Gov. Perry: "Better ways" than more prisons

In yesterday's Austin Statesman, Governor Perry lent his voice to the recent chorus of Texas Republicans calling for reforms to the probation system in lieu of prison building. Reported Mike Ward:

Gov. Rick Perry joined the debate, labeling new prisons as last on his list of justice priorities."

"There are better, more efficient ways to deal with this prison population than going and building more prisons," he said.

Democrat Sylvester Turner, who chairs the subcommittee on criminal justice on the Appropriations Committee, similarly offered promising predictions about how the Legislature would react to the overincarceration crisis:

"We're talking about changing our whole mind-set on criminal justice, redefining and fundamentally changing the way our whole system works," said Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, who chairs the panel. "We simply don't have the money to continue building more and more new prisons that will just fill up and then make us build even more.

"We can't afford that system any more."

You know, as unlikely as it seems, if I didn't know any better, I'd think these folks were working together in a bipartisan way looking for pragmatic solutions to one of the state's biggest problems. According to the article, legislators in Tuesday's budget hearing explicitly spoke in terms of a tradeoff -- more treatment programs in lieu of more prison beds:

Instead of earmarking millions to pay for new prisons and leased prison beds to hold a growing population of new convicts, lawmakers discussed a tradeoff: Figure out what the new beds would cost, then allow prison officials to spend much of that money on expanded probation programs, rehabilitation and drug treatment services that would give the lawbreakers a much better chance of returning to the streets as law-abiding citizens -- and are much cheaper.

Ward called the proposed reforms a "clear and potentially significant shift in state policy," and opined that, "Not so many years ago, such public talk about spending big money on alternatives to prison, in a state that prides itself as being tough on crime, would have stood little chance of passing."

That certainly has been the conventional wisdom in the past, but it doesn't appear to represent the current consensus: "Committee members nodded in agreement as they discussed diverting future funds out of prisons and into those programs," reported Ward.

Regardless of which party is backing proposed probaton reforms, I find myself nodding along with them.