Endorsing an Over-Incarcerator, History Unfolding, Ain't Nothing but a Plea Mill, and other stories

A few odds and ends to clear Grits' browser tabs

Endorsing an Over-Incarcerator
The Dallas News last week endorsed a Collin County Justice of the Peace for a Texas House seat who, according to an investigation by Buzzfeed, is among the most prolific jailers of juveniles in the state. His opponent is a Greg Abbott appointee to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department board, so debates in this race should be about his penchant for over-incarceration of juveniles, but you wouldn't know it from the DMN editorial. From reading it, I'd bet they hadn't even seen the Buzzfeed coverage. Google is your friend, people!

What's the point of MSM endorsements in GOP primaries?
On a related note, I wonder:  Do mainstream media folk understand that, when they endorse someone in a Republican primary, they're actually harming that person's chances because conservatives distrust the media so thoroughly? That was already true by the time I left the political consulting profession after the '04 cycle (we had polling to prove it), and it's surely become only more so in the current political environment. So if issuing an endorsement HARMS the chances of the person you want to win - in some cases even giving their opponent a winning issue to run on ("stick it to the media, who you hate") - then what is the point, exactly?

Two local rulings with (blurry) statewide implications
When thinking about the 5th Circuit's ruling in the Harris County bail litigation and the settlement in the TDCJ heat litigation, it strikes me there's a notable similarity. The bail litigation affects only one county; the heat litigation affects only one prison unit. And the rulings apply only to those jurisdictions. Yet, identical situations exist everywhere around the state. Harris County's bail policies aren't unique, and there are many thousands of inmates in the "heat sensitive" categories which will receive relief at the Wallace Pack Unit now. But that doesn't automatically mean other counties/units will follow suit and the mechanism for how the principles underlying these rulings might end up applying statewide is blurry and unclear, barring repetitive, individualized litigation to apply the same process everywhere that's similarly situated. I fear litigants on both issues may not have sufficient resources for that, given 254 counties, 100+ adult prison units, etc.. Meanwhile, the Legislature last year proved unable to address bail reform meaningfully, and it's hard to imagine them paying to air condition units unless a judge makes them. So these policies could eventually be imposed statewide, but it hasn't happened yet, it's not inevitable, and right now it's hard for this writer to even see the path on either of them.

Tarrant pretrial jailing policies were for decades a weird outlier
For three decades, municipal police agencies in Tarrant County held arrestees in their own city jails prior to charges being accepted by the Tarrant County DA, at which time they were transferred to a county facility. Back in the 1980s, the county tried to charge municipalities for housing their prisoners and Fort Worth responded by moving their prisoners elsewhere. But the new Sheriff says he's not authorized under law to charge cities a fee. To the extent that's true, it means cities in Tarrant County have been paying tens of millions of dollars for jailing these defendants totally unnecessarily. Plus it costs more to do it piecemeal because it fails to take advantage of an urban county jail's economies of scale. Tarrant is the only county in the state where arrestees weren't taken directly to the county jail, reported the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The cities should not have been paying to house those prisoners all those years, if I were them I'd be PO'd.

Ain't nothing but a plea mill
This Austin Chronicle depiction of the "jail reduction docket" in Travis County brought back memories, and a measure of appreciation for the attorneys threatening to challenge it in federal court. I recall sitting in Travis County courtrooms as an opposition researcher more than 20 years ago at what was then called the "rocket docket" and watching the same thing: Clients file into the courtroom, meet their lawyer for the first time, converse briefly with their attorney kneeling beside them, then pleading out their case almost immediately. You can see the same thing in Houston any day the courts are open. It's a breathtaking rendition of assembly-line justice that's still going on. Ain't nothing but a plea mill, baby.

History, unfolding
The Houston Museum of African American Culture has installed a Sandra Bland exhibit. Fitting. Will have to stop in and see it next time I'm in H-Town.

Props
Grits found himself the other day in the offices of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, and thought this was a pretty cool piece of logo-bling: