New TX homeless ban creates unfunded mandates for cities: Costs downplayed during #txlege process but cities must foot bill to store homeless belongings and can't limit arrests to ↓ costs

A Joint Memo From the Unintended Consequences and Unfunded Mandates Departments:

Now that the Texas Legislature has passed HB 1925 criminalizing homelessness (or more specifically, criminalizing cooking or sleeping under a blanket outside), cities must figure out how to implement the new law, which restricts their ability to limit arrests through policy.

Here's the catch: The statute requires police who arrest homeless people under this statute to take custody of their belongings and store them without a fee while they're in jail. Here's the relevant provision:

It's unclear if they must store people's stuff when arresting for unpaid warrants based on Class C tickets under HB 1925. If not, it would defeat the purpose of the provision: It's inevitable most folks who receive these tickets won't be able to pay.

Regardless, the bill forbids cities from establishing policies that limit these arrests, so if and when costs start racking up, the Lege will have taken away their ability to limit this expense.

Let's get down to brass tacks: Where will police take their belongings and what procedures will be put in place for them to be able to retrieve them later? Will they get a receipt? Where will police take their stuff? Who will be in charge of it while folks are jailed? How will  people retrieve it later and what happens when folks don't have good ID?

These are not idle questions: Most police evidence rooms are already overflowing (e.g., see this audit of the Denton PD evidence room, which is stuffed to the gills.) When I was policy director at the Innocence Project of Texas, evidence-room shortcomings emerged as a significant, hidden flaw generating all sorts of problems throughout the justice system: Evidence lost or damaged, guns stolen, DNA gone bad because it was kept at room temperature (that last one we fixed via legislation). The volume of stuff they keep track of boggles the mind, and housing all the earthly belongings of every homeless person arrested is going to overwhelm them.

So cities must create new systems, and probably find new locations, to store belongings of HB 1925 arrestees, but despite these extra costs, are forbidden from setting policies that limit these arrests/costs.

This is an unfunded mandate on cities and one assumes an unintended consequence, since the problem was barely-if-at-all discussed during the legislative process.

OTOH, if we're honest, the bill wasn't written to be good public policy or workable for cities, it was written to punish Austin and virtue-signal to the middle class against homeless people. They're doing it because they believe demonizing societal outcasts plays well in the suburbs, and it appears to be true, at least for the moment.

But whatever "signal" the new law sends to voters, it also lards new costs and responsibilities on cities big and small which they're both ill-prepared for and forbidden from managing. I called this an "unintended consequence" earlier, but that's probably generous. Governor Abbott and the Texas Legislature view putting the screws to cities as a legislative feature, not a bug.

Pernicious housing rule would worsen homelessness, make Texas less safe

We keep hearing how concerned Governor Greg Abbott has been over homelessness, but a rule proposed at the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA) would make matters worse.

TDHCA has suggested forbidding access to supportive housing for two years for anyone convicted of a nonviolent felony, for three years for certain offenses involving guns, retaliation, or obstruction, and imposing lifetime bans for people convicted of sex offenses, any "murder-related offense," sexual assault, or arson. Even a Class A misdemeanor would get a one-year ban.

What's the point of this except to exclude people from supportive housing options who would otherwise end up homeless? Would we be safer if felons, sex offenders, etc., are all desperate and living on the streets, or if they're housed with services and support that give them a chance to turn their lives around?

In a story I'd missed when it came out, the Houston Chronicle reported the agency has no "statistics showing there was a crime problem at TDHCA-backed housing" and does not even track that information. So this is clearly a leap-before-you-look situation.

Grits first wondered if this was proposed to undermine anti-homeless initiatives in the big cities, sabotaging them so the governor could later say they didn't work. Then a rumor reached your correspondent saying the rule may be a favor to a donor who opposes a specific development. In the Chronicle story, TDHCA said they're responding to complaints, but wouldn't say by whom. Who knows where it came from? 

What we do know is that felons leaving TDCJ already struggle mightily to find housing, particularly those with special needs who would most benefit from supportive housing options.

This proposal makes Texas less safe and should be rejected, adamantly, by the TDHCA board.

To communicate with TDHCA about the proposal, email comments to htc.public-comment@tdhca.state.tx.us. Deadline is tomorrow (Friday, Oct. 9) by 5 p.m..

MORE: See related Texas Tribune coverage.

Bail reform saves lives, "The Ogg Blog," pay-per-surveillance, and other stories

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

Kim Ogg oppo blog launched
The Justice Collaborative has launched The Ogg Blog, providing background on various criticisms vs. embattled Harris County DA Kim Ogg as she faces a bevy of opponents in the coming March primary. Grits is grateful; I'd intended to compile a long, greatest-hits post for Ogg as a bookend to this one about Travis County DA Margaret Moore, so they've saved me the trouble.

Bexar County Jail deaths argue for bail reform
At the Texas Observer, Michael Barajas examines recent deaths in the Bexar County Jail, a topic which  led the Express-News recently to call for an audit. At root, the problems implicate a broken bail system that incarcerates low-risk defendants because they don't have money: "Don’t lose sight of the broad strokes," admonished the Express-News. "Three defendants in their 60s. All charged with criminal trespass. All given nominal cash bonds that kept them incarcerated pretrial. All dead in our jail. All of this in the span of about a year." But local judges, including one who ran a bail-bond company before ascending to the bench, have consistently opposed any move toward reforming bail processes.

To be clear, despite plaintive cries that bail reform will harm public safety, the real reason bail-bond companies oppose reform is all about preserving their anachronistic business model. Continuing to subsidize this industry in the 21st century is akin to subsidizing buggy whip manufacturers in the 20th: Their time has passed.

Fact checking the Governor on homeless policies
PolitiFact fact-checked Governor Greg Abbott on his claims about Austin's homeless. Guess how he fared?

Levin on reducing Big-D murder rate
Marc Levin from Right on Crime appeared on the Point of View podcast to discuss Dallas' plan to reduce its murder rate.

Pay-to-surveil
Google wants to begin charging law enforcement for requests for location information and other user data. The big telecoms already do so.

On the dangers of dick-ish drug enforcement, racist cop rose in Austin PD ranks, indigent defense denied in Amarillo, and other stories

Just in time for the drive to Grandma's house, here's the November 2019 episode* of Just Liberty's Reasonably Suspicious podcast covering Texas criminal justice politics and policy, co-hosted with Amanda Marzullo of the Texas Defender Service.


In this month's episode:

Introductory tomfoolery

• ¡Poncho!

Top Stories

• Houston PD narcotics division a black hole of bad practices (2:32)
• Federal judge defines limits of DNA mixture software (8:54)

Fill in the Blank

• Victoria County Jail death from drug withdrawal (16:25)
• Racist Austin PD assistant chief outed, what's next? (21:01)
• Indigent defense shortchanged in Amarillo (24:50)

The Last Hurrah (29:30)

• Denouement of Harris County bail litigation
• Why Greg Abbott owns a homeless camp
• Rodney Reed execution stayed

*N.b. It really is the November episode, despite my embarrassing screw up in the intro to say it's June. 

Find a transcript of this episode below the jump.

Oklahoma! (does #cjreform); HPD raid response doesn't address phony informant; why do probationers die at high rates? And other stories

Here are a few browser clearing odds and ends:

One out of 8 Travis County jail bookings in 2018 was for Class C misdemeanors
In Travis County last year, more than 5,000 people were arrested for a Class-C misdemeanor only - about one out of every eight people booked into the county jail. Between the Freedom Cities ordinance restricting Class C arrests, beginning in January, and the elimination in June of the local no-sit-no-lie ordinance aimed at the homeless, those bookings should decline significantly for 2019.

Post-raid HPD reforms don't address faked informant that got 4 officers shot and killed 2 innocent people
After a no-knock drug raid in Houston this spring killed two innocent people and left four officers shot, HPD Chief Art Acevedo has announced he's creating a special division of the narcotics unit to execute search warrants in drug cases. But as I told the Houston Chronicle:

“His reform is not on point to what caused the problem,” said Scott Henson, policy director with the criminal justice reform nonprofit Just Liberty. “It’s not solving the problem that your investigators are relying on fabricated informants — [it] wasn’t a function of who’s doing the raid, but why you’re doing the raid, and the reliance on this informant, who it turns out didn’t exist. That’s what caused everybody to get shot. It just elides the core issue of what really happened.”

Attacking junk blood-spatter evidence
Check out an amicus brief arguing to disallow blood-spatter evidence in the Joe Bryan murder case that was the subject of Pam Colloff's massive NY Times Magazine/Pro Publica feature. In it, Duke law-school faculty and students argue that, based on current standards, the blood-spatter expert in Bryan's case could not today testify to the main points used to convict him.

Not so natural after all
His death in the Victoria County Jail was attributed to "natural causes." It turns out, he was denied his methadone prescription and died from preventable withdrawal symptoms. Read the excellent Victoria Advocate account from Kali Venable. See also the Advocate editorial board's condemnation of using jails and prisons to treat addiction.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand ..."
"... it never has, and it never will," said Frederick Douglass. So Grits doesn't feel too bad that elected officials in Austin consider criminal-justice reformers excessively pushy, as several implied in this Austin Statesman article about a string of successful, capital-city #cjreform campaigns. Nobody was going to do any of those things if reformers said "Pretty please" and then waited politely for a response.

Own it!
Gov. Greg Abbott's intervention into Austin's homelessness crisis means he now owns the issue. If it isn't solved, it's his fault. Not sure that was the wisest political choice, but it's the one he made. MORE: Now the governor "owns" his own homeless encampment, with neither a budget line item nor any apparent exit plan besides providing still hypothetical services to Austin's homeless ad infinitum. That'll teach 'em! 

Why do probationers die at high rates?
Here's a possible, future, Suspicious Mysteries segment for the Reasonably Suspicious podcast: Grits has long been aware of research showing incarceration in prison reduces life expectancy. But a new study shows that being on probation is associated with a much higher morbidity rate than being in prison or jail, much less in the free world. I don't know how to parse these competing claims. One one hand, while prison healthcare isn't great, being in prison makes it easier to treat chronic conditions because the patient is always available and can't easily decline treatment. On the other, prison can make you sick; e.g., people who contract Hep C in prison  may suffer liver failure later, once they're out. Meanwhile, to the extent criminal laws in general target the poor, the developmentally disabled, substance abusers, the mentally ill, minority communities subject to discrimination, etc., it's not surprising probationers would be an especially sick lot. Or maybe the difference is that people in prison aren't at risk of dying from car crashes! Who knows? Grits would like to better understand this nexus of corrections, health, and morbidity rates. I haven't yet wrapped my head around it. When people die in prison or jail, there is an independent investigation; no one investigates when probationers die, so outside of the above-linked study, we don't have very much information at all regarding why that is.

The Probation Trap
Probation as an institution changes its form and purpose depending on the angle from which one looks at it. Viewed one way, it diverts people from prison. Viewed another, it's a net-widening trap. The Philadelphia Inquirer has published an excellent series expounding the latter view. Via SL&P.

Oklahoma!
As much as it pains me to say so, Oklahoma has now definitely out-paced Texas as the red-state poster child for criminal-justice reform. Also via SL&P:

• Boston Globe, "What a conservative state can teach us about progressive criminal justice reform"
• US News, "Oklahoma Focuses on Criminal Justice Reform"
• Washington Post, "Oklahoma approves largest single-day commutation in U.S. history"

On the ground, #cjreform is not really a red-state-blue-state issue.

When smelling pot is pretext for a search
In Philadelphia, police officers who said they searched a car because they smelled marijuana were extremely unlikely to find any and disproportionately searched black people. When the data was gathered, public defenders argued that "the odor of marijuana [should] no longer be considered probable cause for officers to believe a crime has occurred and conduct a search."

Breathalyzer tests as junk science
The New York Times took a trip down the rabbit hole of DWI breath-test forensics. Like DNA mixture software, analysts treat breathalyzers as a magical black box they simply assume supplies reliable results. The problems, however, have been long known.

'Five facts about crime in the U.S.'
Read this from the Pew Research Center.

Governor should address homelessness crisis for all of Texas

"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." - Matthew 25:40

The Trumpian tropes trotted out by the Governor and local Travis County GOP figures in the Austin homelessness debates - all while President Trump and Fox News frenetically amp up anti-homeless sentiment as a national-election wedge issue - make Grits feel tired and sad. It looks to me like a lot of state leaders doubling down on the wrong side of history, as happened not so long ago when opposing gay marriage was the wedge-issue de jeur.

For all the weeping and gnashing of teeth over Austin's homelessness problems, in reality this is something faced by communities around Texas and beyond, some of which have confronted the situation more honorably than others.

In Dallas, local media say there are no solutions in sight for the local homeless problem. But the governor isn't threatening them, and the troopers he sent in to fight crime left quietly after three months.

Houston's no-sit/no-lie ordinance, implemented under Mayor Sylvester Turner, is just pushing the population around the city. But what did work were large federal grants to pay for tracking homeless and connecting them with services.

The folks dispensing much-ballyhooed homeless services in San Antonio openly admit their must-be-sober-and-take-drug-tests-to-receive-help approach leaves much to be desired and keeps many people on the streets who might be helped by a housing-first approach.

Even places like Plano, Frisco, Lubbock, Midland, Tyler, Longview, Nacogdoches, Corpus Christi, Galveston, Sugar Land, Victoria, and Montgomery County struggle with homeless problems they don't advertise but cannot ignore.

Anti-homeless activists have spuriously suggested that California cities may send their homeless to Austin. But if anybody's doing that, it's Waco, where they're forcibly clearing out homeless camps using police and Sheriff's deputies. Then they use forced labor from county jail inmates to clean up the aftermath, with local journalists tagging along for the poverty porn.

Amarillo started down that same path, but city leaders had a change of heart and issued housing vouchers to people in a local encampment instead. Abilene, similarly, has chosen to empty its homeless camps by finding their residents housing instead of chasing them out. These jurisdictions don't have to deal with the scale of big-city homeless problems, to be sure, but their example complicates what the governor, speaking from his walled compound in Austin, might reasonably portray as a "Texan" approach.

Governor Abbott appears to have singled out Austin for political purposes, tying local debates into a national GOP effort to use homelessness as a wedge issue in the culture wars and blaming this decidedly capitalist problem on political liberalism. In doing so, he trivializes a human-rights crisis faced by numerous Texas cities, including the ones still controlled by Republicans. He's missing an opportunity to exercise leadership that could demonstrate to swing voters the Texas GOP can govern as well as it campaigns.

Perhaps what jumped out to Grits most in Abbott's letter was the threat to use "quarantines" to ban the homeless from certain quadrants. Texas' quarantine laws haven't been used since the Ann Richards administration, and that time it was also a politicized abuse of power. She disingenuously declared a quarantine to keep away the press in the aftermath of the Branch Davidian catastrophe in Waco, which incidentally is the only known use of quarantine authority by a US governor in the last century. Richards' quarantine was done in secret, but Gov. Abbott has now openly threatened to use this same authority to coerce a local city council to reinstate a repealed ordinance. Really?

As Sir Thomas More asked of his accusers, "when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, ... the laws all being flat?"

Austin Mayor Steve Adler declared that he took Gov. Abbott's entreaties as evidence that state government wants to "help" - a reaction that could only be taken as tongue in cheek. But what if Gov. Abbott did want to help solve homelessness?

For starters, the governor could begin to prioritize grants for housing, directing available funds for that purpose and working with Texas' congressional delegation to champion the cause of more federal housing grants from HUD. But as Texas Monthly's Christopher Hooks lamented:

There’s a notable and telling omission among the list of agencies Abbott has said will “help” Austin with its problems: the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, the state agency that helps build affordable housing. There’s been no real effort from state government to actually aid the city here, just a demand that they “fix” things.

He could work with legislators heading into the 2021 legislative session to develop funding packages for housing, mental-health services and prisoner reentry to help mitigate the causes of the problem. The state could fund urban "rest stops" like those on the side of the highway where homeless folks could shower and use the restroom. The governor could use his bully pulpit and personal appearances to fundraise for housing programs like Austin's Community First (at least, in between campaign fundraising for a race that's three years out).

That's what state-government leadership would look like on this issue. What we're seeing, everyone will notice, looks very different.

Humpty Dumpty, the Castle Doctrine, and other stories

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

Humpty Dumpty and the Castle Doctrine

The judge in former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger's murder trial for the shooting of Botham Jean gave the jury instructions on the Castle Doctrine defense, despite the fact that Guyger entered Jean's home and shot him, and wasn't defending her "castle." Her lawyers employed this argument as their primary defense (that it wasn't her home was a "mistake of fact," they said) so the judge had no choice but to address it, but Humpty Dumpty would be proud! The claim didn't help Guyger, however. She was convicted, anyway. UPDATE: Guyger was sentenced to ten years.

Death of trailblazing deputy raises difficult, familiar questions
The tragic shooting death of a Harris County Sheriff's deputy - a trail blazing figure who was the first Sikh to work in Harris County law enforcement - raises familiar questions with no satisfying answers. The alleged killer is a severely schizophrenic parolee who had gone off his meds and heard voices telling him to kill people. Is the criminal-justice system the best way to deal with people whose offenses are rooted in severe mental illness? How did this convicted felon and parolee get a firearm? He already was the subject of a warrant for violating his parole, should more resources be allocated to search for high-risk parole violators? His family had told officials he was dangerous and off his meds: Are there "red flag" laws that could have allowed them to act sooner? The circumstances surrounding this awful episode will provide fodder for these and many other debates in coming years. The public dialogue would have been easier, in a sense, if this had turned out to be a hate crime. The issues surrounding mental illness and the politics of gun proliferation are much more complex and difficult to deal with.

Private jail operator keeps screwing up
At the Liberty County Jail, which is operated by the Geo Group, "In the last 60 days, there have been two felony escapes, one of their correctional officers was arrested for stealing from inmates while on duty, and most recently, there are questions surrounding the death of a prisoner who hanged himself while in their custody. Apart from those instances, they have also flunked two jail inspections this year, one on April 22 and the second on June 28," the Houston Chronicle reported. Local officials are considering whether to terminate ties with the private prison contractor.

The economics of high probation fees
Check out a new article from our friend Todd Jermstad, probation director in Bell County, on the history and future of court-imposed fees at Texas probation departments. Especially interesting was his thesis that policymakers should take into account reduced means of Gen X and Millenial defendants, whose economic prospects remain less robust than earlier generations. Grits may delve more deeply into this soon, but for now, here's the link.

Bail litigation roundup
See a write-up from The Appeal of recent bail-litigation news, including from Houston and Galveston. See also related Grits coverage and our discussion of the topic in Just Liberty's most recent Reasonably Suspicious podcast.

Over friggin' pot?
In Hutto, a police officer responding to a call that someone was smoking marijuana beat up a man in his driveway and made false accusations in official documents to justify it. The victim had no marijuana in his possession, and bodycam video proved the cop was lying about the victim pushing the officer before he was attacked. The officer was fired, was indicted in May, and the victim has filed a civil rights suit, reported KXAN-TV.

Homelessness problems and solutions
In the wake of Austin's tendentious debate over homeless policy, I was interested to see this excellent New Republic article on "housing insecurity in the nation's richest cities." When, in the 1990s, my wife and I could rent a dilapidated three-bedroom house in East Austin for $190, homelessness wasn't such a big problem. Now that rents in my neighborhood for similar homes approach $3k per month, it's little wonder more people are on the streets. Meanwhile, Bloomberg News had an informative piece a couple of months back on how Finland all but eliminated people sleeping on the streets by investing in preventive strategies like rent subsidies.

How police misconduct gets covered up by plea bargaining
Here's an excellent analysis from Brooklyn public defender Scott Hechinger of how mandatory minimums and the threat of long sentences help cover up police misconduct that would otherwise come out in court. That's because "victims of police abuse — illegal stops and frisks, car stops and searches, home raids, manufactured charges and excessive force — routinely forgo their constitutional right to challenge police abuse in a pretrial hearing in exchange for plea deals." This is undeniably true. It's only in cases like the episode in Hutto, described above, where victims face no charges that officers can be held accountable through regular court processes.

Financial motive not only reason prosecutors oppose actual-innocence claims
The New York Times published a feature on falsely convicted people who've been exonerated by the evidence but cannot secure an "actual innocence" ruling because prosecutors fear the financial consequences of civil rights lawsuits against local jurisdictions. All of the examples are from other states, but Texas' situation casts additional light on this topic. I was policy director at the Innocence Project of Texas when the Legislature passed the best-in-the-nation compensation package for exonerees in 2009. We hoped to avoid this dynamic by having the state compensate innocent convicts instead of the locals. Indeed, the bill was sold as a form of "tort reform," eliminating local liability for what were seen as systemic flaws causing false convictions. But it turned out, the real, underlying complaints weren't financial. Many prosecutors and some judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals simply don't want to see falsely convicted people compensated, ever, and go to great lengths to oppose actual-innocence claims, despite the fact that locals weren't on the hook. So Grits is skeptical of the article's thesis that the motive behind opposing actual-innocence claims is financial. I think it's more pernicious than that.

Sheriffs and #cjreform
Our pal Jessica Pishko published a New York Times op ed on Sheriff's offices, declaring "The problem of sheriffs is particularly acute in the South and Southwest, where the office has more power and was historically used to prop up white supremacy." She calls for Sheriffs to undertake what amounts to a truth-and-reconciliation process for past wrongs. That sanguine suggestion to me seems unlikely. Texas alone has 254 counties, after all - a few might do that, under the right political circumstances, but most will not. And abolishing the office, as some have called for, doesn't change the fact that someone has to perform those functions. Grits has often thought that sheriffs' jail-management duties should be separated from their responsibilities to patrol unincorporated areas. These are distinct functions involving very different skill sets, and typically those elected to the office only have knowledge of one or the other. Whether Sheriffs should be an elected position is a question for another day.

Deep thinking on sex-offender policies
A recent NY Times piece examined emerging research on people who are sexually attracted to minors, finding that its roots are not genetic, but are "prenatal," and "can be traced to specific periods of development in the womb." And this Marshall Project story looks at evidence-based anti-recidivism programs aimed at people convicted of violent, sexual crimes once their sentence is complete. I found both articles to be thoughtful contributions to the discussion.

Most crime dropping nationally, but look at those rape numbers!
New Uniform Crime Report data is out, and most categories of crime have continued to fall, except rape, which has risen precipitously since 2014. See first-cut analyses from the Brennan Center and the Marshall Project. No one knows for sure what's behind the rise in rape numbers. The feds began using a more expansive definition of sexual assault in 2014, but the numbers increased even using the "legacy" definition. The question arises: Have there actually been more rapes committed over this period, or are we simply now getting a more complete picture of the scope of the problem in the wake of increased reporting thanks to the #MeToo movement? ¿Quien sabe? Regardless, the year-over-year decline in property crimes, murders, robberies, etc., is cause for celebration, while the sex-assault data should contribute to deeper conversations on the question.

Initial thoughts on the Great Austin Homelessness Debate

Yesterday, more than 150 people spoke to the Austin City Council on proposed revisions to their homeless decriminalization ordinance passed in June. (See initial MSM coverage here and here.) They won't finally vote until tomorrow, but here are a few initial thoughts:

• Despite the local media clambering onto the bandwagon of NIMBY opposition and the local GOP calling for re-criminalization, Austinites supporting decriminalization made up the majority of speakers. Those voices hadn't been portrayed much in local press coverage, but there were quite a few more of them than critics.

• Numerous local organizations - almost none of whose positions had been covered in the intensive press buildup to the hearing - formally supported the city council's decrim position. Here's a list Just Liberty compiled of those groups and presented to the council.

• Most of the opposition to the June decrim ordinance came from white folks over 50. With few exceptions, they pretty much all made the same argument: we don't want to see homeless people or their stuff in public, don't want to pay for services for them, and we fear for the safety of our women-folk. A few critics did say they supported work by charity organizations like Mobile Loaves and Fishes, but ignored that the groups they praised disagree with their position on the decrim ordinance. 

• About 30-40 decrim opponents arrived wearing blue shirts that said "Take Back Austin." A representative of that organization declared that they'd formed three weeks ago and already had 3,000 members. Apparently, this bunch want to take Austin back from the city's majority, since decrim supporters outnumbered critics and only about 1% of their alleged membership showed up.

• Notably, despite the local GOP's ill-advised entry into the fray, Take Back Austin doesn't even represent the views of all conservatives. I was there  recently when a representative from that group came and pitched their petition at a meeting of Texans for Accountable Government, a liberty-minded conservative activist group. His comments alienated most of the room and he left without an endorsement.

• Many decrim critics were incredibly angry and rude - especially for the first hour or so, people would holler out and interrupt speakers from the other side, or talk loudly among themselves when someone was speaking with whom they disagreed. I thought their behavior discredited them nearly as much as their lack of sound arguments. The mayor demonstrated extreme patience in not kicking out the worst offenders.

• A UT-Austin group called SafeHorns has been one of the most oft-quoted critics of the city council during this debate, claiming to speak for UT students. But this week Student Government at UT-Austin voted to support the city council's decrim measures. And nearly all of the young people who spoke were against rolling back the council's June ordinance. So it's now clear those few voices given an out-sized platform by local media don't necessarily speak for the whole student body.

• By contrast, decrim supporters included folks across the age spectrum, but skewed younger, much more diverse, were more solutions-oriented, and endorsed a greater variety of more nuanced perspectives.

• Chas Moore from the Austin Justice Coalition read city council the riot act, emphasizing that only seven percent of Austin's population is black but around 40% of homeless people are. He suggested (and IMO it's almost certainly true) that that's a big, underlying cause of the opposition.

• Grits also appreciated that several white women addressed the "protect our women" trope, describing how that meme had been used to justify racial discrimination and even lynchings throughout American history. I was grateful someone confronted that head on, it was a necessary antidote to some of the Jim-Crow-esque rhetoric being casually thrown around.

• The role of Class C misdemeanor enforcement came up a lot. When homeless folks were ticketed for sitting or lying under the old regime, they couldn't pay so the tickets would turn into warrants. Then later, they'd be arrested and, when they got out of jail, all their belongings had been stolen or confiscated by police. A woman described the agony of losing every family photo she owned that way. (That was the only time I genuinely teared up. My family photos are among my most precious belongings.)

• Testimony from homeless people was generally excellent. A consistent story from the pre-decrim days involved being rousted while sleeping, told to move from where they were, but having no place to go. People described being robbed or having belongings confiscated because they couldn't leave their stuff even to apply for a job. Others emphasized the inability to find a place to shower, to find transportation even to apply for services. A theme from decrim supporters that resonated throughout the day was that, if council wanted to know what homeless people need to improve their lot, somebody should ask them instead of just listening to the angriest voices in the room.

• One of the few things nearly everyone agreed on was that the rising cost of living in Austin was driving much of the homelessness problem. Republicans in the room wanted to attribute that to taxes, but in truth, most of it is driven by the market. Californians sell their Bay-Area two-bedroom for $1.2 million then show up in Austin and drive up local prices. (E.g., I live in a house that my wife and I rented for $190 a month in the 1990s, before buying it from the landlord in '96 for $40k at the nadir of the Savings and Loan bust. Today, it's on the tax rolls for more than $450k. Sure, our taxes are higher, but that's not the main thing making Austin un-affordable.) Calls for emergency rent subsidies and grant subsidies to promote home ownership were some of the more interesting suggestions that cropped up on this score.

As a white homeowner over 50 who's now lived in Austin for 34 years, Grits couldn't really understand the over-the-top animosity coming from others who share my subject position. I spend a fair amount of time downtown and there are homeless folks in my neighborhood. I simply don't see the wave of new problems described by the loud, angry "Take Back" crowd throughout the day. I see a few more homeless people now - mostly camping under overpasses more openly - but I haven't witnessed any new issues that public restrooms, showers and trash-pickup services wouldn't resolve.

Moreover, most of the things critics say drive their concerns with homeless people - trespassing on private property, physically attacking or intimidating people, urinating or masturbating in public - are still illegal. Nothing about the ordinance legalizing sitting and lying down in public changed that, so many of the complaints frankly seem disingenuous.

Comments from councilmembers seemed to indicate that there are sufficient votes to resist the more draconian rollbacks of the decrim ordinance being suggested, but there's no way to tell for sure until the City Council votes tomorrow. Here's hoping they stick to their guns and do the right thing.

UPDATE: For now, the city council rejected reinstatement of the no-sit/no-lie ordinance. Four backed expanding the ordinance even further than it went before the law was changed in June. Five including the mayor endorsed less expansive changes that would reinstate it only around homeless shelters, aiming to address people congregating outside the downtown homeless shelter and a new one being built in South Austin. And two - who in the end, won the day - said the council was being reactive and should give the city's new homeless coordinator who was just hired time to assess the situation and make a recommendation. The council agreed to hold a work session in October to discuss matters further. (Ugh. :/)

Homes and services, not criminal prosecution, are the best (read: only) solution to homelessness. Keep the cops out of it!

We've all heard the refrain: Police are overworked because they've been asked to solve society's social problems.

So why do our police-union friends get so upset whenever government tries to handle those problems by other means?

The brouhaha over Austin's homeless-ordinance revisions - which eliminated the no-sit/no-lie ordinance and modified the panhandling ordinance to make it constitutional - really is much ado about nothing. In fact, it may even be cause for cautious optimism. At the same meeting, the Austin City Council also voted to create a new homeless shelter to provide expanded services, on top of voters approving housing bonds in 2018 to expand affordable housing options.

Giving tickets to homeless people who could never pay them wasn't solving any problems, so it's not like Austin eliminated tools that were working. All the law did was set people up to have an arrest warrant later, at which point county taxpayers would host them in the jail for a while. But that doesn't help anything, and in the long run, created additional problems.

Austin spent years ramping up punitive responses to homelessness that never worked. Maybe this won't either, but it's got a better chance than continuing with the failed status quo.

The question of "What works?" brings us to an excellent and timely Texas Tribune article by Juan Pablo Garnham, "Why homelessness is going down in Houston and up in Dallas." The short answer: An influx of funds, mainly from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), to provide homes and services to homeless people. As a result, Houston has reduced its homeless population by 53 percent, according to an annual census, while the problem in Dallas is getting worse, surpassing H-Town in the latest count. What's their secret?

“If you have a homeless person and you put them in houses, and simultaneously give them social, behavioral and health support services, 92% of them will be stable in that facility,” [Houston Coalition for the Homeless executive director Mike] Nichols said. 

But there’s a hidden secret in Houston’s formula: coordination. 

The scenario from 20 years ago when different organizations would serve food, give clothes or offer shelter — all done separately — has changed. There’s now constant communication between these institutions and a digital database called the Homeless Management Information System (or HMIS) that allows people at several organizations to understand each case. 

Most cities today have HMIS in place, but Houston was quick to adopt it, and that helped organizations strategize, analyze, share information and find personalized solutions.

Giving homeless people tickets won't get them off the streets, but providing them homes, services, and opportunities to get back on their feet will. Austin has finally chosen to shift resources toward confronting homelessness with policies that at least have a chance at working instead of doubling down on ineffective, send-in-the-cops strategies.

Let's do mental health next.

On the limits of citations and arrests for combating panhandling and homelessness in San Antonio

An opinion column by John Brodesky in the Express-News (Dec. 12) lamented the limits of citations and arrests for dealing with panhandling and homelessness in downtown San Antonio. The article opened:

In its never-ending war on panhandling, the San Antonio Police Department has been deploying vice detectives to issue citations for aggressive solicitation.

All through the summer, vice detectives arrested people such as Rafael Alvarado for begging for money and wandering into traffic at busy intersections.

If the goal was to waste lots of time and energy, the tickets were a slam dunk. An analysis of city documents reveals an aggressive campaign against panhandlers — likened to a quota by one expert — that has produced plenty of citations and little else.

Most everyone agrees citing panhandlers is a waste of time. But public pressure to do something, the short-term benefit of moving people out of a problematic area and a lack of other options keep the citations flowing. Meanwhile, a pilot program to steer panhandlers toward treatment has languished due to a lack of funding.

If only we were as aggressive with preventive strategies.

Brodesky quoted a city memo from September declaring that “SAPD has initiated a citywide zero tolerance program on panhandlers and conducts weekly round-ups with arrests.” Nobody thinks that it's working but cops and politicians want to be seen as doing something, however pointless, and pols would rather pay for show than substance.

To Brodesky, "Municipal Court for a panhandler is like circling through a revolving door. The ones taken there loop through it without ever paying their fines because they are indigent, instead getting credit for time served. Factor in transporting and holding panhandlers, or the work hours put into citing them, and it’s downright costly." Thousands of these "quality of life" citations against repeat offenders were dismissed by the SA municipal court in 2014, he pointed out, as "defective" and pointless. His column concluded:

The department’s “mental health squad,” a six-person unit that responds to calls where a person might have mental illness, has saved taxpayers millions by placing offenders of minor offenses in treatment rather than jail.

In fact, [Chief William] McManus, Judge [John] Bull and a number of other judges and stakeholders have considered a similar pilot program for 10-15 panhandlers, but it hasn’t had much success, if any. The issue? Well, it’s ironic, really, but there is no money for it.

“Who is going to pay for the thing, or where are the beds going to be?” Bull asked.

Maybe then, our priority shouldn’t be more panhandling tickets, but funding this pilot program.

Really, it couldn’t be any less effective or wasteful.

San Antonio may criminalize giving to panhandlers

According to AP: Unable to dissuade panhandlers from asking people for money, the San Antonio police chief now wants authority for his officers to write Class C tickets to passersby who give people spare change! Problem is, asking for money is speech and, after Citizens United ruling, we all know money is speech. So First Amendment red flags abound.

Here's Texas Civil Rights Project legal director Wayne Krause's money quote in the AP story, "The idea of criminalizing people giving is both unkind and legally unsound. ... The First Amendment protects the right to ask for help. It certainly protects the right to choose to whom we give assistance."

It's great TCRP is fighting this, but it's too bad there wasn't any clergy in the room. Somebody could have quoted to the council from Matthew 25:36-47. Perhaps some of them will have time to review those passages before the ordinance comes before them next month.

Three day suspension for homeless harassment by Midland cops

A three day suspension seems way too light for this behavior. I have a hard time understanding why any chief would want these two officers on the force. Via AP ("Midland officers suspended for homeless sign contest," Feb. 27):

Two police officers in an oil-rich West Texas city spent weeks competing to see who could take the most cardboard signs away from homeless people, even though panhandling doesn't violate any city law.

Nearly two months after the Midland Police Department learned of the game, the two officers were suspended for three days without pay, according to findings of the internal affairs investigation obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request.

Advocate groups immediately blasted the department's handling, suggesting that the punishment wasn't harsh enough and that the probe should have been made public much earlier, before news organizations, including the AP, started asking about it. ...

The investigation found the two officers, Derek Hester and Daniel Zoelzer, violated the department's professional standards of conduct. There is no ordinance against panhandling in Midland, an oil-boom city of more than 110,000 where a recent count put the homeless number at about 300. About a quarter of those are transient.

Evan Rogers, founder of Church Under the Bridge Midland's ministry, said the failure by police to disclose the officers' behavior once discovered made it appear the department was "pushing it under the carpet."

"I think that does give the public the wrong message," he said.

Austin police chief wants homeless services out of his backyard

This suggestion is so absurdly misguided and ill-considered that it scarcely merits comment, but Rob Patterson at the Austin Post informs us that:

Police Chief Art Acevedo feels that Austin’s homeless and such organizations as Salvation Army, Caritas and the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless that provide them with shelter and services should get out of downtown and move elsewhere. And gets needlessly sarcastic about their presence in the center city entertainment district in an obviously uninformed statement reported by Fox News 7.

"Let's put Caritas, let's put the ARCH, let's put the Salvation Army right adjacent to this huge district. It has beer readily available and booze readily available it's probably not a good mixture."

He does make a valid point that the homeless distract police from addressing other downtown crimes. But just because he says they should go doesn’t mean everyone should all salute and say, “Yes sir!”

It's one thing to say homeless service organizations should move somewhere else. But its not a serious suggestion until the chief informs us a) where he thinks they should move and b) by what authority he would compel them to do so. Past efforts to provide services elsewhere foundered when they ran up against inevitable NIMBYism. Will Acevedo now lead the charge to beat back NIMBY efforts to thwart relocating such facilities or pander to neighborhood interests who don't want them there? My money's on the latter.

A few years back before Acevedo came to Austin, a national advocacy group ranked Austin one of the "meanest" cities in America toward the homeless, with a spokesman declaring,"Austin basically made the list because there has been sort of a pattern of police harassment, harassing homeless people in the community." Acevedo's most recent comments perpetuate that perception.

Huge savings from supportive housing for chronic homeless

Grits was interested to see a report out of California about a supportive housing program created for the 30 most expensive, chronic homeless people in San Diego, which reportedly has about 9,800 homeless folks citywide. What struck me is how a) a small number of homeless people account for a disproportionate share of cost to the taxpayers, and b) targeting services to a relatively small number of people resulted in significant savings. Reported the local NBC affiliate:

The initiative housed 30 homeless people in San Diego who were estimated to be costing taxpayers over $11 million in public resources, according to data from the project.

The participants on average absorbed nearly $318,000 before entering the program, estimated in emergency room visits, ambulance transports, in-patient medical stays, arrests and jail days. Those who enrolled were often disabled and continuously homeless for over a year.

After almost a year of being in the program, analysts estimated that the cost of supporting the average participant was about $97,400.

Overall, the project resulted in a nearly 70 percent reduction in costs to taxpayers, the analysts said.

Not every homeless person needs long-term supportive housing. Most homelessness is temporary and transitional, so for them, short-term supports are adequate. But for a small number of chronic homeless - particularly frequent flyers in local jails who may be arrested dozens of times on petty charges - the cost-benefit analysis of business as usual often reaches absurdist proportions.

The problem with such programs is that the costs of homelessness are spread out among many entities - the city, county, state, Medicaid, local hospitals, etc. - and not all those will pay into supportive housing. So the societal cost is tremendous but there is a free-rider problem among institutions that would see costs reduced. On paper, taxpayers overall benefit tremendously. But in practice, when one arm of government pays the freight, the savings are so spread out that that entity may not see a reduction in their own bottom line.

That's why I think it's smart to target a handful of the most expensive, chronic homeless folks for a pilot, identifying people for whom the economics of supportive housing come out positive even for the government entity ponying up the bucks. This is not a problem which may be resolved with a snap of a finger. I'd like to see more Texas cities and counties take on this topic in the same way San Diego did: Start small, demonstrate the concept, and build on success. (Fort Worth has begun to embrace supportive housing, but in Texas they're an outlier.) Often government does nothing on homelessness - or relegates the issue to law enforcement - because doing everything needed would be so expensive that policymakers become paralyzed. In that context, chipping away at the issue around the edges is preferable to throwing up one's hands and simply declaring nothing can be done, or worse, criminalizing homelessness instead of focusing on reducing it.

A tale of two cities' reaction to homelessness

When it comes to homelessness, the public and policymakers must pick their poison: No matter what is done, somebody is going to complain. A pair of stories caught my eye portraying homeless problems in Dallas and San Francisco, respectively. (The last time I was in SF a few years back they had a tremendous homelessness problem; I can recall literally having to step over folks walking down the sidewalk, along with all the other passersby.)

In Dallas, reports a local TV station, "Main Street Gardens Park in downtown Dallas has become a bit of a homeless haven during the overnight hours.  Residents heading to the park for an early morning dog walk are met by homeless people sleeping on benches, playground equipment, or whatever else may be in the park." The response to the story: "residents should start to see an increase in police presence around Main Street Gardens park almost immediately." Even in Big D, though, officials realize there's a limit to how effective a law eforcement response can be (particularly when the jail is already expensive and full):

For Dallas police, it's not just about enforcing the law anymore-- it's about getting the homeless in downtown Dallas the help they really need, so they won't feel they have to sleep in the park.

"We realize that just writing them tickets for just sleeping in pubic is not the answer," said Janse.

So now, officers will work with Crisis Intervention personnel. They'll even take take those found sleeping in public to shelters like The Bridge in downtown Dallas. 

Jay Dunn, Managing Director of The Bridge said the shelter has 300 beds for adults, and once those beds are filled, the facility has buses to transport people to other shelters in the Dallas area that have room. He said there are some homeless people they have had trouble engaging, but they are working to reach out to the homeless in the downtown area each day.

Residents who live near Main Street Gardens park say they just hope to see results soon, before the park's new tenants start driving folks away.

So the problem is homeless people laying around in public with not enough shelters to house them without busing them off somewhere else, which in any event many resist. For that matter, some people understandably prefer fending for themselves on the streets to a homeless shelter with hundreds of others. A subset of homeless folks, many suffering from severe mental illnesses, cycle in and out of the jail near constantly - sometimes dozens of times a year. (The slang term for such folks in the Harris County Jail, which is today the largest mental health facility in Texas, is "frequent flyers.") So what's the longer term solution?

The most effective response I've heard of - something being tried out in Fort Worth, actually - is supportive long-term housing for the chronically homeless. But somebody's inevitably going to complain about that, too. There's a story out of San Francisco titled "Supportive housing: Cure for homelessness or community burden," where neighborhood residents also have complaints about that program. Neighborhood activists complain bitterly when such facilities are opened in their area. However, upon implementing its supportive housing program, "In its first year and a half, the number of homeless in San Francisco dropped by 28%."

One of the SF program critics declared: "It's a containment zone, it's absolutely a containment zone for crime and for the poor." Continued Mark Ellinger, "They're all containment zones, each one of these master lease hotels. They all have huge, huge crack problems. It's not like nobody knows about it - of course the city knows about it. Is there anything done about it to change it, to improve the situation? No, never. Never.  Because it's contained."

Even granting all the speakers' presumptions about what's going on behind closed doors, isn't "contained" better than not contained? Would you rather have the problem of the Dallas neighbors, with homeless folks laying around the local park, or that described in San Francisco where the problem is "contained" through supportive housing? Containment may be the best we get on homelessness: It's not like there's an obvious solution to hand.

So the question becomes: Do cities want to manage the problem as a criminal justice issue, with homeless people either outdoors in the street or locked up the jail, or are urban neighborhoods better off when the homeless have a place to go? It may not be great for property values to have low-or-no rent housing on your block, but isn't that better than people lying on sidewalks and park benches? Supportive housing keeps those it serves off the street at night, as well as creating one-stop-shopping venues to provide mental-health, addiction, employment and other services to help folks get back on their feet. It's expensive, but so is dispatching police, taking people to jail, treating mental illness through the justice system, trying to process Class C tickets on people with no address, or busing people to far away shelters.

These are difficult problems, with every "solution" bringing its own, new complaints. But the whole "trail 'em, nail 'em and jail 'em" approach is particularly ill-suited to the situation, and to me it makes a lot more sense, whenever possible, to address homelessness with homes instead of cops.

There really is no such thing as a free lunch

Not in Lubbock, anyway. At least if you can't afford a commercial kitchen.

Housing the homeless ... in jail

I thought this was an interesting money quote from a speaker at a Lubbock City Council meeting on the subject of criminalizing homeless people storing or using camping equipment on public property:

“It kind of contradicts statements by City Council members that they do not want to spend taxpayer money housing the homeless” if they end up sending homeless to jail, said Chad Wheeler, pastor of Carpenter’s Church.

No kidding. Creating criminal penalties results in paying for their housing, too, plus food bills, medical care, etc.. That's certainly an irony in the stance of those who would criminalize homelessness but reject spending money on supportive housing options.

Lower utilization by 'frequent flyers' to reduce pressure on jail

In my essay on my recent Harris County Jail tour, I described how a relatively small number of "frequent flyers" account for a huge proportion of jail utilization. In reaction, Lillian Aguirre Ortiz from Mental Health America of Greater Houston forwarded me a couple of documents assessing outcomes of a pilot program at the Houston Police Department. (See here and here.) Called the Chronic Consumer Stabilization Initiative, the pilot focuses on community-based efforts to reduce jail, hospital and police utilization for the 30 Houstonians suffering from severe mental illness who are responsible for the most police calls. (She sent the same materials to Charles Kuffner, who beat me to the punch posting about it. See also coverage of the program from the Houston Press and a column in the Houston Chronicle from attorney George Parnham.) According HPD's analysis of the six-month pilot:

It was determined that 30 consumers alone were responsible for 194 calls for service resulting in 194 offense reports and 165 EDOs [Emergency Detention Orders] from six of their most active months recorded in the HPD database. This is a total of 553 time consuming events which averages close to one hour of work per officer per event. After intense intervention by the two case managers, the same 30 individuals were only reported to have been involuntarily committed for a total of 39 times, a significant decrease by 76.4% while only 65 offense reports and 65 known calls for service were generated resulting in a 67.3% decrease. The end result revealed a total of 169 reported events with a 70% overall decrease observed within six months of the pilot. These numbers indicate that the CCSI pilot program significantly decreased the number of interactions between individuals diagnosed with serious and persistent mental illness and the Houston Police Department. This decrease in interactions with law enforcement may be due to families and care givers appropriately seeking assistance through the mental health system rather than through law enforcement as a result of education received from the CCSI staff.

Think about that: The thirty most prolific mentally ill "consumers" of law enforcement services in Houston were responsible for 194 police offense reports in six months, so reducing that to 65 all of a sudden looks like a positive development. Said the report, "Many of these clients would benefit from a structured residential setting, staffed with mental health professionals 24 hours/365 days a year. These facilities are not currently available within Harris County."

Investing in case workers and community-based support to reduce arrests and overincarceration of such individuals - who inevitably are turned back out on the streets anyway, eventually, when they're sent to jail or a psych hospital - would go a lot further toward reducing jail overcrowding than building more jail space to hold the same folks over and over again. Another notable element is the attribution of the reduction in police calls to changing responses by family members and caregivers, not always direct intervention CCSI staff. If that observation is accurate, educating and supporting direct caregivers - who often find themselves feeling helpless and unprepared in the face of chronic, severe mental illness - can make a huge difference.

Who are Houston's 30 most prolific mentally ill "consumers" of police services?

Thirteen of the thirty clients (43%) have a diagnosis of Schizophrenia. Eight (27%) have a diagnosis of Schizoaffective Disorder. Seven (23%) have a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder with Psychotic Features. Eleven of the thirty clients (37%) have substance abuse dependence. Surprisingly, six (20%) have a diagnosis of Mental Retardation. Additionally, fifteen (50%) have significant medical issues (i.e. diabetes, HTN, seizure disorder, and injuries resulting from trauma). Twelve (40%) are in need of dental treatment.

The lack of consistent treatment generally cannot be attributed to a lack of benefits. Twenty four of the thirty clients (80%) receive SSI benefits. Six (20%) have a guardian and eight (27%) receive case management. Eighteen (60%) have family involvement that does not appear to benefit the client. This family involvement at times is for unknown secondary gain. The family does not maintain care for the client but is unwilling to relinquish care to a guardian or other entity.

Only six of the thirty clients (20%) are homeless. Eleven (37%) reside on their own or a family home and thirteen (43%) reside in personal care homes. The clients who reside in personal care homes are frequently placed in different homes based on their own behavior or an unwillingness of the personal care home to provide adequate care for the client.

The program undoubtedly saves money. According to this addendum, based on results from the pilot, if the program were expanded to 60 individuals, it would save $867,793 in the first year while costing $282,364 to implement. What's more, those savings appear to exclude jail costs! Listed costs were only calculated for participants in the pilot - the Houston PD and the Harris County MHMR authority.

If Harris County wants to reduce jail overcrowding, first things first should be to ramp up CCSI-style community supervision for those responsible for the highest rates of jail utilization. Pick the 500 or 1,000 most frequent jail visitors and make their effective community supervision a priority. Supply case-management type support in addition to law enforcement supervision, where necessary. And if the county wants to build "mental health beds," as Sheriff Garcia has proposed, they should be medical, not correctional facilities - the kind of "structured residential settings" the CCSI report laments aren't available in Houston.

Consider the relative cost-benefit analysis: Sheriff Garcia wants to spend a quarter-billion dollars to expand the jail to create a mental health wing and to expand the overcrowded booking area. At 3% over 20 years, that comes out to around $16.8 million per year, PLUS another $5+ million or so in annual staffing costs - enough to require a tax increase. If it would cost $282,364 to provide such extensive supervision to the sixty highest utilizers of police and jail services among the mentally ill, as declared in the addendum to the HPD report, then for the $21.8 million annually taxpayers would spend on an expanded jail, CCSI-type case management support could be provided for more than 4,600 "frequent flyers" - probably more since once you get down the list their utilization levels won't be nearly so high as those in the pilot. (Likely the risk factors dealt with among the non-mentally ill in that group will differ significantly, but problems with substance abuse will be a recurring theme.)

A few years back Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker wrote a piece titled "Million Dollar Murray" that told the story of one such high-utilization "consumer" of police services and healthcare services, describing a homeless man whose medical bills alone cost the city of Reno, NV $1 million over a single decade. Heaven knows what the costs would be if you tacked on police, court, and jail expenses. But there are Million Dollar Murrays in every US city of any size, and certainly passing through every urban jail.

Clearly investing in community-based supervision and support like the CCSI program gets a lot more more bang for the buck than the current "catch and release" approach: Maximizing evidence-based supervision of the most frequent offenders outside of jail makes much more sense than expanding the jail to hold the same people over and over without ever addressing the core problem. HPD and its partners deserve a lot of credit for piloting CCSI, but the program deserves to be scaled up considerably, and doing so should be a much greater priority than jail building.

NIMBYism biggest barrier to supportive housing for homeless, mentally ill

This blog frequently laments the extent to which the justice system has become the primary delivery vehicle for mental health services, so I was interested to see a couple of stories out of the Austin Statesman focused on community-based solutions. "Helping the homeless on their own terms" details the activities of a nonprofit doing field work and case management among the mentally-ill homeless, while another story describes the dearth of supportive housing options to keep such folks from cycling in and out of jail.

Supportive housing — low-income housing that offers social services to its residents — is crucial for keeping people off the streets, said Walter Moreau , executive director of Foundation Communities, a nonprofit agency that provides low-cost housing to needy people.

Those services can include on-site programs such as money management classes and social workers to connect people to Social Security, food stamps and other public benefits.

"You need a variety of ways to help people where they're at," Moreau said.

Advocates for homeless people say Austin doesn't have nearly enough supportive housing units.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development , Travis County has 540 permanent supportive housing beds. The Corporation for Supportive Housing recently concluded that Austin needs about 1,900 more such units.

Part of the reason for the dearth of supportive housing is a persistent, NIMBY-driven backlash against any new facility aimed at this population - an incredibly short-sighted position considering the lack of housing makes it more likely they'll commit new crimes. Describing opposition to supportive housing for the homeless in Dallas' Lake Highlands neighborhood, the Dallas News reported:

It has been difficult to find neighborhood support for this type of housing, even beyond Lake Highlands and north Oak Cliff. Deep Ellum residents objected to a proposal to build 100 units there. Plans for similar housing have fallen through in South Dallas, the Cedars and at another Lake Highlands site. Meanwhile, several more projects are in the pipeline.

Advocates for the housing say that resident opposition is making it difficult to achieve the City Council-approved goal of creating 700 units of permanent supportive housing by 2014. Experts say that this type of housing, which includes treatment services, is key to ending chronic homelessness. 

Relatedly, see this sadly typical story out of Mesquite of a family struggling with the behavior of a mentally ill teen. He's been in and out of jail and his family is at their wits end, fearing he'll end up dead or in prison. According to the Dallas News:

The Mesquite couple's ordeal illustrates the complications that can surface for families trying to care for a loved one with serious mental illnesses: There's not enough treatment available, the person with the illness often rejects help, and problems boil to a crisis point – often leading back to shelters or jail.

"The system to help these kids stinks to high heaven because there is none," Susan Koshar said.

Officials who work in the criminal justice system say they see people like Brown all the time. And there aren't enough services to help them, said Ron Stretcher, director of Dallas County's criminal justice department. Texas ranks 48th in the nation in per capita spending on mental health, according to a Mental Health America survey.

"In Texas, we just don't provide for this population," Stretcher said. "There's nothing out there."

If the public want the City to address homelessness, mental illness and petty crime, they must be willing to provide community-based services in addition to only jails. Supportive housing for the most resource-intensive people - particularly those who are essentially "frequent flyers' at the county jail - is among the most promising approaches toward reducing crime among this group, but those services must actually be physically delivered somewhere.

Mentally ill prisoners, homeless the focus of media report but not national healthcare debate

Josh Rushing from Al Jazeera's English-language news has produced a quite well done, two-part video report on the mentally ill in US prisons, focusing particularly on Texas prisons and the Harris County jail (which is the largest mental institution in Texas, according to the report). See:

• Part One
• Part Two

The two pieces run around 20 minutes all told and are well worth watching. Part one in particular contains some good interviews with staff and inmates at the Harris County Jail and hones on the relationship between homelessness and the criminalization of the mentally ill. Part two focuses more on the politics and history of how we reached this sorry state and also contains some interesting interviews with volunteers from our friends at Restorative Justice Ministries as they greeted prisoners fresh out of lockup in Huntsville.

An excellent point raised by Rushing is the near-complete lack of discussion about providing mental health services in the ongoing national healthcare debate. I'd also noticed that nobody in D.C. is talking about mental health and have wondered how the "individual mandate" for people to buy insurance will work with people who are homeless and mentally ill.

Kudos to the Harris County Sheriff for letting Rushing in the jail for interviews with inmates, medical staff, and front-line jail personnel. The state prison system refused, which I thought was bad form. Everybody knows we have a serious problem with warehousing the mentally ill in prisons and jails; there's no need to be close-lipped with the media about what's happening inside public institutions.

RELATED: From MWWatch.org, see "Loathsome Prison Conditions for the Mentally Ill," covering a recent Congressional hearing on the topic.

Related Grits posts:

• Mentally ill youth strain juvenile system
• Total spent on homeless 'frequent fliers' better spent outside of jail
• SA Jail Shrink: Mental health services in free world a must
• Number of mentally ill in jail a 'community barometer'
• Reduce number of mentally ill offenders languishing in jail
• Prevention, punishment, mental illness and crime
• Outpatient centers better solution than jails for competency restoration
• Mental health courts: A strategy that works?
• Federal bill backing mental health courts a teaspoon of remedy for an oceanic problem
• Locals everywhere struggle to manage mentally ill offenders
• Using jails for mental health treatment an expensive, counterproductive approach
• Number of mentally ill inmates, parolees rising