Prominent committee chairmen leaving House criminal justice posts

House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden and House Criminal Jurisprudence Chairman Pete Gallego have both announced they won't run for reelection next year, reports the Austin Statesman. Both will be missed by criminal-justice reformers.

A Craddick Republican loyalist, Jerry Madden was the House architect of Texas probation reforms that reduced incarceration rates and avoided new prison construction during the first decade of the 21st century, while Gallego, a West Texas Democrat, was the House author of much of Texas recent "innocence" legislation, including insisting that police departments have written eyewitness ID procedures and requiring corroboration for the testimony of jailhouse informants. I think Gallego may have been the only legislator under the pink dome who actually understood the ins and outs of habeas corpus proceedings. Both men had the kind of tactical know-how only years of experience can bring. As a nationally respected GOP reformer, Madden's voice will be especially missed as chairman. His storied partnership with Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire made possible a series of reform bills that nobody expected but which have saved the state hundreds of millions in incarceration costs during a period of declining crime.

The problem is these are complex topics where every decision affects multiple, disparate institutions from the local to county to the state and occasionally even the federal level. For their first few sessions, most legislators are baffled by what to do on criminal justice subjects beyond whatever seems "tuff," and usually only more seasoned veterans like Gallego, Madden, Ray Allen before him on Corrections, or John Whitmire and Rodney Ellis on the Senate.side demonstrate the cojones to pursue more serious reforms.

My hope is that the Speaker replaces Madden on Corrections with somebody who, like his or her conservative predecessors, is a respected veteran committed to keeping costs down. If that remains the goal, then no matter who replaces Madden, basically the same array of policy choices will confront them: either spending potentially billions to build more prisons or plowing forward along the alternative path Madden and Whitmire began to forge. The pair weren't named Governing magazine's 2010 Public Officials of the Year for nothing.

The House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, by contrast, while it has passed significant "innocence" legislation, much of it carried by Pete Gallego, has never been on board with de-incarceration reforms passed in other committees. Instead they passed dozens of new crimes and enhancements each session under Gallego's leadership, even as the Lege adopted other measures, mostly through the Corrections Committee, to reduce the prison population.

Criminal Jurisprudence needs to continue its innocence work, but it would benefit from a new small-government focus to consolidate the goddawful mess created by piecemealing together dozens of new crimes and enhancements every session. In many ways, Gallego's not personally to blame that the committee operates that way; the committee has always operated that way, which is how Texas got more than 2,400 felonies on the books. But there needs to be a concerted effort by the next chair to stop creating new crimes and enhancements, and to shift more liability, where possible, back to the civil courts. The next chair of House Criminal Jurisprudence should reconsider past enhancements, and going forward, the committee should follow the advice of the Texas Public Policy Foundation to stop criminalizing business and social behaviors that could be better regulated by other means.

The Legislature will be filled with new faces in key positions in the 83rd session. What that says about the prospects for reform depends largely on the quality of leaders who replace these chairmen and what they're willing and able to accomplish. In any event, certainly in these two committees and probably more broadly, 2013 will see a changing of the guard at the Texas Legislature. Good luck to Madden and Gallego, as well as other departing legislators, as they move to the next chapter of their lives.

MORE: Texas Insider posts Madden's exit statement.