Inside the plea mill, how bad prosecutors cause bad policing, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends which merit Grits readers' attention:

• Inside the plea mill in San Antonio: "Little-noticed jail court offers inmates a fast track." Related, from the SA Express-News: "Rules for bail punish the poor."
• Eva Ruth Moravec recounted the stories of seven off-duty police officers who shot and killed people in 2016 and differing DA policies about presenting such cases to a grand jury.
• Read how Harris County Sheriff's deputies mistook a sock full of cat litter for meth thanks to faulty field tests which have been responsible for dozens of false convictions.
• Jail failures criticized after Dallas inmate's beating death.
• Will 2017 finally be the year Texas requires police to record custodial interrogations?
• The Texas Inmate Family Association urged greater transparency and oversight at TDCJ.
• Bexar County's probation officers are represented by the local steelworkers union, according to this TV news story. Their union presidents keep getting fired.
• The Texas Lege faces a $7 billion shortfall. Will they close prisons by eliminating private prison contracts to make cuts at TDCJ? Otherwise, their current budgetary growth curve is unsustainable.
• Before the election, criminal justice reformers had stopped losing, reported Jacobin magazine, but hadn't yet started to win. For example, "Reformers have touted conservative Texas, which shed 2,100 inmates, as a model. But Texas still suffers from a sky-high incarceration rate — more than four times higher than Maine’s."
• From Slate: "How bad prosecutors cause bad policing."
• In the wake of shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge, police officers say their jobs have gotten more difficult and dangerous, according to a new poll, although officer fatalities "remained far below record highs set in the 1970s." 
• From Forbes: "Another constitutional protection that's eroding - double jeopardy."