Truncated agenda: Aim high on criminal justice this session

Mi amigos Marc Levin and Derek Cohen of the Texas Public Policy Foundation last week published a column on the Texas Tribune's Tribtalk site outlining "an agenda for criminal justice," including raising the age for prosecuting youth as adults from 17 to 18, decriminalizing truancy, and the raft of legislative suggestions from the Smart on Crime Coalition.

Grits agrees with their suggestions, but they don't go far enough. In particular, the column is mainly focused on sentencing, programming and budget savings, as well as juvenile-justice reform. Those are all important topics, but today more than ever there are a significant number of conservative pols in the Lege approaching criminal-justice from more of a personal liberty perspective. Large chunks of the conservative base, including some recently elected GOP legislators, care about the budget but also about limiting government overreach like civil asset forfeiture (the subject of a TPPF forum in December) or enhancing Fourth Amendment protections in the digital age. In addition, over the last few sessions the GOP-controlled Texas Legislature has focused on innocence issues to greater effect, arguably, than any other state legislative body, passing several landmark bills* aiming to reduce the likelihood of false convictions and provide relief to those wrongly convicted.

On these and other topics, coalitions are available in both chambers on criminal justice reform between factions of an increasingly fragmented GOP and progressive Ds, whose base has itself been energized on criminal justice by the Ferguson and Staten Island episodes. The agenda articulated in this column skews more toward the views of business conservatives than the populist grass roots (the Texas Association of Business is the most powerful member of the Smart on Crime Coalition, of which TPPF and my clients at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition are both participants). The agenda outlined by Levin and Cohen included some good stuff, but there's no reason to think even more can't be done.

Tim Cole statue unveiled in Lubbock, and other stories

Here are a few items from the last week that may interest Grits readers but which lost out in the competition for time with my paid work:

Tim Cole memorialized by VIPs at statue unveiling
Lubbock this week unveiled a 13-foot tall statue of Timothy Cole, who was falsely convicted of rape in that county and died in prison before his innocence could be proven. Lots of VIPs there, including Gov. Perry and both the Democratic and Republican nominees to succeed him. See CNN's coverage, AP, and the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. Perhaps the best way politicians could honor Timothy Cole next session would be to pass the final, unfinished recommendation from the Timothy Cole Advisory Panel: Requiring police to record custodial interrogations for serious offenses.

Texas Association of Business goes 'Smart on Crime'
A left-right "Smart on Crime" coalition formally announced this week including the Texas Public Policy Foundation, my part-time employers at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, the Texas Association of Business, and Goodwill Industries. The big news here really is the Texas Association of Business stepping up to the plate more seriously on the subject. Their interests are mainly in continuing adequate supply in the labor market, but at this moment in history that aligns their interests with less-government reformers on the left and right who think limited state resources should be spent on more productive endeavors than incarceration.

Abuses reveal Houston cops' mercenary view of ticket writing
Prosecutors in Houston will dismiss hundreds of Class C charges, reported the Houston Chronicle (Sept. 18), because four police officers lied on the tickets, claiming their colleagues were present at the stop so they could cheat on their overtime records. The four officers were recently "relieved of duty" and are "being investigated for criminal conduct." One frequently hear politicians claim the purpose of ticket writing is to enforce the law, not generate revenue.  But for these cops it was about generating revenue: overtime, for themselves.

Harris DA candidates: End key-man system of grand jury selection
Both R and D District Attorney candidates in Harris County believe the key man system of selecting grand juries should be eliminated, reported HouChron columnist Lisa Falkenberg (Sept. 18). So do I. Problem is, judges make those appointments and nobody can tell them what to do but the Legislature. So if you want to change how grand juries are picked, the candidates might be running for the wrong office. I'm old fashioned that way, but I'd prefer the candidates debate stuff that's actually part of the DA's job.

The Driver Responsibility surcharge is still a catastrophe
The Texas Observer's Forrest Wilder has a column decrying Texas' Driver Responsibility surcharge; nothing regular Grits readers haven't heard before but he outlines the problem well and expresses the appropriate level of outrage at one of the most dysfunctional programs in all of state government.

Who is operating fake cell phone towers in Texas, US?
Popular Science wondered, "Who is running the phony cell-phone towers around the US?" (Sept. 15). Like me, they think it's probably cops and spooks. See prior Grits coverage.

Making slime
Off topic, but this was a lot of fun to do with the granddaughter this morning. A big hit. Eight year olds love to make slime.

On ideology and overincarceration: Explaining conservative support for criminal-justice reform

Reacting to the announcement by Bill Hammond at the Texas Association of Business' that the group will support criminal justice-reform measures this session, the Austin Statesman was quick to point out that:

It’s a welcome message, but it’s not original with Hammond. Former District Attorney Ronnie Earle was delivering that sermon throughout a law enforcement career that spanned three decades.

Asked for his reaction to Hammond’s pronouncement, Earle’s comment was typically pithy: “TAB just affirmed that the world is round.”

Alternatives to incarceration have been a cause célèbre with liberals for years, arguments about the high cost of staffing and operating prisons gained traction with even the most conservative members of the Texas Legislature.

Hammond's message may not be "new" (certainly Grits readers won't find it particularly novel), but messengers matter and among Texas legislators, particularly in the GOP, TAB enjoys a megaphone among both the leadership and newer, conservative members.

Grits would dispute Ronnie Earle's contention, though, that TAB has merely copied liberals, a meme which misunderstands what's going on here. Like the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Hammond and Co. have reached similar policy conclusions to liberals on a narrow range of issues, but based on a quite different ideological basis. That's possible in part because much in criminal-justice policy comes down to math and process. The math of overincarceration doesn't work; that's the "earth is round" part that everybody sees. But conservatives differ from liberals like Earle in how they view the process. After all, the "State" in "State v. Smith" is the same government that grassroots conservatives believe can't tie its own shoes in any other facet of public life.

What's new here is a growing willingness to apply small-government conservative values to criminal justice, which in the past has sometimes seemed exempt from such critiques. This new trend has perhaps been furthered by the rising use of criminal law to replace traditional tort liability and government regulation. But as a representative of some of the state's largest employers, TAB also cares about Texas having an educated and productive workforce, goals that are sometimes hindered by overcriminalization and a byzantine array of occupational licensing restrictions, which was a central issue the group focused on at their announcement. TAB's entry into the criminal justice realm represents both an example of enlightened self interest and the ascendance of conservative ideology to the furthest reaches of state government activity.

There are other dynamics at play that make reform perhaps more likely than in the past. For example, while liberals may tremble at the disapprobation of police unions - a political force which has rebuffed countless reform efforts - to some ideological conservatives they're just another public-employee union at the government trough. And the unions reciprocate their distrust. Last year, the executive director of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, John Burpo, referred to grassroots conservatives as the "Forces of Darkness," warning his membership that a "cabal of anti-union, anti-public employee businessmen out of Houston" was out to gut their pensions.

The same goes for prosecutors. Last session, the Texas District and County Attorney Association's Shannon Edmonds lamented what he called the "new math" applied by the Tea Party toward prosecutors: "This session's infusion of Tea Party sentiment in the legislative process has affected the standard law and order calculus that we use to gauge the potential fate of various bills. That 'Tea Party sentiment' can be boiled down to this: 'The government is the enemy. You work for the government. Do the math.'" Whether that's actually reflective of "Tea Party sentiment" remains to be seen - I suspect the paranoid comments about "cabals" and "enemies" are overblown calumnies - but that's how the Texas prosecutor and police-union lobbies perceive the state's new wave of conservative legislators.

The embrace of criminal-justice reform by ideological conservatives doesn't reflect a conversion to liberal views, as Ronnie Earle contended, so much as a serendipitous alignment of interests, driven partially by facts on the ground and partially by the conservative movement maturing to the point where at least some of its adherents no longer feel threatened when their views may lead to strategic collusion with those who believe differently than them. Legislators take hundreds of votes each session. A mature politician understands that, on any given issue, partisan distinctions may not be determinative, and it's been a great achievement of the Texas Legislature since the GOP took over that criminal-justice issues can frequently be approached in a bipartisan, fact-driven fashion, as evidenced by evolving positions in the business community regarding incarceration, its costs and consequences.

RELATED: "Six Impossible Things': Do you believe in a conservative, rational and smaller corrections budget?"

Major development: Business lobby backs criminal justice reforms

The Austin Statesman's Mike Ward points to a major development on the criminal justice reform front: The entry of the Texas Association of Business, a powerful lobby representing some of the state's largest employers, will be backing a reform agenda on criminal justice this session. Reported Ward ("Big-business lobby enters fray on criminal justice reforms," Jan. 15):

In a significant shift in lobbying clout, Texas’ most powerful business group has decided to make criminal-justice reforms a key focus of its priorities for legislative action, seeking ways to spend taxpayer money more efficiently and to improve the state’s economic future.

Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business, said the group plans to push to expand successful rehabilitation and community-based corrections programs; to change Texas’ drug-sentencing laws to put more low-level offenders in local treatment programs and reduce penalties for small amounts of drugs; and to modify state licensing laws that keep some ex-convicts from ever becoming certified for various trades.

“We’re sending too many people to the slammer,” Hammond said. “The taxpayers and the business community are both being harmed.”

On Wednesday, the business group will meet to plan its strategy to persuade the Legislature to enact changes that Hammond said are designed to keep more low-level, nonviolent lawbreakers on probation and in treatment and rehabilitation programs in their communities, “rather than sending them all to Huntsville.”

This would have been unthinkable a decade ago and reflects the growing realization among fiscal hawks that Texas' corrections costs have grown at rates far in excess of other government spending. Here's TAB president Bill Hammond elaborating further on the group's new position:

“TAB supports criminal justice reforms from previous legislative sessions and ongoing efforts to improve public safety, reduce the rate of recidivism, and decrease prison costs,” the association states in its legislative wish-list this year. “Such reforms include, but are not limited to, finding cost-effective alternatives to incarceration through the implementation of enhanced probation programs.”

The bottom line, Hammond said, “is that the current system is ineffective. It doesn’t work.”

“We don’t pretend to be experts at criminal justice, but we’re for good public policy,” he said, noting that the association supports keeping Texas competitive in attracting new business in coming years. That should involve reforms to the current corrections system, he said.

In its legislative platform, the TAB notes that “while the daily cost of probation is $2.92 per person, only $1.40 of which comes from taxpayers’ dollars, it takes $50.79 per day for taxpayers to hold a single inmate in prison. That comes to a total of $18,000 per inmate, per year, with Texas currently housing over 150,000 prisoners.”

Congratulations to Hammond, TAB, and also the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which has been working hard to convince business leaders they have a dog in this fight. This is an exciting development. TAB brings every bit as much clout to the Lege as traditional opponents of reform like prosecutors and police unions. Though one hesitates to begin counting chickens, it's possible we'll look back in just a few years and see this as a important tuning point. Grits certainly hopes so.