TDCJ can't stem staff turnover crisis at remote, rural units; #txlege must align policy with reality and reduce low-level drug sentences

While your correspondent was on a much-needed vacation, the Houston Chronicle's indefatigable Keri Blakinger published a story updating the Texas prison system's efforts to staff rural units, which have up to 49 percent vacancy rates. Her article opened:

The Texas prison system handed out more than $9 million this fiscal year on bonuses to aid recruitment as they grappled with extensive officer vacancies, but department data shows the cash outlay has hardly moved the needle. 

Seven months after the state launched a concerted effort to bring down the 14 percent officer vacancy rate, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice still has 3,675 unfilled positions - roughly 30 more than in January when the leadership started tackling the problem.

Despite record hiring bonuses given out to new hires at understaffed facilites, Blakinger reported:

more units are severely understaffed now than last fall. The latest unit-by-unit figures - from May 31 - show that fourteen units were under 75 percent staffed. Dalhart was down to 51 percent staffed. At the Daniel Unit, between Lubbock and Abilene, staffing dropped from from 77 percent in October to only 62 percent of jobs filled in May. 

And the notorious Ferguson Unit - where a teacher was allegedly raped by an inmate last year in an incident her lawyers blamed on understaffing - was down to 69 percent staffed. 

Of the 29 units with hiring bonuses, 19 - including Daniel, Ferguson and Dalhart - had higher vacancy rates in May than they did in October.

Employees punished alongside prisoners

Blakinger raised the seldom-discussed but potent employment barrier of requiring people to work in un-air-conditioned prison units. Litigation framed the issue in terms of prisoners' health and well being, but the more pressing state interest may be the inability to hire people to work in harsh, unpleasant conditions:

“If they would air condition every unit across the state they would keep more people,” said one officer, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the record. “If you as a corrections officer tell your lieutenant, ‘Look I’m hot, I need to go cool down,’ they’re gonna laugh you off the unit.”

Ask yourself: Would you take a job in a small rural town for a low-thirties salary surrounded by convicted felons in an un-air-conditioned metal building? I'm guessing most people reading this would say "No." (And if you would say "Yes," go apply to your nearest prison. They're hiring.)

These various issues compound. Understaffing contributes to a more dangerous and occasionally deadly environment for guards, and the summer heat amps up everybody's tensions, making prisons a more perilous place to work, less inviting to new applicants, and more likely to drive away existing employees.

That's the piece the hiring bonuses can't and won't solve. Former union boss Lance Lowry made that point in the story. “A bonus just gets people in the door,” he said. “We’ve never had a problem getting people in the door - the problem is getting those employees to stay.” That's exactly right. A "turnover" problem is about dissatisfaction of employees who are already on the payroll, not how many people arrive on the front end.

Piddling guard salaries and the limits of prison parsimony

The biggest problems remain low pay and oppressive workplace conditions. IMO the rural settings wouldn't matter and TDCJ could easily fill its positions if prison guards here made as much as in California, for example, where the union is politically powerful and starting salaries are around double what they are here.

Texas spends $3.5 billion per year on TDCJ, which sounds like a lot, but given our highest-in-the-country prison population numbers, we're pretty chintzy when it comes to spending on state prisons, a point I made in the story:

“We already pay less to incarcerate people than just about every other state,” Henson said. A 2015 Vera Institute of Justice analysis showed that Texas has 11.6 percent of the country’s state prisoners, but only accounts for 7.6 percent of prison spending. 

“We’re underspending at pretty radical levels,” he added. “If you don’t want to spend more, your options are: incarcerate fewer people. That’s it.” 

Marc Levin, vice president of criminal justice policy at non-profit Texas Public Policy in Austin, agreed. 

“I think it’s the ideal solution,” he said. “We would obviously want to look at the units with the biggest staffing issues and biggest capital costs.”

Based on the Vera Institute figures cited above, if Texas' proportion of state prison spending matched its proportion of state prisoners - i.e., if we spent the nationwide average amount per-prisoner - we'd spend $5.3 billion per year instead of $3.5 billion.

The pretense of parsimony is a picayune point of pride for many Texas legislators, but it's also the source of most of the prison systems problems. Texas' under-spending comes from several sources, but mainly low guard pay, lack of air conditioning, and dramatic under-spending on inmate health care. 

A prescription to match the diagnosis

Grits was further quoted in the story, pointing out that there's only one, real solution to the problem: "to reduce the incarceration levels enough to close more units and this time target units with high vacancy rates for closure." Let's explore that a bit further.

The shortest distance to lowering incarceration levels in Texas is to reduce sentences for non-violent drug offenders. Texas has already adjusted property-theft thresholds for inflation, diverting thousands of low-level theft offenders from prison. And the 2007 probation and parole reforms have likely reached the limits of what can be expected from probation reform: after a decade, local judges and probation departments remain slow to reduce revocations for technical violations or use early-release provisions for successful probationers. Probation departments have economic incentives to keep successful, fee-paying offenders on the rolls and to revoke those who cause headaches, whether or not those folks engage in criminal misbehavior.

Best case: Probation reform may offer medium to long-term savings, but in the short-term would actually require more investment.

That leaves two large categories: drug offenders and people convicted of violent crimes.

While we do over-incarcerate violent offenders, locking thousands of people up long after they've aged out of crime and pose little threat to society, any statute change aimed at reducing incarceration for that group would result in long-term benefits that won't address the immediate crisis. The person incarcerated for ten years instead of 15 saves the state a lot of money, to be sure, but we wouldn't see any of the savings for a full decade after they were sentenced. 

By contrast. reducing penalties for low-level drug offenders - say, making possession of up to four grams a Class A misdemeanor instead of a felony - would save lots of money in the immediate, biennial state budget, and even more in the long term. Legislators only view the budget in terms of a two-year time horizon (since many of them won't even be legislators ten years from now). So politically, out-year savings are mostly irrelevant at the capitol. Altering drug sentences would have the biggest short-term impact on both decarceration and budget savings, allowing the state to move toward immediate closure of several units and solving numerous, nagging problems at once.

That's the only real alternative for reducing incarceration enough in the near term to help Texas with its rural-prison understaffing problem. New-hire bonuses are a band-aid, at best, and won't stop staff from wanting to leave these hot, dangerous, underpaid jobs.