Whitmire: Parole board, TDCJ, must do a better job explaining parole decisions to inmates and their families

A significant portion of yesterday's Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee hearing focused on the parole process, with several interesting points highlighted during the discussion. (Video from the hearing is available online here.)

Chairman John Whitmire was in top form, politely but firmly taking TDCJ officials and parole board chair Rissie Owens to task for not doing enough to notify inmates why their parole is denied. The failure to do so, he said, harms guard and prisoner safety and makes rehabilitation less likely because offenders don't think there's anything they can do to achieve parole faster. As a result, they don't participate in programs, etc., or become frustrated and catch new disciplinary cases.

The parole board notifies inmates of approvals and denials through a letter that's delivered by a TDCJ parole officer assigned to each institution. Whitmire expressed concern that the entity that makes the decision is not the one that informs the inmate why their parole is denied. In many cases, he observed, inmates are functionally or entirely illiterate, and the letter, he said, is quite complex and bureaucratic.

Those arguments made a lot of sense to me, and better communication about parole decisions likely would improve inmates' behavior in prison as well as ameliorate bad will among inmate families. The Chairman said his office receives about 300 letters a month from inmates and their families (I'm surprised it's not more than that!), and that the most common complaint he hears is that people don't understand why they weren't paroled, or what they have to do to earn release from prison.

Another excellent discussion centered on whether new in-prison treatment capacity would improve Texas' parole rates. To fully grok this issue you must know that even though Texas prisons are completely full, that's entirely by choice - specifically from decisions by the parole board.

According to statistician Tony Fabelo's presentation in San Antonio in February (power point, see slide 7), 88,000 inmates, or 2/3 of the Texas prison population are eligible for parole, and more than half of parole eligible inmates (55%) have a non-violent crime as their main offense of record.

The committee devoted a great deal of discussion to drug and alcohol offenders who've been approved for parole pending completion of a treatment program. But these programs are so backlogged that at one point, the Chairman said, it took as long as a year after an inmate's parole was approved just to get into a six month treatment program. (TDCJ executive director Brad Livingston testified the average wait is down to 3 months for male inmates.)

Whitmire and others rightly declared that TDCJ's goal should be to provide treatment before an inmate is eligible for parole, so that if that's all that's standing between them and freedom they could be processed sooner and free up space for more dangerous offenders. Before last session, TDCJ only had 500 treatment beds in its entire prison system. The Legislature added 1,000 more, all of which are now up and running, helping eat into the waiting list for these programs, Livingston said.

In other parole-related matters, Sen. Whitmire and parole board chair Rissie Owens have clearly been engaged in significant behind the scenes disagreements over her refusal to implement a requirement in the Sunset bill that parole board members give a detailed explanation when their decisions fail to fall within release guidelines. Owens claimed technical barriers to implementation that quite frankly I found disingenuous and easily surmountable. She's hanging her hat on the strictest possible interpretation of SB 909, when IMO her board has plenty of discretion to craft a rule that would make the legislation work.

Unlike some past hearings where Owens and Whitmire butted heads publicly, her testimony yesterday was marked by numerous references to conversations outside the hearing room between her, Whitmire, and his staff, with the Chairman expressing his desire to "help" her figure out how to implement the law. There was tension, but Mrs. Owens did not exhibit the level of open defiance she has in the past.

Whitmire also questioned Owens and Livingston about DWI offenders who are frequently denied opportunities for treatment, apparently, because many have relatively short sentences and the waiting lists made it impractical. As a result, many just sit out their full term. The Chairman said he'd seen many DWI cases where an offender had been convicted five or six times (which would qualify them for up to 99 years or life in prison), but who'd never received treatment while incarcerated. That's amazing to me; you'd think you'd at least try the treatment option before locking someone up for decades.

Finally, CURE representative Joan Covici came in from Dallas to encourage the Committee and the parole board to rethink parole policies for inmates sentenced to life. Many such offenders are elderly people who committed extremely serious crimes in their youth, but are now for the most part not a significant threat, she declared.

Covici said the most common reason these offenders were denied parole was the "nature of the crime," something that's unchangeable, meaning nothing they can do to demonstrate rehabilitation could overcome the presumption against them. She estimated there might be 10,000 such inmates in that position system-wide, and encouraged the committee and the parole board to evaluate them based on future dangerousness instead of the nature of a decades old offense. (In addition to being the right thing to do from a justice standpoint for many offenders, her suggestion would also save the state a ton of money in health costs for elderly inmates, who take up a disproportionate amount of healthcare resources.)

The parole process has needed this type of scrutiny for many years, so I'm glad to see Chairman Whitmire and the Criminal Justice Committee continue to bird dog this incredibly important subject.