Conservative think tank looks 'beyond prison walls'

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative San Antonio think tank perhaps best known for promoting school voucher schemes, sets its sights on criminal justice reform today with a luncheon event entitled, "Looking Beyond Prison Walls," moderated by Marc Levin, the new director of TPPF's Center for Effective Justice.

"In a landmark shift in criminal justice policy, the Texas House is declining to build new prisons in favor of greater reliance on other strategies," reads the invite (pdf) to the event. The luncheon panel will "discuss the implications of the change and how to increase the effectiveness of alternatives to incarceration that will play a greater role in the state's criminal justice system."

House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden joins a San Antonio district judge, the head of Travis County's probation department and ACLU's Ann del Llano on the panel. See this Grits post for more on the role of conservative think tanks in Texas' sentencing debate.