Elephant in the room: Lege must adjust sentencing to cut TDCJ's budget

Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire wants to end contracts for at least two private prison units and wants the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to find internal savings to cover its extra costs, reported Mike Ward at the Austin Statesman ("Senators to state corrections officials: Tighten your belts," Feb. 7), covering TDCJ's presentation to the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday. Ward quoted Chairman Whitmire, who also chairs the working group doing the "markup" on TDCJ's budget this week, declaring that, “We’ve got to quit, once and for all, running these facilities just because they’re there for economic development purposes ... We need to use taxpayers’ money to fight crime, on the public safety priorities of this state, rather than just on bricks and mortar that in some cases we don’t need.” Hear, hear!

There's an elephant in the room, though, or really, two. First: The Legislative Budget Board predicts prison populations will creep back up in the next few years and TDCJ doesn't control prison population levels. Local DAs, judges and juries decide who goes in and the parole board or the statutes decide who gets out. Though recent trends are mildly encouraging, there's no way around it: The only way to sustainably keep prison populations low enough to reduce capacity long term is if the Legislature adjusts sentencing policies to reduce projected new prison admissions.

Besides, eliminating two private prison contracts won't make up for the extra $102 million Livingston told the committee would be necessary, for example, to cover TDCJ's base prisoner healthcare costs. And that doesn't even consider requests for increased guard pay to counter understaffing at rural units. If the Legislature wants TDCJ to live within its means, they must reverse the trends driving increased prison admissions.

Which brings us to the second elephant in the room: TDCJ's institutional culture prioritizes running prisons over probation and parole, so they'll never suggest the sort of dramatic shift in resources from incarceration to expanded treatment and strengthening community supervision that would be needed to reverse the trends driving the agency's budget crunch. TDCJ officials (perhaps rightly) view those sort of policy decisions as the province of the Legislature and the courts and historically have been loathe ever to suggest statutory changes the Legislature could enact to lessen prison admissions. Instead, they tend to suggest budget cuts to community supervision programs that would set the agency up to fail, requiring increased prison spending later on.

Bottom line: The Legislature must devise its own plan, or rely on experts outside TDCJ to do so, if they want to spend less on prisons. The agency's institutional priorities won't ever allow it to offer the sort of major policy suggestions that might significantly lower prison costs by reducing the number of people incarcerated. To get there will require leadership from the Legislature. Brad Livingston can't do it by himself. He needs marching orders.