TX inmate population declined 7% over last decade - would be more but for increase in long drug sentences, declining releases

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) finally released its annual statistical report for FY 2017, 18 months after the last annual report was released, and more than a year after the fiscal year ended.

I'll dig into the report more deeply later, but let's look at some top-line trends.

At the end of August 2017, there were 145,341 prisoners incarcerated in TDCJ, a reduction of 10,785 from a decade prior in 2008, or a seven percent decline. (See the FY08 report.)

That's nothing to sneeze at, given that before then Texas inmate populations were rising on a steadily upward curve. But it's a smaller reduction than seen in other large states like California or New York. And Texas remains, along with Louisiana and Oklahoma, the global epicenter of mass incarceration.

The number of people entering TDCJ dropped over the period '08 to '17 from 74,283 to 65,278, for a 12 percent reduction over the last decade.

But that was offset by an 8.7 percent reduction in number of people released from prison in '17 compared to '08. So fewer people were coming in, but they're letting fewer people out, keeping inmate populations high. In the past several years, the percentage of sentence served by those released has been creeping up, from 58.1 percent in FY14 to 61.1 percent in FY17.

As Grits has mentioned before, the big growth area for both prosecutions and incarceration in recent years has been the drug war. Thirty percent more drug offenders were incarcerated in prison (meaning they're serving a sentence for third-degree felony or higher) in 2017 than ten years earlier, while 70 percent fewer cycled through the state jails. The number of people in SAFP drug treatment programs also dropped, by 42 percent, or about a thousand people.

Big picture: that represents a shift in drug punishments from shorter sentences and drug treatment to longer sentences and less drug treatment.

The number of people on death row declined over the decade from 346 in '08 to 224  at the end of FY17. But the number sentenced to life without parole skyrocketed, from 121 to 1,021.

And when one examines sentence lengths, the number of inmates incarcerated for longer sentences increased, while the number incarcerated for the shortest terms declined. Same goes for new "receives"; they tend to have longer sentences than in 2008. Sentence lengths overall appear to be shifting upward (perhaps, in part, as lower-level offenders are diverted out of the system).

More than 70,000 offenders are presently eligible for parole.

Grits' takeaway from these topline data: Texas has successfully begun to decarcerate, but in fits and starts. More than 10,000 fewer inmates in TDCJ is why the Legislature could close eight prison units over these last few years. But the prison population could have been reduced more if drug prosecutions hadn't ballooned and release rates hadn't declined.