Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Texas prisons full by March!

The Houston Chronicle reports that Texas prisons will be full by March, requiring the state to reduce the population or contract for new beds.

Governor Perry abolished the agency that used to make such projections, and the new one charged with that task, the Legislative Budget Board, got it wrong, predicting prisons wouldn't reach capacity until October.

The article seems to push the idea of building a new prison as the only option, and speculated that Governor Perry may call for building more facilities in his January 26 State of the State speech. But that's financially unrealistic, and bad public policy. Grits has covered the topic extensively, see
The website Solutions for Texas is entirely devoted to providing information on this subject.

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