Tuesday, August 11, 2009

NPR on Texas' probation reforms

Texas House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden and I were both interviewed for a story on NPR's "Marketplace" that ran this morning. Not much new here for regular Grits readers, of course, but I'm glad to see Texas' de-incarceration reforms getting national play.

2 comments:

Steve said...

Thanks for speaking up for us. I know probation was fortunate to receive some extra funding from this session, but it seemed strange to many that we saved the state hundreds of millions of dollars, but we were rewarded with pennies on the dollar of that savings. The real strange deal was that the Houston food bank program for offenders got more money ($2,000,000 for FY 2010 and another $2,000,000 for FY 2011) than the Basic Supervision budgets of 115 of the 122 CSCDs in the state.

Gritsforbreakfast said...

Rep. Debbie Riddle, who chaired the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, was the main one who didn't want to expand probation funding. On the Senate side they'd approved more.