End of an Era: Rissie Owens replaced as parole board chair

There was a time when Rissie Owens and her husband Ed were the ultimate Texas prison power couple. He ran TDCJ's institutional division overseeing all Texas prison units and she chaired the parole board which decided how full those prisons would stay. It was a cozy, all-in-the-family arrangement.

Ed retired a few years ago to take an ill-fated turn running the Texas Youth Commission during its darkest days. And now the Houston Chronicle reports that Gov. Abbott has replaced Rissie Owens as parole board chair with David Gutierrez, "who has served on the parole board since 2009, served as the sheriff in Lubbock for 11 years and was chairman of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards and the Texas Correctional Office on Offenders with Medical and Mental Impairments Advisory Board. He is a past president of the Texas Corrections Association and the Texas Jail Association."

I like Rissie; she knows how to disagree without being disagreeable and has never been anything but charming and gracious toward me. She grew into the job and in her early days didn't understand how to manage her relationships with the press or the Legislature. Some of her public comments, particularly early on, earned her a reputation as a hard-ass. And sometimes she said things that were just confusing and wrong. Moreover, her defiance of the federal judiciary over assigning sex-offender conditions to offenders not convicted of sex crimes bordered on the insensible.

OTOH, under her watch rising parole rates have accounted for much of the slack space that allowed Texas to close three prison units. Especially on revocation policies, the board embraced reform more than most local probation departments, which did not see revocation rates decline nearly as much as on the parole side, though they were given basically the same tools to accomplish the task.

I spoke briefly this morning with Bill Habern, an attorney based in Huntsville who has practiced in front of the parole board for four decades. He said that "while she's not the best chairman we've had, she's certainly not the worst. Many issues were not in her control. But she was in the job too long and that gives too much of an opportunity for the office to become focused on power and politics and become stale. That would be true of anyone who stayed in office that long, so that's not a condemnation of her personally. But it's time to move along." He thinks Gutierrez has been a fine board member and expects good thing from the former Sheriff.

Habern mainly faulted Owens for failing to address consistently bad legal advice that led the board down rabbit trails the courts would then predictably shut down. Two in particular he mentioned were imposing sex offender conditions on people not convicted of sex crimes and illegally terminating the parent-child relationship without due process. He said she remained loyal to her lawyers even after they consistently gave advice that put the board cross-ways with federal courts and other state agencies.

Habern also faulted Owens for keeping parole commissioner Pamela Freeman as a parole commissioner long after her shortcomings had been identified in multiple grievances by attorneys who practice before the board. Instead, Freeman kept working until she was indicted last year for document tampering in a case which may go to trial by the end of the year. There were plenty of red flags before it came to that, said the lawyer.

Finally, Habern added via followup email, "Even after our law firm had serious differences with the policies of the Board we felt were unconstitutional, and litigation was filed, I must say that Owens and the other board members and commissioners (except Freeman) treated us totally professionally, and with respect. I never felt a hint of retaliation from the legal differences which ended in the court room. I thought that spoke and speaks well of Owens and the other panel voters."

Say what you want to about Rissie Owens - and I'm sure readers will, in the comments - but her departure marks the end of an era for the nation's largest state prison system. Grits wishes her well in all her future endeavors.