Parole: The "quick solution" to Texas overincarceration?

Texas Senate Criminal Justice Chairman John Whitmire offered up a poignant observation about the state's supposed need for three new prison units to house the projected number of new prisoners ("A quick solution to prison overcrowding?, Austin Statesman, Dec. 4"):

"The more I see, the more I think we do not have a capacity issue. We have an operations issue," Whitmire said.

He's right. Texas prisons don't have an overcrowding problem. Texas' criminal justice system has an overincarceration problem. The state just isn't using its available tools to manage the system well.

Whitmire pointed to statistics Grits highlighted here from the Sunset Commission showing that the state parole board was LESS likely to follow its own release guidelines for nonviolent offenders in the lowest risk categories compared to more dangerous felons. Under current law and trends, Texas would require 11,000 new prison beds before the end of the decade, but wouldn't need to build any if the parole board simply followed its own guidelines.

For its part, the parole board points to the lack of drug and alcohol treatment in Texas prisons, especially for low-level offenders, and says it makes its decisions based on public safety.

Chairman Whitmire, though, suggested a more dastardly reason for keeping low-risk inmates in prison - they supply cheap, hassle free labor, especially thousands of trusties.

Whitmire said he is convinced that the large number of parole-ready trusties is a case of prison officials not wanting to lose valuable help. Outside trusties work as porters, help in offices and do field and community service labor. Inside minimum-security prisoners serve as cooks and janitors and do laundry and other chores.

"I'm convinced the reason we're not paroling more of these people is that they're the workers," he said. "If they're a low-enough risk that they are allowed outside without close supervision, why not parole them and put them on a monitoring bracelet, and open up that bed for someone else?"

That's an understandable pressure on the system, especially since Texas chronically can't hire enough prison guards to staff its facilities. After all, prisoners can't resign, but one in four Texas guards quits every year. Even so, understaffing doesn't justify incarcerating prisoners longer than necessary to preserve public safety.

Texas has one of the lowest rates of per-inmate spending in the country and the Sunset review process has revealed why. There is virtually no programming or effort at rehabilitation of prisoners, healthcare is dangerously underfunded, guard staffing levels hover at around 3,000 below minimum requirements, and inmate labor makes up the difference. So our per-inmate costs look cheaper, but it's a false comparison - we're getting less public safety bang for our buck.

Perhaps significantly, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank in Austin, also recently pointed to parole as a potential solution for overincarceration - see Doc Berman's post about the report and its proposals to use "technocorrections" solutions like GPS tracking for low-level parolees. Look for Whitmire's Senate Criminal Justice Committee to consider some sort of parole legislation, possibly requiring the parole board simply to follow its guidelines, in addition to the probation reforms he and Rep. Jerry Madden are seeking.