tempered with Mercy" might have been a more appropriate headline.

Those are VERY broad first impressions to a series with a lot of detail and nuance. Congrats to the Dallas News and its reporters for tackling this journalistic behemoth.

Blue Ribbon Panelists still touting TYC reform ideas

I'm a little annoyed that nobody told me about a forum featuring Blue Ribbon Panel members at UT-Austin yesterday regarding the Texas Youth Commission (Uh ... readers ... you're slacking here!), but The Daily Texan provided coverage.

Southwest Key president Juan Sanchez told the audience "that 67 percent of those incarcerated in Texas juvenile correctional facilities are nonviolent offenders. The panel suggested that those who do not pose a risk to themselves or others should be treated through community involvement rather than a trip to a lock-up facility."

Panelists repeated their calls to move away from a punishment culture at TYC and toward evidence-based rehabilitation strategies.

BRP chair David Springer particularly criticized overuse of solitary confinement for TYC youth. He "said that the facility located in Edinburg can hold 30 youths in solitary confinement at one time, six times more than in the entire state of Missouri."

For those in Austin, reports the Texan, "The task force will present its September report to the Human Rights Commission at Austin City Hall on Monday," which should be televised on the local community access channel.

I'm glad the Blue Ribbon Panelists are out promoting their ideas in the reform blueprint (pdf) to the public, because nobody in TYC management is listening. The acting Executive Director has said she will not implement the recommendations, and the publication isn't even available on the agency's website.

Amachi Texas shows adult guidance can keep more kids with incarcerated parents out of prison

Children of incarcerated parents are around 6-8 times more likely than their peers to wind up in prison when they're adults, while roughly half of men and 2/3 of women in Texas prisons have minor-age children on the outside. So I'm thankful to see the Amachi Texas program - a partnership with Big Brothers Big Sisters targeting this group - gaining additional state support, including grants from the Governor's Criminal Justice Division.

An op ed in today's Fort Worth Star Telegram ("Nudging a child away from a jail cell," Nov. 12) makes the case for expanding the program and reducing unnecessary incarceration to reduce the collateral consequences for children:

Studies show that children who receive positive one-on-one mentoring are 52 percent less likely to skip school, 46 percent less likely to use illegal drugs, 33 percent less likely to strike someone in anger and 27 percent less likely to use alcohol. And most important, successful intervention reduces the likelihood that these children will end up in prison.

Amachi -- the Nigerian Ebo word means "Who knows what God has brought us through this child?" -- is the creation of Wilson Goode, the former two-term mayor of Philadelphia and a child of incarcerated parents. First introduced in Philadelphia in 2001, the program is used in more than 273 projects in 48 states. Amachi Texas is the first statewide model.

The rapid growth of Amachi is both hopeful and alarming. On one hand, it tells us that it's effective and the issue is gaining much-needed attention. However, it is also a dismal reminder that thousands of children nationwide lack the guidance necessary to become successful adults.

As the CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of North Texas, I have witnessed the impact of this incredible organization through our partnership with Amachi Texas. But it's my personal experience as an Amachi mentor to Jamar that truly opened my eyes to the life-changing power of the program.

Jamar's father, arrested before Jamar was even born, is serving a life sentence for murder. When I first met Jamar, he was troubled, angry and prone to violence. Today, Jamar's attitude and behavior have dramatically improved -- and a boy who once idolized the prison lifestyle is looking toward a bright future that includes becoming a Big Brother himself.

Hundreds of stories like mine could be told. Each relationship endures unique obstacles and struggles. But time and time again, the results speak loud and clear--a small gift of attention and love is the difference between a life of crime and a life of hope for these neglected children.

In the Dallas-Fort Worth area alone, 72,000 children have lost a parent to incarceration. These children have a second chance to receive positive guidance, love and support, thanks to Amachi Texas.

Reducing the levels of incarceration benefits us all. By targeting this high-risk group, the Amachi program has the power to dramatically reduce violence and crime nationwide.

By all accounts this is a terrific program, even if the scope of the need for children of incarcerated parents nearly boggles the mind compared to the meager resources afforded the problem. I've argued before that focusing services and guidance for these kids might be the most important crime prevention strategy the state could pursue. As the Dallas News argued yesterday, the best way to "fix" TYC may be to reduce the number of kids who go there. More support for kids with parents in prison, no question, must be a part of that strategy to achieve success.

Arbitrator reinstates steroid using Arlington PD officer

Having discussed recently the quiet but growing problem of steroid abuse among police officers, I was interested to see an article published in the Fort Worth Star Telegram last week about a female officer fired for abusing steroids from the Arlington PD ("Veteran officer gets her job back," Nov. 9). The Arlington cop admitted to using steroids after police responded to a domestic dispute at her home:

During an arbitration hearing that ended Oct. 18, [Officer Kelly] Lincoln admitted that she had used steroids for less than two weeks in 2006 and that she had steroids in her possession at the time of the incident, the document said.

An arbitrator ruled Wednesday that Lincoln's firing was unreasonable and ordered that she be reinstated within three days of the ruling. The arbitrator said in his report that Lincoln volunteered for a drug test, ceased steroid use well before the domestic dispute and holds both a master's degree and an advanced peace officer certificate.

Lincoln's request for back pay was denied. The arbitrator wrote that the seven months without pay should serve as a reminder to Lincoln of Police Chief Theron Bowman's concerns about maintaining the highest standards within the police force.

"The Legislature passed and the city's leaders enacted the arbitration system," said Lt. Blake Miller, police spokesman. "We will abide by the arbitration process."

Two points to make about this: First, state civil service law shouldn't give arbitrators authority to overrule a police chief's decision to fire police officers. That's why those cities have civil service commissions, and it's unfortunate and misguided - an homage to police union power at the Texas Legislature - that state law gives officers who've engaged in serious misconduct so many extra appeals.

Second, the arbitrator's reinstatement of Officer Lincoln implies that - as a matter of policy if not in the opinion of the Arlington police chief - that steroid abuse is not a firing offense at that agency. After all, the next steroid abusing officer will point to Kelly Lincoln to convince the next arbitrator that firing defies precedent, and on and on it goes.

In related news, an officer allegedly peddling steroids was arrested in Tennessee last week. Allegedly he tipped off dealers about police surveillance in addition to profiting from the product's sale. Maybe it's time to begin demanding steroid testing of police officers, at least when supervisors suspect steroid use as with a new policy in Albuquerque. It would also help matters to conduct more thorough investigations when law enforcement discovers connections between peace officers and illegal steroid rings.

To be clear, I don't necessarily believe steroids should be illegal, although anecdotal tales of "roid rage" might make steroids inappropriate in any case in the law enforcement profession, where officers must always keep their heads. However as long as steroids remain outlawed, officers who use them expose themselves to black markets and corruption that risk compromising their ability to uphold the law. Police chiefs should be empowered to remove such risks from their departments.

BLOGVERSATION: Lose an Eye, It's a Sport riffs on these themes.

Dallas News: Fix TYC by sending fewer kids there

The Dallas News on Sunday called for "A Fix Closer to Home" for the Texas Youth Commission, arguing that the state gains no measurable public safety benefit from sending most youth to TYC:

As the governor's Blue Ribbon Task Force Report notes, Texas, unlike demographically similar California, chooses to incarcerate more younger offenders for less serious crimes but achieves no better youth crime rates. Punishment over community-based intervention only costs more.

Senate Bill 103, passed in the last Legislature, is a well-intentioned start toward reform, although mostly reactive to the mountain of problems. Yet it does have its forward-looking sections. One requires counties of 335,000 people or more – like Dallas and Tarrant – to implement more community-based programs and report to the governor and Legislature on their success.

The TYC may never fix itself, but one thing the rest of us can do is send fewer of our kids into its care. Solve the problems closer to home for as many of them as possible."

As I've argued recently both on Grits and in "Surviving the TYC Meltdown," the simple math of legislative reforms, combined with changes to agency administrative code rules, means Texas counties inevitably must handle more kids who previously would have gone to TYC, and kids sent to youth prisons will return home much sooner than in the past. Dallas News editorialists are right so suggest that counties need to plan now for how to manage more such kids in their home jurisdictions.

It's what's going to happen, anyway. Why not prepare now?

Judge Cynthia Kent spreads credit on Smith County jail alternatives

Tyler District Judge Cynthia Kent forwards me a response she penned to a letter to the editor I wrote to the Tyler Morning Telegraph that ran today (see here). My letter was based on this Grits blog post suggesting additional strategies for reducing overcrowding at the Smith County Jail and praising Judge Kent for her leadership on the issue in Tyler.

In her response, Judge Kent rightfully shares credit with other elected officials for first steps taken in Smith County to shift away from policies causing unnecessary incarceration for low-level offenses.

I read Mr. Scott Henson's letter, printed 11-12-07 in the Tyler Morning Telegraph, and wanted to thank him for his kind remarks but to also correct some of his information. Smith County citizens should demand and receive the best from their public servants. I believe that the judges, district attorney, and law enforcement are working together to provide public safety through incarceration but also new and innovative programs aimed at reducing recidivism. I don't believe that just giving criminal offenders a ticket or a slap on wrist makes our society safer. Nor do I believe that throwing everyone in jail or prison is the answer. The problems our society face are complex and so are the answers. Many new and old tools of criminal justice are needed to deal with the criminal by-product of a society in trouble unless the good old fashion values of hard work, decency, honesty, clean living, and love of neighbor are re-instilled in our daily lives. Just building a bigger jail is not the answer. However, letting violent offenders free to victimize our community is also not acceptable.

The new programs in Smith County are the product of a team approach to reducing jail overcrowding but still addressing the needs of public safety. Our district attorney, Matt Bingham, and his staff have worked hard to participate in the new Alternative Incarceration Center Program and Jail Expedited Case Court while still focusing on the rights of victims and the community to safety. These new and innovative programs are aimed at expediting cases so that our local jail will only house and feed inmates for the limited time needed to properly dispose of their case. Without the prosecutor's hard work these programs would fail to provide jail overcrowding relief.

The local judges have brainstormed and worked hard to implement the programs to reduce the local jail population, while still protecting the public with proper sentencing for criminal offenders. Judge Carol Clark has worked long and hard hours with the AIC program and to start up the drug court for families in divorce cases with serious drug addictions. She should be highly commended for her willingness to utilize these new justice tools. Her work has resulted in fewer parents locked up in jail, more parents working and paying their child support, and better counseling for parents with drug addictions. Judge Randall Rogers has worked to investigate new technology, such as SCRAM (Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitoring) to deal with DWI and other alcohol criminal offenders outside of the jail. Judge Russell, Judge Skeen, Judge Dunn, and Judge Getz have all spend many hours evaluating the new programs and carefully selecting those individuals who could participate in the jail reduction programs without increasing the safety risk to our community. The judges have differing degrees of confidence in these new programs. That is healthy and necessary in developing new and effective tools to address growing criminal problems in our world.

Our community is in debt to our probation officers, who are doing the hard day-to-day work of helping people turn away from crime, illegal drugs, and alcohol abuse. These men and women are a critical key to giving a hand up to people who want to positively change their lives. Sheriff Smith, well, I don't know how he keeps all the balls in the air with the jail so overcrowded. Somehow he seems to get the job done with the limited resources he has available to his office.

I wish that I could take all the credit for these new programs, but the truth is that many public servants are working hard to reduce the jail population in a safe and responsible manner. My opinion is that it is a better use of our local resources to increase the facilities for the courts, district attorneys, and probation officers, then just build a bigger jail to house, feed, clothe, and medicate inmates. We need more prosecutors and judges to sort out the cases properly, free the innocent, rehabilitate the guilty and non-violent offenders, and then ship off to prison those who pose a serious and continuing threat to our public safety. Our criminal felony case load has increased ten fold since we last created a new district court. Smith County has historically just continued to build more jail cells, but this does not help move the cases out of our jail and on to the proper disposition. It just builds an expensive and bigger criminal warehouse. Smith County deserves a more innovative and productive response from government. I believe our district attorney and judges understand that challenge and are trying to develop positive solutions.

Well, that is the opinion of this simple country judge.

Sincerely,

Judge Cynthia Stevens Kent

Thanks, Judge, for the response and for your hard work (and smart politics) on this issue. As I told Judge Kent responding to her email forwarding the above note, "I think you're too modest ... You've fought an uphill battle and deserve enormous credit for the courage, intelligence and common sense you've shown on this issue over the past couple of years." I do believe that's true - too many other Tyler elected officials have been too quick to jump to building an enormous, expensive new jail as the easy way out. Plus, high pretrial detention rates are entirely a function of decisions by Smith County judges.

But it's also true that elected officials now can universally see that Tyler voters won't support paying for another dose of Incarcerex, and she and her allies will need broad political support to make real reform happen and make it stick. So I applaud Judge Kent, both for her past work to prevent unnecessary jail building and support for incarceration alternatives, and also for her insistence on framing what steps must be taken next in a smarter and more politically astute manner than did my letter.

RELATED:

• Voters who rejected county jails looking for better policies
  
• Counties that rejected new jails must now get serious about diversion
  
• 'The Jail that Ate Tyler' and other stories
  
• Debate intensifies over Tyler's $125 million 'Taj Mahal' jail
  
• Architect: Voters should accept nine-figure pricetag for new jail
  
• Tyler's jail alternative saves $1 million in first nine month
  
• Smith County voters have more options than building Taj Mahal jail
• Tyler's day reporting center reduces overcrowding, saves money
• 'Unsellable' Tyler jail still too small
• Tyler's Alternative Incarceration Center opens; DA thinks no one qualifies
• Tyler judge: End jail overcrowding with community supervision of nonviolent offenders
• More on Tyler's alternatives to jail overcrowding
• Incarceration Alternatives: From Smith County, a plan emerges
• Update: Tyler Alternative Incarceration Plan, Day Reporting Center funded
• Tyler voters: Jail bonds a 'No-No"
• Jail bond vote may become annual affair in Tyler

Tracking the big American drug bosses

Since we've been discussing on Grits the question of who are the big American drug bosses, I wanted to point readers to this story by Mad Cow News tracking ownership of two US-owned jets that Mexican officials say were used in drug trafficking, as well as US banks (Harris Bank of Chicago and Wachovia in Miami) allegedly involved in laundering drug money for the Sinaloa cartel.

The planes were owned by a Florida company, reports MCN's Daniel Hopsicker, which received a sizable unexplained investment from US military contractor Titan Corp. Indeed, one of the "DC9 airliner was also used, without reimbursement, during the first-time Senatorial campaign of Florida Republican Senator Mel Martinez, who until recently was President George W Bush’s handpicked chairman of the national Republican Party."

When I first posed the question of whether there existed any big American drug bosses, I'd forgotten about the nexus of credible allegations surrounding the CIA using drug money to finance the Contras in Nicaragua and other covert counterinsurgency operations in Latin America in the 1980s, but my eyebrows raised when these Mad Cow News reports astonishingly connected these planes to associates of billionarire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, one of the key extra-legal players in the arms to Iran, cash to the Contras arrangement that made Oliver North a national figure. (Khashoggi remains a fugitive from justice.) Talk about a blast from the past! Readers above a certain age will recall that the CIA used money from illegal arms sales and allegedly Latin American drug running to finance covert ops in Central America during the second term of the Reagan presidency.

These connections aren't being raised in the MSM, and it's possible there's smoke that won't lead to fire in Mad Cow News' ongoing expose'. For example, Hopsicker makes much of the fact that Panamanian General Manuel Noriega's attorney represents one of the involved parties, but it's a big stretch to say two criminals are connected because they had the same defense lawyer - at least, unless the same person pays the bills in both cases.

To me, though, the alleged involvement of some US banks seems like a near-inevitability given how much money is involved in the illegal drug trade. And connections by people involved in past US-government covert operations that allegedly involved drug money to the modern Sinaloa cartel raises pretty serious questions to me about whether there really are big American drug lords protected by corrupt law enforcement in the manner of their counterparts in Mexican cartels.

I still don't know if Mexican-style drug lords exist in the United States or who they are, but I can tell you this for certain: The way to find out is to follow the money.

UPDATE: See related primary documents forwarded by Mr. Hopsicker at my request, published in past Mad Cow News stories:

http://www.madcowprod.com/100BUCKS.htm

http://www.madcowprod.com/billboardenvy.htm

http://www.madcowprod.com/from_an_sec_filing.htm

http://www.madcowprod.com/farkas.asp

http://www.madcowprod.com/whittington3.htm

Reader Poll: What is the biggest public safety threat from illegal drugs?

Since I've been focusing more coverage again recently on the rising threat posed by drug cartel violence on both sides of the Texas Mexico border, this week's reader poll aims to identify what Grits readers think is the biggest threat to public safety from illegal drugs.

I wanted to post someplace here for readers to comment as well as the poll in the sidebar because it's quite likely I didn't identify all the important threats to public safety that may concern Grits readers. (Responses from commenters to last week's query were quite informative and useful. Thanks, folk!) Here's the question as asked; register your view in either the poll in the sidebar and/or in the comments:

Which is the biggest public safety threat related to illegal drugs in America?

• Detrimental effects on users' health and lifestyle
• Crimes by drug users
• Organized crime gangs transporting and distributing drugs
• Mexican drug cartels
• Damage done by overincarceration and reduced civil liberties related to the Drug War

Accounts of abuse allegations against guards at Harris jail, TDCJ unit, recall Stanford Prison Experiment

It's been small Texas papers and blogs, not the major metro dailies, who've continued to highlight the rising number of sustained misconduct allegations against Texas prison guards. Lately, The Back Gate and then the Huntsville Item looked at the aggregate misconduct statistics. Now reporter Brenda Johnson at the Lake Houston Sentinel, a community newspaper covering eastern Harris County, brings several micro-examples of serious abuse by guards at a TDCJ unit and the Harris County Jail ("Huffman man indicted for assault, coverup," Nov. 9).

Huffman resident, Tracy Jewett, a former Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) correction officer, was recently indicted for allegedly assaulting a former inmate, covering up the assault, and obstruction of justice.

The announcement was made Oct. 29 by U.S. Attorney Don DeGabrielle and acting Assistant Attorney General Rena J. Comisac, Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice.

In November of 2002, Jewett, holding the rank of sergeant, was assigned to the Ferguson Unit of the TDCJ. He allegedly watched while guards Eugene Morris and Troy Grusendorf allegedly "stomped, kicked and punched" Robert Tanzini until he became unconscious.

According to the affidavit, Tanzini said he had several skull fractures and an eye "kicked out of its socket" when he awoke at University of Texas Medical Branch hospital in Galveston.

An investigation by TDCJ determined Morris had used excessive force. It also found that Jewett and Morris conspired to provide false testimony and falsify reports. Both men are charged separately with one count of falsifying and making a false entry in a TDCJ "Use of Force" report concerning the inmate with the intent to obstruct the investigation.

They are also both charged with separate counts of persuading other TDCJ employees to make false statements about the circumstances regarding the use of force against the inmate, with the intent to hinder, delay or prevent communication of details to officials.

Jewett was suspended without pay in April 2003. According to TDCJ records, he was "allowed to resign for personal reasons."

An east Harris County resident, who wishes to remain anonymous, said that he has been in Jewett's shoes. He was a jail guard at the Harris County Jail for 10 years. "I decided to change jobs when I found myself becoming callous and hardened to people and their basic human rights," he said. "The job, in itself, causes you to lose your perspective about people. There are many incidents that I'm not proud of, where other jail guards treated the inmates with cruelty and it was wrong."

Another person, who also wishes to remain anonymous, said that he was a Harris County Jail guard, but lost his job after his checkbook was stolen and a series of fraudulent checks caused his being arrested and incarcerated in the Harris County Jail.

"For four horrible days, I was treated exactly the same way I used to treat inmates," he said. "I never realized how it felt to be on the receiving end of that cruelty. Now that I've stood in their shoes, I'm just really having a hard time forgiving myself for how I used to treat inmates."

Samuel Miller, a 21-year-old Harris County resident, who was booked into the Harris County Jail in early October, 2006, for an expired registration has a pending law suit claiming he was deprived of his right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. He describes an incident that transpired while he was waiting to be booked out of the Harris County Jail.

"I was excited to finally be getting booked out of that awful place and said something to the guy behind me," said Miller. "The jail guard got irked with me and I believe he set me up because about 15 minutes later, after a series of strange events, he took me into a holding cell and said `If you don't stop talking, I'm going to welcome you to County.' When I asked him what I'd done wrong, he grabbed me by my arms and pinned me to the wall. As I was sliding down the wall, he grabbed me by my right ear and slammed my face into a concrete bench and all I saw was blood. And then after he slammed me, he started to knee and elbow me in my ribs while screaming, `Quit resisting arrest!' But I wasn't. I kept saying, `I'm not. I didn't do anything. Then about four or five other officers came in and began kicking me and punching me. '"

Mark Evans, an east Harris County resident and father of six, witnessed the incident while he was also being booked out of the Harris County Jail for an erroneous out-of- county offense. "I was about 10 feet away," he said. "I can vouch for the kid as never once having raised a hand to those jail guards before they beat him. I saw the blood everywhere in the holding tank. They picked him up and carried him away like a limp rag doll. Then afterwards they carefully cleaned the room and scrubbed the blood from their shoes." ...

Jewett could not be reached for comment. His case, investigated by the FBI, will be prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Ruben R. Perez, and Trial Attorney Edward Caspar with the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. Upon conviction of the deprivation of civil rights and obstruction of justice, Jewett faces a maximum punishment of 10 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. The charge of making a false entry into a document also carries the same maximum punishment.

Note especially comments by the former Harris County jailer who learned to abhor his own prior cruelty toward inmates after spending four days in jail receiving the same treatment he'd previously dished out. I couldn't help but think upon reading them of the Stanford Prison Experiment, where "In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress," or of Waxahachie students' behavior earlier this year during role playing about the Holocaust. One wonders, hearing such accounts, whether the social relations in carceral environs simply bring out the worst in many folks?

"What happens when you put good people in an evil place?," asked Stanford Prison Experiment supervisor Phillip Zimbrado. This Lake Houston Sentinel article supplies at least a partial answer to that question. and it's not a very satisfying one.

Honey, the Marshals are here, I won't be home for dinner

Check out this Houston Chronicle story about a woman convicted of armed robbery who escaped from prison 33 years ago, married and lived a law abiding life for decades in the Piney Woods of East Texas, but is now awaiting extradition back to a Georgia hoosegow:

In the 33 years since her escape from a Georgia women's prison, Deborah Ann Gavin Murphey was able to evade authorities and keep most of her past to herself, carving out a small-town life in East Texas where she worked as a nurse and raised two children.

I've got really mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, nobody wants to reward a prison escape (and I don't know the statute of limitations for such a crime in Georgia). But from a public safety perspective, I'm not sure anyone benefits from her future prosecution or incarceration. Years of fear, isolation, and living a "hermit"-like existence (according to her acquaintances) surely were punishment enough, particularly coupled with years of marital stability, successful child rearing, and service as a practitioner of the healing arts.

Then there are the mitigating factors around her escape. Murphey, who was 20-years old when she escaped for the sixth and final time, was allegedly sexually abused at the prison, which the Chronicle reports did have serious, confirmed cases of sexual assault on female inmates during the time she was incarcerated.

Bottom line, this woman got away from a life of crime and made a life for herself and her family. Does it make sense to punish her now for what happened in the early '70s?

What do you think?

Reader poll results: Counties have few alternatives for repeat, juvenile misdemeanants, but TYC likely not the best place for them

In last week's Grits reader poll, I posed a question derived from research in "Surviving the TYC Meltdown," a Grits for Breakfast publication based on a talk given a couple of weeks ago to the Juvenile Justice Association of Texas: When if ever should kids who commit misdemeanors be committed to the Texas Youth Commission?

Purchase "What Texas Counties Must Know to Survive the TYC Meltdown"

To provide some context, the Texas Legislature in 2007 forbade counties from sending youth with misdemeanor offenses to state youth lockups, providing new money (though not enough, county officials say) to manage those youth locally.

That action raised a hue and cry from local judges, probation departments and detention centers who complained that repeat misdemeanor offenders were often their most difficult cases where they'd exhausted local resources and required state support. Indeed, the data support that claim. According to information supplied by the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission (published in "Meltdown"), youth sentenced to TYC for misdemeanors came into the system with significant problems:

• 45% had a prior felony adjudication
• The average number of adjudications prior to commitment was 3
• 69% had at least one prior placement
• 40% needed mental health treatment
• 44% needed chemical dependency treatment

So these were some high-risk, high-needs kids, whether or not the offense for which they were committed to TYC was felonious. The fact that almost 70% had already been placed once in a custodial setting means most counties have tried to use the resources they have before shipping kids off to Texas youth prisons. (The notable exception is Harris County, which disproportionately sends large numbers of such youth to TYC with less emphasis on diversion, but that tangential observation must wait for another day to explore.)

How did Grits readers feel about the policy decision to exclude misdemeanants from TYC? Of the 120 readers who responded to Grits' survey, these were the responses. Folks believed misdemeanants should be sent to TYC when:

• They have three or more prior misdemeanor adjudications (50%)
• They have a prior felony adjudication (53%)
• They had at least one prior placement in a secure facility (31%)
• They need chemical dependency treatment unavailable in the home county (22%)
• They need mental health treatment unavailable in the home county (22%)
• No, kids with misdemeanors should never be sent to TYC (35%)

So only 35% pf Grits readers agreed with the Legislature that misdemeanants should never be sent to TYC. I was surprised that the lowest percentages came for kids sent to TYC for treatment. I think that's best explained by the Grits commenter who wrote, "TYC is so short-handed the youth are not getting any special treatment, really. My facility has 2 specialized areas and nothing is being done for the kids because there is no one to do it. So, sending kids to TYC for treatment is a travesty to the youth." Regular commenter and TYC veteran Whitsfoe concurred, declaring:

We don't do a very good CD programs given they don't pay our CD treatment providers what they should. Mental Health... not enough beds and quit frankly, they don't pay our psychologists what they really deserve, so TYC is no help here either.

Several TYC field staff expressed the view that misdemeanants were among the most difficult TYC inmates, for example:

My experience supports that of the Probation and that misdemeanor offenders who get to TYC often have a slew of misdemeanor offenses i.e. a long history of troubled behavior.

General Offenders, often misdemeanor offenders, in my experience often displayed worse behavior than Violent Offenders. Violent Offender is just a classification of the type offense a youth was committed for and not indicative of the behavior a youth might display. Many so called Violent Offenders often have short offense histories but committed a offense that warranted incarceration in TYC.

Who is easier to work with...long term habitual offender or a kid who recently fell into a bad crowd or began acting out due to some recent traumatic life event but otherwise has pro-social value systems?

Another reader, though, feared that mixing misdemeanants with more serious offenders tended to increase their criminality and reduce their chances for rehabilitation:

I agree that the misdemeanants tend to be the worst-behaved in TYC. However, mixing in youth whose primary problem is that they are rebellious, and high-strung, with youth who are serious criminals, creates more problems. The more criminal type kids sit back and set the others off. The "wild ones" create a distraction for staff which allows their attention to be drawn away from the more criminal kids. These wild kids are not leaders, they are follows who desparately want to believe they are accepted by their "peers". Those kids who have long strings of misdemeanors do not need to be mixed in with the felons. There should be separate programs for each.

It is obvious that these kids have exhausted the local resources, so I sympathize with those local juvenile justice officials who are pulling their hair out over the recent ban on sending misdemeanants to TYC. The solution, possibly, might be a legislative mandate that allows judges to send youth with strings of misdemeanors to TYC, but which also requires TYC to treat them in separate facilities from the felons. Those units might be the ones that are placed close to the cities of origin.

With all that said, and with respect to the 65% of readers who disagree, I think at the end of the day excluding misdemeanants, at least in the short term, was the right thing to do (though I acknowledge that the Lege created new unfunded mandates, a dilemma which needs to be rectified).

For starters, Harris County judges abuse the privilege, and as the largest county they send far more youth to TYC than anybody else. What's more, if kids aren't getting services at TYC and if there's no rehabilitation plan (which is currently the case), I'm not sure warehousing low-level offenders for a few months would do any good.

If TYC were in better shape, my gut instinct would be to allow counties to send misdemeanants there, at a minimum, when they didn't have adequate mental health or drug treatment resources available locally. But if those resources aren't being supplied at TYC - and I believe that's true because of understaffing and misplaced priorities among TYC management - what's the point of sending them there?

To the extent it's true, as several readers suggested, that many teen misdemeanants committed to the Youth Commission could have been charged with felonies but had charges reduced by lenient prosecutors, those kids will continue to come into TYC, anyway. Also, though I don't think it's the right thing to do, I'd anticipate more juvenile judges ordering longer felony probation terms than previously, so that if the kid commits a misdemeanor later they could still be sent up the river.

Some counties are headed the opposite direction, and I applaud them for it. At the JJAT conference, Travis County juvenile probation chief Estela Medina told me that Austin judges had sent only three youth to TYC since the scandals broke last spring - all of them for serious offenses, and the rest, including all misdemeanants, are being handled in the community because Travis officials don't believe kids will be rehabilitated or treated properly at TYC-run youth prisons.

I think Travis County is headed in the right path, one where ultimately all Texas counties will be forced to follow - using TYC literally only for the worst of the worst, incorrigible murderers, youth who committed sexual assaults, or other violent offenders who commit serious crimes and receive determinate sentences.

TYC handles only about 2% of Texas youth who commit crimes, while local probation departments and detention centers handle the rest. There is very little TYC offers for most offenders that the counties cannot do themselves given additional financial support.

For all those reasons, I broadly agree with the Legislature's decision to exclude misdemeanants from TYC, though I don't think they provided adequate funds for locals to take over the job. However, both TYC and TJPC are under Sunset review next year, so the opportunity for significant structural reform to support these goals may emerge in the coming year and a half.

For better or worse, for the time being SB 103 set in stone the ban on misdemeanor commitments to TYC, and there's a good chance that policy will (and IMO should) continue into the future.

To prepare for what's down the road, the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission should closely track and analyze how counties spend new money given to them to handle misdemeanants. Since these are among their most difficult populations, the resources they consume with those funds will tell us what local resources need to be bolstered through legislative action in 2009 to enable counties to handle a greater percentage of more difficult offenders - both misdemeanants and nonviolent felons - in the community where staffing ratios are better, the risk of abuse is less, and youths' chances for success are much higher.

For more on this topic:

Purchase "What Texas Counties Must Know to Survive the TYC Meltdown"

Small county juvenile detention center closed in Henderson

A few weeks after the Texas Youth Commission shut down a privately operated Coke County facilility was shut down, the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, with much less hoopla, shut down the Henderson County juvenile detention center, a much smaller, county-run facility out in East Texas, because of staffing shortfalls. In the short term, reports the Tyler Morning Telegraph ("Juvenile Detention Center Closed," Nov. 9)

Henderson County is now transporting its juvenile offenders to neighboring counties after the state ordered the immediate closure of the juvenile detention facility following a routine inspection.

The state shut down the facility Oct. 24 after Texas juvenile department monitors determined the Henderson County Juvenile Detention Center in Athens did not have enough certified officers on staff.

"They came in and said we were out of compliance and we have acted accordingly," said David Holstein, Henderson County judge.

Holstein added there were no problems with the treatment of juveniles, but only with the training and certification of officers.

More than 25 percent of the officers on staff, composed entirely of part-time workers, did not have the proper certifications to work at the detention center.

"It's harder to ask someone who is working in a part-time job to take time off of their other job to take classes," said James Owen, Henderson County attorney. "We have tried to get the facility in compliance with the new juvenile regulations, but it's only going to get more difficult."

In accordance with the regulations for the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, a facility the size of the Henderson County's, which has four beds, has to comply with the same rules as a facility with 100 beds.

State regulations require the county to maintain a 12 to 1 ratio of children to officers at nighttime and 8 to 1 during the day. The facility is also required to separate juveniles along gender lines.

"If the county has one male juvenile and one female juvenile in custody, that would require two certified officers supervision 24/7," Holstein said.

Now, the county has to decide where to put its juvenile offenders, until required changes from the state are met, and if making the changes the state requires will be cost effective. ...

Before the detention center closed, Henderson had contracts with Anderson and Van Zandt counties to take any overflow from their facility. Now, the two counties are taking all of their juveniles to the cost of $70 to $80 a day per juvenile.

Supporters of transporting the juveniles rather than training workers said the change could save the county nearly $200,000 per year.

When do snitches become government agents? Court ruling leaves open major loopholes

This is not a Texas case but here's an interesting legal development on the subject of "snitching," or the use of "confidential informants" by police, in this instance jailhouse informants rewarded with leniency in exchange for testimony that helped convict a defendant.

The judge in the case ruled that jailhouse snitches aren't "government agents" if they voluntarily report jailhouse conversations, even when the informant already had in place standing, open-ended snitch contracts with prosecutors. Reports the Knoxville News-Sentinel ("When does snitch become government agent," Nov. 10):

In what appears to be the first ruling of its kind in the federal court region known as the 6th Circuit - of which Tennessee is a part - U.S. District Magistrate Judge Bruce Guyton has crafted a test to determine just when jailhouse snitches become government agents.

The ruling, issued Friday, comes in the case of Vicente Corona, an illegal immigrant with alleged ties to a violent Mexican drug cartel and accused of heading up a large-scale drug conspiracy that funneled tons of pot and cocaine from California via mail-delivery services to a host of states, including Tennessee.

Corona, through defense attorney Steve Johnson, tried to block federal prosecutors from using against Corona incriminating statements he allegedly made to fellow inmates in the Blount County Jail.

Johnson argued that the half-dozen inmates prepared to testify against Corona had struck deals with the U.S. Attorney's Office that included promises of sentencing breaks for any snitch work they might do. That, Johnson contended, made them government agents bound by the same rules as legitimate law enforcers.

Agents interviewing Corona would be required to inform him of his constitutional rights. The snitches, Johnson contended, should be held to the same standard.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Mike Winck and Assistant U.S. Attorney Trey Hamilton disagreed, arguing that jailhouse informants become agents of the government only when they are specifically instructed to target a particular person.

None of the informers against Corona had been told to elicit alleged confessions from Corona, the pair argued.

The problem for Guyton was that the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which decides legal challenges of federal cases in Tennessee, Ohio, Kentucky and Michigan, had never decided when an informant becomes an agent. Neither had the U.S. Supreme Court.

Johnson urged a broad test, arguing that any deal that gives an inmate a break for snitch work makes that informant a tool of law enforcement.

Winck and Hamilton pushed Guyton to create a "bright-line" test used in other federal court circuits in which an informant becomes an arm of the government only when the government specifically sends that snitch to do its dirty work.

In his ruling, Guyton sided with Winck and Hamilton.

"The court is persuaded the test for agency is as follows: regardless of whether the inmate informant had entered into a cooperation agreement with the government or had cooperated with authorities in the past, law enforcement must have instructed or requested that the informant obtain information from a particular defendant in order for the informant to be acting as a government agent," Guyton wrote.

According to the magistrate judge, anything less than a "bright-line" test is wrong.

"The court finds that based upon this body of law and because such a test provides clear guidance to law enforcement and defendants on the issue, the test for government agency embraced by this court is not only proper but mandated," Guyton wrote.

Corona is set to stand trial in February. Because he has two prior felony drug convictions in California, he faces a mandatory life term if convicted.

In the run-up to his trial, authorities have alleged Corona was not only responsible for shipping massive amounts of cocaine and marijuana to dealers throughout the eastern seaboard but also was linked to a cartel that killed his brother.

While I agree a "bright line" needs to be created to decide when snitches become surrogates for law enforcement, I think this judge drew the line in the wrong spot. If prosecutors have already entered into a cooperation agreement with an informant, I don't see why the creation of the information-exchange agreement wouldn't trigger the agency's "control" of the informant.

What's more, since jail officials decide who goes where within the jail, intentionally placing an informant with an existing cooperation agreement in the same cell or vicinity of someone whom the ADA wants them to snitch on seems like intentionally circumventing the rules with a wink and a nod. This case was decided by a federal district judge in the 6th Circuit and I don't know what is the 5th Circuit standard (the article mentioned that SCOTUS had never ruled on the subject).

What do the lawyers in the crowd think about it?

The use of jailhouse snitches, to me, show why even corroboration frequently isn't enough to prevent informant abuses. Prosecutors may have evidence which does not conclusively prove guilt, but which they know could provide "corroboration" if the informant tells their story in just the right way.

Increasingly, I'm thinking we may need to skip past mere corroboration as a reform demand and head straight back to Mosaic Law, which required that "One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or for any sin, in any sin that he sinneth: at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established." (Deuteronomy 19:15) Christ formally affirmed this doctrine as part of the New Testament covenant in Matthew 18: 15-16, as the Apostle Paul did in Second Corinthians.

As I've said most recently here, I'm not a biblical literalist, nor do I believe in biblical inerrancy. However, I believe the Bible is a moral document, and since debates over "what is moral" and "what is just" date back millennia, only a fool would ignore it or deny its historical relevance to western jurisprudence or as a moral touchstone.

On the question of corroboration, I think the ancient Jews got it right, not just for snitches but also for eyewitnesses, whose testimony may often be flawed from either error or secret motivations. Corroboration in many cases is not enough to prevent convictions of innocent people - "two or three witnesses," as Christ put it, should be required for prosecutors to introduce testimony given in exchange for leniency. That person's word should never be enough to convict.

I feel the same way about eyewitness testimony where the witness did not previously know the person against whom they're testifying (though I know that's a harder sell and mere corroboration would be a major step forward). Error rates are just too high to continue as is knowing that frequently innocent people have and will be continued convicted.

The main argument against requiring corroboration or multiple witnesses that I've heard on this blog and elsewhere is that it would disempower the jury, that current law allows jurors to evaluate the credibility of witnesses. But empirical research on deception has shown over and over that liars fool people about half the time.

We cannot continue, IMO, to ignore this factual reality. Informants who receive incentives for their testimony have incentives to lie to give prosecutors the information they need for a conviction. Under certain, well-understood circumstances, victims and witnesses frequently misidentify offenders. Why not change the rules governing snitch testimony to prevent wrongful convictions on the front end instead of making it easier to use unreliable testimony, as the Tennessee judge did.

Given all the recent Texas innocence cases, this is a subject I'd hope the Texas Legislature would take up in 2009, along with other needed innocence reforms. It's now well past time for that to happen.

RELATED RESOURCES:

• National ACLU website on criminal informants
• Prior Grits posts on snitching abuses

Voters who rejected county jails looking for better justice policies

If you're a Smith County resident who hasn't been arrested, declared a Tyler-based blog, "Statistically speaking: They just haven't gotten around to you yet!"

Thanks so much to the reader who turned me on to Smith County: Tell the Truth, a Tyler-based political blog which had a good write-up on the jail plebiscite that failed by a 70-30 margin on Tuesday, declaring "residents feel, and justly so, that it is not so much the jail that needs to be revamped, but the entire way that justice is mis-handled in this county."

Having not seen the blog before (posting is infrequent), I hadn't seen their arguments from earlier this year against the jail. If Tyler has so many more criminals compared to other counties, the writer observes, it might be cheaper than building a jail simply to build a fence with razor wire around the town! Here's more from a piece posted in April:

The people of Smith county showed incredible good sense in turning down the first jail proposals, ostensibly for tax reasons, which was, by the way, the rationale for the first American Revolution and several smaller ones to follow. I want to offer a few more thoughts on why we were right.This is not a rant, the logic is sound, and the stats are available to anyone at the official state website.

The statistics tell the tale. Smith County Texas locks up it's citizens at about twice the rate of the state's average. That is in a state where the incarceration rate is 44% higher than the national average! Now, why is that? Well, some possible reasons are:

That more of the residents of our county are criminals than any other place in the country.

That our Peace Officers are so highly efficient that they catch and incarcerate more than the rest of the country.

That there is something wrong.

Now, I read an article saying that a big part of the overcrowding problem in the jail was due to the population growth. Folks, these figures are per capita, so that dog won't hunt!

If the first is true, we don't need a new jail, we need a 20 foot high FENCE with razor wire around the county! Well, you say, not everyone in the county is a criminal. My answer, have you looked at the probation figures? If you couple them with the per capita incarceration rate provided by official state records, even factoring out the doubling, you would seem to be wrong! You haven't been arrested? Statistically speaking: THEY JUST HAVEN'T GOTTEN AROUND TO YOU YET!

How about the second possibility? I am sure that we have a fine group of deputies in this county, but, if they are that good at locking away bad guys, there should be a zero crime rate by now!

The options are diminishing. Unfortunately, there really are no others but the last. We either have a higher rate per capita of criminals, the Deputies are more efficient, or something is wrong. THERE ARE NO OTHER OPTIONS!

What then is wrong with our system? For starters, we might consider that many of the inmates in our much maligned jail are there awaiting trial for insanely long periods of time. I believe it was one of our Judges who pointed this out. Something needs to be done to get these folks through the system a little quicker. Decrease the bail, or clean up the process and make it move faster. Perhaps some of these folks could be ticketed and mailed a summons unless they are caught in the act of some particularly egregious crime.

Many of the inmates are there for not paying child support. Someone please explain this one to me. Exactly who is benefiting from this practice? It is obvious that this is no better than debtors prison. The guy can't pay if he can't work, and he won't find to many lucrative opportunities in jail. Don't get me wrong, I know something has to be done, and I am a strong proponent of doing it, but this isn't it.

The other large group of our locals housed in our facility, seems to be what we once called "potheads," people who were found with relatively small quantities of the dreaded cannabis. I know that it is illegal under current law, but can't we do something besides locking these folks away and clogging up the system. I can name a half dozen doctors and lawyers in the area who do the same thing on a daily basis! Can't we give them a ticket and mail them a summons to report later? ...

Sheriff Smith says he just wants a place to lock up murderers and rapists, this might help to provide that space. Otherwise, WE DON'T NEED A JAIL, WE NEED A FENCE!

What a hoot! Meanwhile, I'd said Friday that "citizen journalists" continue to do a better job analyzing jail vote results than the MSM, and a November 9 letter to the editor in the Houston Chronicle continues that trend. Writes Chron reader Staci Hedlund:

Confusion abounds. The defeat of the jail bond baffles Harris County officials who have begun blaming each other for its failure. Political analysts cite late campaign efforts. (Please see "County wonders why jail bonds voted down," Page One, Nov. 8.) And reporters puzzle over voters who simultaneously support new crime labs and reject more jails ("Bonds behind bars / Financing for needed county jail facility, planned for Buffalo Bayou site, fails to gain a majority," Page B8, Nov. 8). Not one of the post-election articles quotes a voter. No wonder it's a mystery.

It makes sense to insist on better crime labs and less space to imprison citizens. Texas Youth Commission official Forrest Novy says, "If you've got a place where you have room for a hundred 10- to 13-year-olds, you're going to fill it up." (Please see "Short of years, but long in lockup," Page One, Nov. 1.) Granted, this bond was not for TYC facilities, but it follows that the principle would apply to adults.

Please present us with a bond that provides more health services for prisoners without more opportunities to lock up our people.

After years of convictions on flawed evidence combined with escalating imprisonment rates, it is no wonder that the voters have spoken. Will the "deciders" understand that ill-timed direct mail is not their biggest problem?

I find Staci's letter refreshing and the Tyler blog has me beaming with hometown pride. While many among the media and elected officials continue to believe the public will support near-endless incarceration expansion, voters themselves are beginning to look more critically at overall criminal justice policies instead of automatically buying into "tuff on crime" hype.

Teen hitmen do cartel dirty work on US side of border

Those who consider violence by drug cartels a Mexican problem will want to read this Dallas News story ("American youths doing drug cartels dirty work," Nov. 10) describing how Los Zetas - a group of former US-trained Mexican military commandos who defected to join the Gulf Cartel as enforcers - hire and train youth as young as 13 to commit murders and perform cartel business on the Texas side of the border. Much of the public information about this shadowy network comes from the prosecution of Rosalio Reta, one of the teenage "Zetillas" prosecuted this summer for murders in Laredo on the US side. Reports the News:

By July 28, 2006 – one day after his 17th birthday – when Laredo police charged him with the contract killing of Noe Flores in Laredo, Mr. Reta had been involved with 30 murders, Mexican and Texas investigators believed. All were on behalf of the Zetas, the ruthless enforcement arm of Mexico's Gulf Cartel drug smuggling operation.

His trial last summer for the Flores killing offered tantalizing glimpses into the shadowy workings of the Zetas and the inroads of cartel violence into this border city.

Court records revealed a portrait of a group of young American killers who were well-paid to do one thing: kill people the Zeta leadership in Nuevo Laredo wanted dead. And they highlighted a group of young killers who followed orders from Mexican drug lords with ruthless efficiency while often behaving like teens with poor impulse control. ...

Laredo police had already identified Mr. Reta as one of three people responsible for the Flores killing. Their investigation had linked him to one of three three-member scicarias, or hit man cells, the Zetas had set up in Laredo.

They believed Mr. Reta was responsible for at least five killings in the city – either as a shooter or organizer.

This kid was taught the assassin's trade by a group led by commandos trained by US Special Forces at Fort Benning, Georgia. I bet, though, their US trainers didn't anticipate the anti-drug enforcers would flip sides become cartel enforcers instead, much less pass on their murderous skill set to punk teenage delinquents. So when we hear Reta may be responsible for 30 murders between his 13th and 17th birthdays, keep in mind it was American military personnel who trained his trainers. (Makes you wonder whether further "training" for Mexican police and military is a good idea without reducing police corruption, doesn't it?). Also keep in mind that Reta is an American citizen, putting the lie to claims that a "wall" or other border enforcement will prevent further violence:

For too long, people refused to admit that the drug-fueled violence that erupted for several years across the Rio Grande in Nuevo Laredo couldn't happen on the U.S. side, he said.

"That violence did slip across the border, and we have to understand, these weren't murders being committed by illegal immigrants," Mr. Guillen said. "These were executions, committed by American kids. They speak English, they play video games and they look just like any kid you'll see in the mall. They just chose to get into the life the cartel offered of money and drugs and violence.

Finally, the News offered several other vivid example of Gulf Cartel inroads into the United States, beyond Laredo up I-35 in the DFW area:

Below is a look at some cases in the Dallas area that were linked by police to the cartel or to the Zetas:

•In August, federal drug agents swept through Dallas and three other Texas cities, arresting more than 30 people believed to be affiliated with the narcotics distribution network of the Gulf Cartel, one of Mexico's most powerful drug smuggling organizations. Among 20 people arrested from the Dallas area was Sergio Maldonado, 33, of McKinney, believed to be the cartel's "cell leader" for North Texas. Mr. Maldonado was arrested without incident in Laredo and indicted on multiple counts of conspiracy, drug trafficking and money laundering.

•Wesley Lynn Ruiz, 27, was arrested in March after shooting and killing Senior Cpl. Mark Nix following a short chase and a gunbattle. Mr. Ruiz, who faces charges of capital murder, aggravated assault and possession of methamphetamine, had been seen nine days earlier leaving the home of Maximo Garcia Carrillo, who is believed to be one of Dallas' leading drug traffickers and an associate of the Mexican drug enforcers known as the Zetas. Mr. Ruiz is awaiting trial.

•Maximo Garcia Carrillo, 34, a fugitive whose last known address was a fortresslike home in north Oak Cliff, is wanted on a sealed indictment involving drug charges out of Laredo.

•A Lancaster man, Erasmo Arciba, was sentenced in March to three years and 10 months after pleading guilty to being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. He was arrested by members of a U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives task force in September 2006 as part of an ongoing investigation into weapons sales to the Zetas, a group of mercenaries employed by Mexico's Gulf Cartel. His court-appointed attorney Carlton McLarty has previously said his client denies direct ties to the Zetas. Authorities believe Mr. Arciba used 21-year-old Angilita Ortiz of Grand Prairie and other "straw purchasers" to buy handguns and assault rifles in the Dallas area. She pleaded guilty to buying a firearm for Mr. Arciba.

•Nicolas Monarrez, 30, is a fugitive believed to have abducted and killed a Dallas couple whose bodies were found under a bridge in southeast Dallas County in January. Police believe that the couple – Luis Campos and his pregnant girlfriend, Linoshka Torres – may have been set up as scapegoats after at least $40,000 in drugs and cash was stolen from the home of a man who could have ties to the Gulf Cartel, the notorious Mexican drug operation that has been increasingly active in North Texas in recent years.

•Gilberto Lugo, thought to be the North Texas leader of a powerful Mexican drug cartel, pleaded guilty to federal drug charges in September 2005, ending a two-year investigation that chronicled the flow of cocaine from the violence-torn U.S.-Mexico border to the Dallas area. He was arrested about four months after a high-profile shooting at his home on Mimi Court in Oak Cliff in which a gunman walked up and began firing, killing one and injuring three others, including Mr. Lugo. Authorities seized 46 kilos of cocaine, semiautomatic weapons and more than $300,000 in cash from Mr. Lugo's two homes on Mimi Court. The shooting remains unsolved, but it is thought to be the work of the Zetas.

Such news reports of Mexican cartels establishing significant US-side infrastructure lead me to think recent (perennial?) claims of drug war success are overblown, mistaking tactical successes for strategic ones. There's always another hopeless teenager willing to take Mr. Reta's place, and since drugs come from a regenerative resource (plants), there's always more dope coming whenever large seizures are made. Does anybody think current strategies are really reducing the supply (or more importantly, the demand) for drugs?

Murderers on Probation: The 'Flip Side' of Texas Tough

It may be, as the Arkansas Times editorialized recently, that "Capital punishment, not football, is really Texas' favorite sport." But Texas is also the home of "Unequal Justice," reports the Dallas News, focusing on cases of murderers who received probation. See their powerful website focusing on the "flip side" of Texas justice - dozens of murderers who received the lightest punishments instead of the ultimate one. The site previews a major feature story that will be published on Sunday. Via Stand Down Texas.

Public Participation Required for Vigorous Jail Debates: Before blogs, "citizen journalism" meant Letters to the Editor

Tyler doesn't have any active local political bloggers, that I know of, but the Letters to the Editors section of the Tyler Morning Telegraph rocked during the recent jail bond vote, consistently providing an outlet for "citizen journalism" that we hear so frequently touted as the purview of the blogosphere, stamping it onto dead trees and tossing the product into driveways and yards around East Texas.

Today's example comes from Tyler jail opponent Dale Watson, writing in retrospect, who made as cogent an argument as you could ask for in a letter to the editor why the Smith County jail bonds failed by a whopping 70-30 margin. He writes:

There has been a lot in the local media as to why the jail bond failed. These are some of the reasons I think caused the jail bond to fail.

1. Price way too much.

2. Commissioners' and judge's pay raise. Totally out of line for work done.

3. Many people simply feel their property taxes are too costly now. They simply cannot afford more taxes. This may be the number one reason for the failure of the bond.

4. The arrogance of most of those for the bond in advertisements and news articles. The demeanor of those people was we had no choice but to vote the way they wanted us to. If we did not, we were very stupid. The greatest thing about our country is we can vote a secret ballot no matter what someone thinks about it. We did that.

5. When the jail bond issue failed in 2006, then-County Judge Becky Dempsey put together a task force of "community leaders" to put together a new plan. For the most part, these people were well-known people who had been parts of groups wanting a new jail but only differing on the plan. A task force for a jail bond issue to be effective should include members of the community are not part of the "elite" crowd in Smith County: people such as blue-collar workers, housewives on a budget, senior citizens on a fixed income, and even people who just do not want their taxes to go up.

6. Figures do not add up. I heard on several "For" ads that it costs us $4 million per year to farm out prisoners to other counties. I am not sure if this figure was the total cost or the difference of what it would cost to house them here. That was not made clear. Four million dollars multiplied by 20 years is still only $80 million. That is much less that the $225 million or so that the issue would have cost.

7. There are several new programs by two judges that have the hope of decreasing the jail population. The drug court and the program have inmates work at a real job, but check in every day. These programs need to have an opportunity to see if they would work.

There were many reasons people voted their conscience. Thanks for the opportunity to explain my reasons.

Thank you, Daryl. I think your analysis is spot on. Compare this citizen journalist report to the Houston Chronicle's analysis why the Harris County Jail bonds failed, written by reporters Bill Murphy and Alan Bernstein. Their report doesn't look so much at the issues of whether Houston needs a jail, which is what voters really care about, but mostly at polls and the mechanical functioning of the pro-bond campaign. Even the few references to substantive issues about the jail were framed in terms of the horse race:

In a pre-election poll, the jail bond had the support of only 38 percent of African-Americans likely to vote, said Bob Stein, a Rice University political scientist who conducted the polling.

Franklin Jones, a Texas Southern University political scientist, said jail referendums often do not fare well among some African-Americans, who believe society should invest more in education and other programs and less on jails.

"It becomes a question of priorities and spending," Jones said. "In the black community, many believe that if the money was spent on the front end, you wouldn't need these factories and warehouses at the back end."

I'm not trying to pick on Murphy and Bernstein (professional reporters are sadly taught to cover elections as a horse race) so much as to praise Mr. Watson and other letter writers who contributed to the Tyler jail debate in a way that professional journalists too often overlook - focusing on the substance of the issues. (I should add that Kuff's coverage of the Harris jail vote was a welcome supplement to the Chron's minimalist efforts.)

Tyler voters were well served by their local paper during the last election, which functioned as a true community forum and clearinghouse for all sides of the jail issue. I don't think the same can be said for the Houston Chronicle or the Bryan College Station Eagle.

Texas criminal justice bloggers breaking stories, making news all over

This week Texas criminal justice bloggers' work is busting into the mainstream media.

Criminal defense attorney Robert Guest at I Was the State used the open records act to break a story covered in these three blog posts on the Austin PD's warrantless surveillance of utility records that's been picked up by local TV news.

Now, data on increased rates of Texas prison guard misconduct, compiled through open records by bloggers at The Back Gate, have received prominent coverage in the Huntsville Item.

These examples should be a lesson to all regular bloggers - if you want the MSM to pick up your work, publish the results of original research. The open records act is your friend.

Meanwhile, over at Defending People, Mark Bennett's impromptu effort to gather dozens of attorney signatures on a complaint against Judge Sharon Keller has been cited in media accounts all over the state, as has the public complaint put together by Scott Cobb at the Texas Moratorium Network.

Criminal justice bloggers are making a difference in how debates over crime and punishment are carried out in this state, and very much for the better. Great job to all these blogs!

UPDATE: Now the MSM are even crashing the blog party! Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith announces on his blog, State of Mine, that TM will call for Sharon Keller's resignation in its December issue. He quotes from reporter Michael Hall's feature article that just went to press:

This is hardly the first time Keller has sacrificed fairness for toughness. In 1998, in her determination to keep convicted rapist Roy Criner in prison, she turned a blind eye to DNA evidence that indicated he hadn’t committed the crime; fellow judge Tom Price said the decision made the Texas court a “national laughingstock.” Well, no one is laughing now. When a man’s life is on the line—to say nothing of the U.S. Constitution—our top criminal judge should behave like one: with prudence, fairness, and a calm hand. It’s time for Keller to go. If the commission doesn’t act quickly, we’ll have to wait until January 2009, when the Legislature—which has the power to oust high judges—reconvenes, or worse, 2012, when Keller is up for reelection. The fact is, we need to do it now. Impeach Sharon Keller.

Understaffing forces TYC youth transfers from Sheffield to ... ???

My God, if it's not one thing it's another at the Texas Youth Commission. Now, the problem of understaffing Juvenile Correctional Officers and a flood of recent staff resignations are finally coming home to roost. Mike Ward at the Austin Statesman reports ("Guard shortage forces inmate transfers," Nov. 9) that:

A shortage of guards at a remote West Texas boot camp has forced the Texas Youth Commission to move almost half of the incarcerated teenagers to other state lockups, officials said Thursday.

Youth Commission officials said there are no plans to close the Sheffield Boot Camp, which now has 32 correctional officers on duty, about a third of the 92 authorized positions. ...

Twelve guards resigned during September and October, and 11 others are on extended medical leave, officials said. Forty-nine guard jobs are open. Hurley said three guards resigned in the past two weeks.

He said the latest resignations were not related to a recent decision by Youth Commission officials to delay paychecks for overtime earned in November. ...

Opened in 1995, the lockup is in a former school in Iraan, a remote hamlet northeast of Big Bend off Interstate 10. Most of the youths housed there are 14 to 18 years old and dress in military-style uniforms and boots, according to Youth Commission officials.

Okay, I knew TYC systemwide has nearly a 50% annual turnover ratios among JCOs. But a facility staffed at one third of minimum levels qualifies as officially the worst staffing ratio I've ever heard of at a corrections facility. The previous record by my count is the adult prison in Dalhart, which is only 62% staffed, but TYC's Sheffield unit must have been downright dangerous before reducing the population of boys.

That said, what will TYC do with those kids, now? Other TYC facilities are also understaffed - to my knowledge every last one of them. The resignation problem certainly hasn't just been happening in Iraan, as comments in Grits regularly attest. And I doubt it's true, as Jim Hurley told the Statesman, that the new policy not to pay overtime did not contribute to employee departures.

I predicted in "Surviving the TYC Meltdown" that, for a number of reasons related to SB 103 and new agency rules, TYC's youth population, by my estimate, will continue to drop in the coming year. Driving the shift will be the new law eliminating misdemeanants from admission to TYC, and new rules moving most kids back to their home communities on parole much quicker than in the past.

House Corrections Chairman Jerry Madden's statement about the Sheffield Unit really sums up the Legislature's approach this year to all of TYC: "if they don't have enough staff to cover shifts, they did the right thing in reducing the youth population," he said. Well, TYC doesn't have enough staff to cover shifts system-wide, so in the end "reducing the youth population" will also be the only option left for administrators overall.

To me that's not necessarily a bad thing, but then funding and focus needs to follow the kids to local communities who will have to supervise them, and an extra focus must be placed on re-entry and community support for TYC parolees. Texas' youth prisons only handle 2-3% of youth offenders; the rest are all managed through county juvenile systems. If they're given the resources, counties can figure out how handle these kids, too. And if current trends continue at the Youth Commission, they'll have to.

The Morality of Jailing Innocent Children

See the excellent new website and blog focusing on the T. Don Hutto detention center for immigrant families in Taylor, Texas. Via Eye on Williamson County, which also brings us this video of Texas Civil Rights Project Attorney Scott Medlock discussing the morality and economics of incarcerating children who've committed no crime:

Why nobody likes Judge Keller and she should quit and go home

New headaches seem to crop up every day for Presiding Judge Sharon Keller of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ever since she refused to accept condemned murderer Michael Richard's last minute appeal. (See prior Grits posts here, here, here, here, and here.)

Now she's even seeing protesters outside her home, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has filed a complaint with the Texas Judicial Conduct Commission, as did the Texas Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association and other prominent Texas attorneys before them. A Washington Post columnist called for her ouster. Here in Texas, the Dallas News editorialized that "It may be impossible to remove the stain that Sharon Keller ... has placed on the state's judiciary."

Yesterday, Richard's widow sued Judge Keller over the decision, saying it "exceeded her authority." A "duty judge" had been assigned to the case, but Judge Keller rejected Richard's appeal without consulting her. For that reason, I disagree with this blogger that the widow has filed a "junk lawsuit." In any event, it's certainly one more headache.

For her sake, I hope Keller owns a dog because nobody else seems to want her around. At this point, for the good of the court and for the sake of the reputation of the Texas justice system, I think the most honorable thing would be for her to resign her seat.

Think about it, Judge Keller: I bet you'll feel better.

At least one substantive reform has come from the Richard fiasco this week.As Quorum Report put it on their Daily Buzz:

IN APPARENT REBUKE TO KELLER, COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS ESTABLISHES EMAIL URGENT APPEAL SYSTEM

Supposed fail safe system aimed at preventing Chief Justice Keller or anyone else from preemptively blocking future emergency appeals

After the national embarassment of Chief Justice Sharon Keller circumventing her colleagues and locking the doors to prevent an emergency death penalty appeal filing after 5PM, the Court of Criminal Appeals has instituted what they say will be a fail-safe email system. ...

The e-mail system will be a stop-gap procedure before the development and implementation of a more wide-ranging electronic case-filing system due for all Texas appeals courts. That system is scheduled for operation in early 2010.

Texas Kaos has more, and here's the Dallas News' coverage. An assistant DA from Texas blogging at Man o' Law praised the CCA's decision to accept e-filings, and summed up my overall view on Keller's actions, declaring:

Ya know, if the State is going to execute someone, let's at least follow the law and procedures, and add a dash of common sense and humanity into the equation, including the thought "well SCOTUS is looking at this, why don't we wait the extra 20 minutes to allow the filing of the last minute appeal, and we can execute him later"?

We are supposed to be the good guys, y'all.

Unnecessary Evil: ACLU launches campaign to limit snitching

National ACLU's Drug Law Reform Project (DLRP) has launched a website to promote a campaign against law enforcement abuses related to confidential informants, including a new blog devoted to the subject. (As a self promoting aside, this project first began based on work here on Grits back when I still worked for the organization.) DLRP also compiled examples of policies from federal state and local agencies related to informants along with other resources, and is soliciting stories from the public about snitching-related abuses. From the overview:

Unlike witnesses, informants are motivated by self-advancement. Informants work for the government, often secretly, to gather and provide information or to testify in exchange for cash or leniency in punishment for their own crimes. Preliminary research indicates that up to 80% of all drug cases in America may be based on information provided by informants.

An informant can be a useful law enforcement tool – a necessary evil – if used properly.

But putting police work in the hands of known criminals and blindly trusting that justice will be done is an unnecessary evil.

Counties that rejected new jails must now get serious about diversion

Now that voters in Houston and Tyler have rejected new jail construction, it's time for the commissioners courts, judges, and local law enforcement in those counties to get a lot more serious about their responsibility to reduce jail populations. They should start by implementing HB 2391, the only legislation passed in 2007 by the 80th Texas Legislature aimed at reducing jail overcrowding.

In both Harris and Smith counties, the Sheriffs and local PDs refused to allow their officers to use new discretion created this year by the Legislature to issue a summons instead of making an arrest for certain low-level, nonviolent offenses. Under HB 2391, signed into law by the Governor earlier this year, officers can choose to give tickets instead arresting people suspected of:

• Marijuana possession, (up to 4 oz)
• Criminal mischief with less than $500 damage
• Graffiti with less than $500 damage
• Theft by check with less than $500 stolen
• Theft of service with less than $500 stolen
• Contraband in a corrections facility (B misd. only)
  
• Driving With an Invalid License

The idea was to reduce overcrowding at local jails and keep more officers out on the street instead of spending hours booking suspects for low-level crimes. But several DAs and local law enforcement officials have thwarted the law's implementation in much of the state.

In San Antonio, Bexar DA Susan Reed blocked the law's implementation, even though it would have saved the county more than $10,000 per day. In Harris County (Houston), DA Chuck Rosenthal announced he would use his prosecutorial discretion to refuse cases where officers exercised this new authority, undermining any possible use in that jurisdiction.

Rosenthal should now back off that position, and both county sheriffs and local police departments in Harris and Smith counties should reconsider their refusal to exercise this new authority. Ignoring the only tool given you to reduce overcrowding while simultaneously paying other counties to house local offenders doesn't make economic or political sense.

In Tyler, Judge Cynthia Kent came up with a slew of proposals after the last Smith County jail bond defeat to reduce overincarceration through alternatives and strengthened probation, but the county commissioners court only funded one of the long litany of ideas suggested in her plan. The new day reporting center has been a huge success, but by itself it's not enough. Smith County commissioners should go back to Judge Kent, hat in hand, and ask her to provide leadership to face the county's overincarceration problem head on. (UPDATE: Smith County Judge Joel Baker emails to add that the commissioners court also recently funded a new drug court and a special court for expedited cases, both of which were among Judge Kent's suggestions; I apologize for the omission.)

Both Smith and Harris counties need their judges to do more to reduce pretrial detention, particularly for non-violent misdemeanants and state jail felons. The purpose of pretrial detention is not to assist prosecutors in extracting a guilty plea. Both counties jurists need to rely more heavily on recommendations from their pretrial services divisions, which exist to recommend offenders who are good candidates for release on low bail or personal bond, but whose recommendations in practice in both counties are routinely ignored.

Now Harris and Smith counties have no choice. For the time being jail building is off the table, so all there is to do is seek community-based solutions and strengthen probation supervision. And they'd better get started soon. In fact, both counties should have started those initiatives a long time ago. Then voters might have more confidence that they'd exhausted all their alternatives before proposing hundreds of millions in new debt.

RELATED: Exploring alternatives to local jail building

• Grits' best practices to reduce county jail overcrowding, Part One
• Grits' best practices to reduce county jail overcrowding, Part Two
• Texans' taxation revulsion vs. their Incarceration Addiction: Which will prevail on county jail building?
  

HB 2391 - Cite and Summons for Low-level Misdemeanors

• Tuff on crime meet reality at the Nacogdoches County Jail
  
• Sheriffs more likely than PDs to welcome new arrest discretion
  
• Jefferson County works out kinks with new cite and summons authority
  
• How one Texas county will take advantage of new law to reduce jail overcrowding
• HB 2391 could save Bexar taxpayers $10,000 per day
• Bexar jail administrator: Stop arrests for nonviolent misdemeanors
• DA Susan Reed blocking key Bexar jail overcrowding solution
• Midland Sheriff's Captain: Cite and summons for low-level offenses would reduce jail overcrowding
• Cite and summons for low-level offenses could free up jail space
• Texas Lege approved new tools to reduce jail overcrowding, if police can change their thinking
• DAs thwarting jail overcrowding solutions

Harris County

• What they're reading at the Harris County probation department (series)
• State to Harris County: Pay the piper on overincarceration
• Whitmire: Houston doesn't need more jail beds
• Jailing drug offenders and the interests of justice
• Houston should fix current jails before building more
• Chuck Rosenthal looks vulnerable in '08 Harris County DA's race

Smith County

• 'The Jail that Ate Tyler' and other stories
  
• Debate intensifies over Tyler's $125 million 'Taj Mahal' jail
  
• Architect: Voters should accept nine-figure pricetag for new jail
  
• Tyler's jail alternative saves $1 million in first nine month
  
• Smith County voters have more options than building Taj Mahal jail
• Tyler's day reporting center reduces overcrowding, saves money
• 'Unsellable' Tyler jail still too small
• Tyler's Alternative Incarceration Center opens; DA thinks no one qualifies
• Tyler judge: End jail overcrowding with community supervision of nonviolent offenders
• More on Tyler's alternatives to jail overcrowding
• Incarceration Alternatives: From Smith County, a plan emerges
• Update: Tyler Alternative Incarceration Plan, Day Reporting Center funded
• Tyler voters: Jail bonds a 'No-No"
• Jail bond vote may become annual affair in Tyler

Austin PD lawyers up on warrantless surveillance program

Reports Robert Guest at I Was The State. Austin city attorneys defending the practice of warrantless searches of utility records instructed their clients not to talk to the press. KXAN, an Austin TV station, picked up this blog-generated story last night. Good job, Robert!

Texas prison and jail vote results

UPDATED 11/7.

How did the big prison and jail votes around the state turn out last night? While statewide voters approved three new prisons as part of a larger hodgepodge of proposals, voters in Smith and Harris (Tyler and Houston) - long considered two of the more "tuff on crime" counties - both shot down new jails. Overall, these tallies show voters no longer view building more lockups in nearly as favorable a light as they did just a few years ago. Here are the results:

State Proposition 4 (building three new prison units and a new Youth Commission facility): Approved, approximately 58%-42%. Lumping prisons in with repairs for state parks and homes for the mentally retarded made this item bulletproof, despite opposition to new prisons from all parts of the political spectrum. In its last Legislative Appropriations Request, TDCJ estimated the cost to staff and operate three new prisons would be $72 million per year on top of $34 million in bond payments. The Legislative Budget Board must still certify the prisons are needed before they are built. The new TYC unit will likely be in Harris County.

Smith County Jail Bonds: Defeated, 69%-31%. This is the second year in a row Smith County voters rejected a new jail. Opposition to jail bonds in Tyler is growing. Due to high voter turnout, more people voted against the jail in 2007 than voted in the entire 2006 bond election. Maybe it's time for Smith county commissioners, judges and the DA to start looking more seriously at incarceration alternatives. Or maybe we can do this again next year.

Harris County Jail Bonds: Defeated, 51%-49%. Wow! With no organized opposition, this went down solely on the voters' gut instinct that they didn't want it. Smart voters! It's not like Harris County could staff the jails they've got. Plus, some advocates like the blogger at Intermodality hoped the parcel of land where the jail would have gone can be used for more public-spirited purposes. County Judge Ed Emmett told the Houston Chronicle, "There's no question we need more jail cells." Hogwash! Harris County's jail overcrowding stems from decisions by elected officials, not some Providential demand from on high. Given yesterday's results and overall electoral trends in Harris County, perhaps replacing some of those folks next year might be an easier sell to voters than building more jail beds.

Brazos County Jail Bonds: Approved 63%-37%. Of all the jail bonds before voters in the state, these had the least local media coverage or public debate. As a result, they sailed through.

Howard County Jail Bonds: Approved 70%-30%. This was the only jail bond proposal I felt was necessary. The Commission on Jail Standards had vowed to shut down the jail if the bonds didn't pass. In 2006, Howard County voters rejected a slightly smaller jail bond package.

Schneier: Faulty War on Terror tactics target the 'unique, unorthodox and unexpected'

A wrong-headed reliance on citizen informants to combat the war on terror may have the unintended side effect of enforcing uniformity and cultural rigidity, says security guru Bruce Schneier, thanks to an unholy combination of media hype, unreliable informants, and bureaucratic CYA. Schneier says we opening up:

a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

This isn't the way counterterrorism is supposed to work, but it's happening everywhere. It's a result of our relentless campaign to convince ordinary citizens that they're the front line of terrorism defense.

This is the flip side of the "stop snitching" dilemma - what happens when the public starts snitching, but shares misleading or inaccurate information in volumes much greater than any useful data? After all, "If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel," Schneier argues, "you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security."

His description of the type of information counterterrorism investigators receive and sometimes act upon from public tips reminded me of the Texas Youth Commission's recent experience with "tip lines" in the wake of the West Texas sex scandal. Often unmanned, according to the agency's Ombudsman, TYC's tip lines so far have generated more confusion and false accusations than indictments. This quote particularly reminded me of what's happening at TYC: "politicians need to stop praising and promoting the officers who get it wrong. And everyone needs to stop castigating, and prosecuting, the victims just because they embarrassed the police by their innocence." Sound advice all around, don't you think?

Schneier's one of the best at cutting through the BS and focusing on key security elements that really contribute to making us safer. I'd encourage those interested to read the whole thing.

Vote No on Proposition 4

I'm voting against Prop 4 today authorizing Texas to issue new bonds to build three new adult prison and one new youth prison. So is Kuff, though he predicted all the bonds will pass. While some of the other items they lumped in with the prisons I support - particularly added parks funding - new prisons will suck even more funds from state parks in the long run, and for that reason alone the whole Prop 4 package should be voted down. The Texas Criminal Justice Coalition sent out a last-minute alert this morning giving voters the facts about Prop 4 and asking them to oppose it. Here's the text of the alert:

"What is ... disturbing is that the Legislature didn't even bother to tell the voters what the entire $1 BILLION would be spent on. They have outlined $717.3 million, leaving an astounding $282.7 MILLION at their discretion. Are the taxpayers of Texas this gullible?" -Lone Star State of Texas Blog

What Others Say About Proposition 4: "If you can't staff the prisons you've got, how can we afford to build more?"

Americans for Prosperity is another organization AGAINST Proposition 4 because $57 million in General Revenue funds have been obligated to pay for debt service payments. Though many of these projects need funding, taxpayers should not have to fund them through General Obligation bonds; Texas has a budget surplus and should use a portion of that money to fund these projects. Find out what Americans for Prosperity has to say about Proposition 4 here. Find out why the Restorative Justice Ministries Network is against Proposition 4 here. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) currently has a massive shortage of correctional officers. Taking this into account, how can they expect to staff 3 new prisons? Check out a video about why correctional officers don't support building new prisons. Check out the Grits for Breakfast blog post, Arguments you won't hear in TV ads about new prisons and Proposition 4. Included is an additional video that shows why new prisons (and Proposition 4) are bad solutions to our criminal justice dilemma.

Cast your vote today, November 6! To find out where to vote, call the Texas Secretary of State voter information line toll-free at (800) 252-VOTE. More information is on the Secretary of State's Voter Information web page.

TCJC strongly opposes Proposition 4 for the following reasons: The 80th Legislature set up a system of prison diversions (alternatives to incarceration) so that the construction of new adult facilities would be unnecessary. Proposition 4 prematurely calls for the construction of three new prisons ($273.4 million). There is simply no need for new prison construction, especially when TDCJ does not have enough prison guards to adequately staff current prisons. Criminal justice concerns aside, Proposition 4 would give voters no future say over how bond proceeds would be allocated or spent. PROP. 4 sets aside close to $300 million-with no specific purpose! Though Proposition 4 does provide funding for a much-needed regionalization of Texas Youth Commission facilities, the negative aspects of Prop. 4 far outweigh these positive concessions. Vote NO on Proposition 4! State lawmakers should go back to the drawing board and come up with a better plan that doesn't waste valuable tax dollars on unnecessary prisons.

Read More About Proposition 4 Check out the House Research Analysis report on this Constitutional Amendment Proposition 4, dealing with general obligation bonds for state agency construction and repair projects, has TCJC's attention. Read this analysis to have a better understanding of the outcomes of this $1 billion dollar proposition.

View ALL 16 Propositions Be well-informed! Read the House Research Analysis Focus Report to learn how each of these propositions will affect you and the State of Texas. This will help you decide which propositions you are in favor of and which ones you oppose. You can also check out Representative Scott Hochberg's website, which outlines the propositions as well.

Voters in Harris, Smith, Brazos and Howard counties also have important bond votes today to decide whether to build new jails. Of these, only Howard's new jail is justified - officials in the other three counties just need to focus more on solutions and less on thumping their chests about being tuff on crime.

Finally, here's an election-day themed video from the Drug Policy Alliance to cap off the post - I've linked to it before, but it pretty much tells the story of why Texas pols put Prop 4 on the ballot. Everybody go vote, and check back on Grits tonight for prison and jail building results.

Austin police busy searching utility records without a warrant while 127 murders go unsolved

Blogger and former prosecutor turned defense counsel Robert Guest at I Was the State publishes a great piece of bloggerly research to confirm through an open records request that the city-owned utility company, Austin Energy, is providing customer data to Austin police - without a warrant, thank you very much. After all, we're all just one big happy family at the City of Austin! What's a little thing like a warrant among friends? Writes Guest:

It is a sad day for freedom when your power company become an agent for law enforcement. Is the danger from cannabis so great that we must give up our privacy?

The War on Drugs makes us all less safe and less free. Austin Police have 127 unsolved murders they could be working on. Instead theyare they wasting resources on indoor pot farms. Unplug your tanning bed and hot tub or else expect Austin SWAT to visit.

A sad day indeed. Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson is fond of saying that there is no greater enemy of liberty than a local city council, and this is a great example. This is the very first time I've wished my electric service was provided by TXU instead of a city-owned utility company. At least with them police would need a warrant to access my customer data, but Austin Energy's "hand it all over" policy encourages pointless police fishing expeditions that waste scarce police manpower and violate utility customers' privacy rights.

Should misdemeanants ever be sent to TYC?

Addressing a topic covered in "Surviving the TYC Meltdown," I wanted to pose to readers a question many folks from local juvenile probation departments asked me at the conference of the Juvenile Justice Association of Texas last week. The kids sent to TYC for misdemeanors, several probation directors told me, were consistently among the most troubled youth they dealt with, and especially those from smaller counties said they typically only sent misdemeanants to TYC when they'd tried everything else at their disposal. So this week's poll identifies several of the reasons given by county probation officials as to why they were sending juveniles to TYC on misdemeanor charges. What do you think? Are these good enough reasons?

For more on this topic, get your own copy of "Surviving the TYC Meltdown" right now for just $12!

Let me know in the poll in the sidebar which if any of these you think justify sending a juvenile to TYC for a misdemeanor offense, or if you agree with the Legislature that all juvenile misdemeanants should be handled locally. Here are your choices, sending misdemeanant youth to TYC when:

• They have three or more prior misdemeanor adjudications
• They have a prior felony adjudication
• They had at least one prior placement in a secure facility
• They need chemical dependency treatment unavailable in the home county
• They need mental health treatment unavailable in the home county
• No, kids with misdemeanors should never be sent to TYC

Guess who's fighting a juvenile curfew in Waco?

I don't agree with them on everything, but I'm sure with the Eagle Forum on their position opposing juvenile curfews in Waco, just forwarded to me via email:

A citizens group in Waco, Texas, vowed to do everything it can to block plans for a daytime curfew for juveniles. Wacoans Against the Curfew Ordinance has hired legal counsel to assist in its battle and is circulating a petition against the measure. Deborah Korpi, leader of the group and president of the Waco Eagle Forum, said Wacoans Against the Curfew Ordinance would file suit against the city if the measure passes. “Some in our group have legal organizations and have fought curfew issues all across the country,” she said. “They are on call to come to our aid if and when we need them.” The measure would impose a $500 fine per violation on parents whose students under the age of 17 are caught in public places between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. on regular school days.

Whaddya think about that? It's nice to hear of somebody standing up to oppose overcriminalization and piling criminal penalties on often troubled families.

Ticketing parents for truancy by their children makes little sense, and not just because of the dilemmas faced by home-schooled kids, which is the main reason for Eagle Forum's concern. A rebellious teen who wants to lash out at their parents might see that as a reason for more truancy! Besides, if the parent could control their kid with their say so, they likely wouldn't be truant in the first place! Have these city council members never raised teenagers?! Juvenile laws should support parents, not punish them in the face of futility. Go get 'em, Eagle Forum!