Prison educator: TDCJ inmates' reading and math on a 5th grade level

The average Texas prison inmate's reading and math skills are at a fifth grade level, the superintendent of TDCJ's Windham School District told the Senate Criminal Justice Committee this morning.

Large numbers of the nearly 70,000 inmates leaving Texas prisons every year, he told the committee, do so without a GED. The agency grants about 5,000 GEDs per year.

Chairman John Whitmire briefly raised the question of computer proficiency among inmates leaving the system, and I found myself wishing the superintendent had discussed it more. The ability to use a computer - particularly word processing and spreadsheet software, but even basic internet search functions - can be essential these days, even for retail or service work.

For that matter, in 2018, searching for a job most frequently means searching on the internet. That's harder to do if, first, one has to learn how to ACCESS the internet.

Those skills should be taught in prisons.

Committee backs boosting programs to prevent recidivism

The section of the Texas House Corrections Committee interim report to the 84th Legislature on "recidivism" had some good elements, if not a groundbreaking analysis. Here are a few highlights:

First, it should be mentioned that Texas has among the lowest recidivism rates of any prison system, certainly among large states, in the United States. "Offenders released from prison in fiscal year 2011 had a rearrest rate of 46.5 percent, and a reincarceration rate of 21.4 percent within a three-year period," according to the report. Since in Texas one can be arrested for anything including Class C misdemeanors punishable only be fines, not jail time, many of those arrests are for petty stuff that may not really concern us from a safety perspective. Even so, that's a remarkably low rate; nationally, the rearrest rate is 67.8 percent. And our re-incarceration rate is also lower than the national average (55 percent within 5 years). Texas is one of a number of states where recidivism rates have been falling.

We've discussed before on Grits the reasons why, and it's not because we're doing such a great job of rehabilitating prisoners. Texas has the largest prison population among American states - greater even than California's whose civilian population is nearly half-again ours - and the reason is that we incarcerate more low-risk offenders who could be safely released than do other corrections systems where more rigorous cost-benefit analyses are applied to government activities.

At root, Texas' low recidivism rate mainly stems from the fact that we're over-incarcerating low-risk people to begin with - that many of those folks leaving prison were unlikely to have reoffended even if they'd remained free, and therefore they commit no new crimes when they get out, either. Reserving incarceration for people who pose a significant risk of harming others is a cost-benefit judgement at which the Texas system is not very good.

At present, Texas' system involves a great deal of churn on the low end, especially among drug users, with prisoners entering the system just long enough to receive a life-altering "felon" tag, maybe a prison tat or two and advice from career criminals on how not to get caught next time before being released. Then, on the back end, some elderly prisoners convicted of serious violent crimes are held too long after they no longer pose a big recidvism risk, with their healthcare costs driving up overall costs of incarceration. Both groups contribute to our low recidivism rates, but only because they wouldn't have committed more crimes whether incarcerated or not.

Among some of the good news in the report was the decline in parole revocations for technical violations, which is due mainly to 1) Texas' 2007 reforms, including the creation of intermediate sanctions facilities, and 2) the changing makeup of and decisions by the parole board to reduce incarceration modestly. "In 2006, the Board of Pardons and Paroles revoked over ten thousand offenders. In fiscal year 2015, that number was reduced to about 5500." By contrast, revocations for technical violations on the probation side remain high - about half of all probation revocations.

There's a good discussion in the report of in-prison programming and reentry support services which I won't replicate here but which may interest some readers. In the end, the committee recommended that, "Enhanced funding of Windham and correctional aftercare [for ex-prisoners who received drug and alcohol treatment] should be strongly considered next session." And they suggested that restrictions on occupational licenses for felons should  be reevaluated "to exclude those who have kept a clean record for a certain period of time."

Grits agrees with most of their observations about programming but would only caution to look at the recidivism data with big-picture nuance. If the Legislature stopped incarcerating low-risk offenders who're mainly imprisoned because they're drug addicts, for example, recidivism rates would likely go up over time. But that's only because a low-risk cadre has been removed and the remaining offenders are made up of predominantly higher-risk people. In the context of Texas' specific situation as it relates to over-incarceration, a rise in recidivism rates resulting from decarceration of low-risk offenders wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

'We need rational approach to incarceration'

An op ed in the Amarillo Globe News today by restorative justice advocates with the same title as this post argues for a smarter approach to Texas corrections spending. The column concludes:

recidivism costs Texas citizens many millions of dollars annually, plus untold loss and suffering.

Unfortunately, the state’s budget woes are leading to major cuts in the very programs that help reduce recidivism, suffering and cost. Budget reductions in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice have been largely focused on community supervision, parole and programming funds. Even the department’s ability to process new volunteers for work in prison programs has been impaired.

It appears the goose that could lay the golden egg is being killed by short-sighted legislative policy.

There is a better way. Some people need to be locked up to protect society — and many for a very long time. But the tendency of tough-on-crime advocates to lock up more and more people for longer and longer terms for smaller and smaller offenses, while de-emphasizing the programs aiming to rehabilitate inmates and prevent their return to prison, is misguided at best.

As responsible citizens, we all need to demand that our elected representatives take a more rational approach to incarcerating offenders, while retaining or expanding in-prison programming as a humane, recidivism reducing, cost cutting — and presumably tax saving — measure.

Required budget cuts should focus on creating a policy that aims to provide community supervision of offenders who are not a threat to society, incarcerate those who are and rehabilitate them all. And each of us should do our part by participating in or supporting nonprofit programs, such as Bridges To Life, that help restore offenders to the life of a productive, tax-paying citizen.

Fewer GEDs, prison industry jobs thanks to TDCJ budget cuts

Coupla news items caught my eye related to budget cuts at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. First, reports Mike Ward at the Austin Statesman, six prison industry factories including a soap factory formerly at the Central Unit in Sugar Land have been closed because of budget cutbacks. Wrote Ward:

The closures are part of a national trend, officials say, as government agencies that run prison industry programs experience budget cuts and government agencies that buy prison-made goods scale back their purchases, also to cope with tighter state budgets.

"The question is how do you keep convicts busy if the plant closes," said Tony Fabelo, an Austin-based criminal justice statistician who tracks criminal justice trends.

"This has implications for prison management, beyond just the closing of a plant here and there."

In Texas, prison officials have always prided themselves on the state's robust prison-industry program. It is among the nation's largest, where convicts make everything ranging from furniture, highway signs and soap to garments, license plates and shoes at 41 plants. But now some officials worry that increasing numbers of idled convicts could lead to new disciplinary and security problems inside Texas' sprawling system of 111 state prisons.

The other closures:

In Beaumont, a metal products plant at the Stiles Unit was shuttered earlier this year and its operations were consolidated with similar plants at the Coffield Unit near Tennessee Colony and the Powledge Unit near Palestine.

A garment plant at the Jester 3 Unit in Richmond was consolidated with a plant at the Eastham Unit north of Huntsville. A shoe plant closed at the Jordan Unit near Pampa had its lines moved to a plant at the Clements Unit in Amarillo that makes blankets.

A wood and furniture plant at the Ellis Unit outside Huntsville was moved to the Lewis Unit in Woodville. And a plant that manufactures stainless-steel fixtures at the Boyd Unit in Teague has been closed and consolidated with a metal plant at the Luther Unit outside Navasota.

Meanwhile, the Huntsville Item has a story on recent budget cuts at TDCJ's Windham School District which informs us that:

As of Thursday, Windham had to eliminate 271 full-time employees, including 157 teachers in addition to adminstrative and support staff. WSD also enforced salary reductions across the board in order to reduce its budget by $17.8 million, or 27 percent, per year of the biennium.

It was another tough blow to the residents of Huntsville and the surounding communities. Another 40 jobs were lost in the area after the Texas Department of Criminal Justice went through a round of layoffs a few months ago.

Windham had to cut jobs at the Eastham, Ellis, Estelle, Goree, Huntsville and Wynne units as the agency’s budgeted figures for 2012 under the regular programs were substantially lower than the estimated expenses for the fiscal year 2011, which led to a reduction in funding. ...

As a result of the teaching cuts, Windham, which provides academic, career and technology training for offenders to help combat recidivism, has also had to eliminate and reduce educational programs, including General Educational Development (GED). Each teaching position was determined to serve 107 students per year, meaning more than 16,700 offenders will be left out of the classrooms in 2012.

GED classes are no longer being offered at the Glossbrenner, Halbert, Havins, Johnston, LeBlance and Sayle substance abuse facilities and at the Duncan Unit. The Central Unit in Sugar Land was recently closed down completely.

“Despite substantial budget reductions, WSD remains committed to providing the best possible programming with allocated funding,” Kiser said.

The GED, as well as other programs, were signifigantly reduced at 19 other units, including Eastham, Goree, Ellis, Byrd and Huntsville. According to WSD’s annual performance report for 2009-10, approximately 77,500 inmates received educational services and 12,464 of the offenders released in 2010 attained a GED and took college classes while incarerated in TDCJ.

Offenders at the units that no longer offer GED courses have limited options as to continuing their education.

Senate pushing biggest cuts to TDCJ vocational ed

A recurring theme in the budget battle at the 82nd Texas Legislature is that the proposed Senate budget - which includes tapping the state's "Rainy Day Fund" - is generally more generous than its parsimonious House counterpart, though it still represents a radical cut from the last biennium. On the question of in-prison vocational funding at TDCJ's Windham School District, though, that dynamic is reversed, reports KENS-5 out of San Antonio: "the Texas House is eying plans to cut around 12 percent of Windham’s budget; Senate cuts total near 37 percent."

Whichever chamber prevails, in the scheme of things this will be the second major cut to vocational ed at TDCJ in a decade. During the last major budget crunch, WISD also took a hit: "In 2003, Windham School District faced similar funding issues. The superintendent said the district reduced staff by 35 percent and the remaining employees took pay cuts."

Bottom line, the question becomes whether extra incarceration costs from increased recidivism outweigh the expense of in-prison programming: "Windham says graduates of their programs are 11 percent less likely to end up behind bars again," the TV station reports. It's impossible to tell without more data how much increased recidivism among this cohort might cost in expanded incarceration costs, but one thing's for sure: It's not zero. And whatever the sum required, it's not being incorporated into TDCJ's budget. Instead, legislators appear to be pretending they can cut reentry and anti-recidivism programming without any effect on future incarceration rates. Grits suspects they've got another think coming.

MORE (5/4): From the Wall Street Journal, which reports on a new study which:

argues "federal and state statutes should be revised to support the development and expansion of Internet-based delivery" of education. The report also recommends "federal and state statutes should be amended to make specific categories of incarcerated persons eligible for financial aid."

Inmate education in America plummeted after President Bill Clinton's crime bill of 1994 rendered federal and state prisoners ineligible for Pell Grants, a form of federal financial aid for college.

Since then, the educational opportunities for state inmates have varied dramatically from state to state. According to the study, 13 states have made it a priority: Washington, Idaho, California, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina and New York.

"Keeping someone in prison costs about the same per year as sending them to Harvard," said Max Kenner, founder of the Bard Prison Initiative, a privately funded nonprofit that brings Bard College classes to prisoners in five facilities in New York. Published research shows that prisoners who obtain post-secondary degrees are much less likely than others to return to crime upon release, Mr. Kenner said.

A policy statement from the American Correctional Association, a trade group for correctional professionals, says that "public and private agencies should develop, expand, adequately fund and improve delivery systems for academic, occupational and other educational programs for charged and adjudicated juvenile and adult offenders."

Though Texas is cited as one of 13 states providing prisoners access to post-secondary education, that funding has been slated for the chopping block in proposed budgets. Most "college" courses for Texas inmates are vocational ed classes provided by community colleges.

Programming cuts v. prison closures: The inevitable tradeoff

Prison closures were abated and some of the probation and treatment funds scheduled for cuts were restored in the state budget on the Senate side yesterday, as well as shifting money from road funds to the Texas Department of Public Safety, while the House and the Governor continue to back deeper cuts. According to a release on the Senate website:

A Senate subcommittee charged with evaluating funds dealing with prisons and the Department of Public Safety recommended increasing appropriations by almost $300 million Monday. These recommendations would restore allocations to current budget levels for many programs. Current funding in the Senate's version of the budget for public safety agencies is about $9 billion, which is more than a billion dollars less than the last budget.

The subcommittee recommendations would put more money into probation and drug treatment programs and would move $100 million from the state's transportation fund, called Fund Six, to Department of Public Safety. Fund Six diversions have been controversial in the past, as critics say that reducing money marked for highway construction and maintenance leaves the state relying on private entities to build toll roads. Subcommittee Chair Senator John Whitmire said using Fund Six money for highway enforcement is within the constitutional intent of the fund. "I'm very committed to the needs of DPS," he said. "We ask them to do more and more along the border, in particular, and along our highways. Fund Six does allow you to spend highway funds if the security and enforcement is related to our safe highways, so we went with the agency and identified easily a hundred million of their request which could be directly related to safe highways."

The subcommittee will present its recommendations to the full Finance Committee later this week.

Mike Ward at the Austin Statesman summed up the Senate changes thusly:

Back in: $273 million for the state corrections system, including funding for rehabilitation, treatment and parole programs, plus $31 million to keep the Central Unit in Sugar Land open; and $32.7 million for DPS to hire 646 additional troopers, $22.8 million for new vehicles and unspecified funding to restore the uniform-cleaning allowance for state troopers.

Out: $10.2 million for operation of a drug treatment lockup in Burnet; $23 million from the Texas Youth Commission's budget, in expectation that the agency will be merged with the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission; and a directive that controversial raises the Youth Commission awarded to eight executives last year be rescinded.

Still on the table: $111.4 million in additional funding for expanded border security.

This is the same subcommittee that just slashed vocational ed classes in prisons by roughly the same amount as it cost to keep the Central Unit open for the next two years, a decision that IMO should be flip-flopped. Texas already releases 72,000 people per year, so most folks in TDCJ are going to get out. From the standpoint of crime reduction, since they're getting out anyway, I'd much rather the agency close a prison and educate more of the prisoners who remain, which in turn dramatically boosts their chances of being employed one year after incarceration. I wish I knew what secret forces were pushing to keep the Central Unit in Sugar Land open. I've long thought that if there was a chance they'd close any prisons at all in the current budget crunch, it'd be the first one to go; locals have lots of good reasons to want it shut down. But especially if the direct tradeoff, as in this subcommittee's recommendations, is cutting programs that reduce recidivism and long-term incarceration costs.

As far as DPS' budget is concerned, IMO the border security money distributed so far has mostly been misspent on activities that either fundamentally misunderstand the real crime problems on the border or seek to exploit them for political gain at the expense of maximizing public safety per dollar spent. If that's ever gonna change, this is the budget cycle when you'd expect it might. Texas already pays for too much of our transportation budget on credit, and DPS may need more troopers but not more missions. Each new one comes at the expense of the agency's core, historic functions.

This hesitance to act in many ways reflects the public mood. According to polling, the public is living in a fantasyland where they believe the state can continue to fund all government services, not raise taxes, and for many (most importantly the Governor), not raid the Rainy Day Fund. That's not true, and eventually the math will force some behind-the-scenes realism, but likely not until May, or maybe even over the summer.

I'm certainly glad the subcommittee restored most probation and diversion funding, but unless I'm misreading my tea leaves, which is certainly possible, the choice to tradeoff vocational ed in prisons and the treatment facility in Burnet with keeping open the Central Unit may bode ill. It'd be one thing if they cut vocational ed and counted the expense as savings, but just spending money cut from an anti-recidivism program to keep one more prison open shows there are unseen forces pressing the Lege to avoid closing even a single unit. In practice, money to keep open old, outdated prisons like the Central Unit (built in 1909 to provide labor for a now-long gone sugar plantation) come at the expense of programs that reduce future crime and long-term incarceration spending.

These changes do indicate to me that senators expect extra revenue, either from the Rainy Day Fund, new taxes (or fees, etc.), or both. We'll probably know more in the next week or two about how the politics of the Rainy Day Fund will play out in the House. And of course, the real budget doesn't get written until the conference committee at the end. These subcommittee recommendations are but yet another step on a long road to a final budget in the most trying fiscal year for the state in living memory. Still, the tradeoff decisions made early on in these venues risk being cemented among those who've made them and repeated over and over like a fractal - cut programming, don't close prisons. Those are the agency's priorities, but in a leadership vacuum where nobody (with power) but TDCJ is suggesting serious cuts (all to probation, treatment and programming), their recommendations and priorities will inevitably be the ones adopted.

MORE: A few tidbits from watching a bit of the hearing:

The committee invited DPS to come back and present to the subcommittee how much could be raised by jacking up a "large number of fees" the agency charges to drivers and others ... ugh! A tax by another name. This is how we got into the Driver Responsibility surcharge mess.

The subcommittee recommended restoring $40 million to juvenile probation and cut $23 million from youth prisons, including 26 cuts at the TYC Central Office.

LBB made a "technical adjustment" to reduce its estimate of how many employees TDCJ could afford to keep by 723 based on the funding levels in SB 1, potentially presaging more layoffs. OTOH, the subcommittee recommended reinstating the pay 7% pay raise given COs last session which the filed version of SB 1 would have eliminated.

Whitmire said he and Ogden were looking at reductions in the number of private prison beds including Mineral Wells instead of closing the Central Unit, and it "probably" would be closed eventually, but he wanted to keep it on the table heading into the conference committee. Whitmire called keeping the Central Unit open "a concession from me to Ogden."

Part of the reason for suggesting closing the Burnet treatment unit is as a bargaining chip to convince the county to lower its rate.  (Sen. Kel Seliger was a great spokesman for treatment and diversion programs.)

The subcommittee recommended restoring General Revenue funding for inspections of county jails by the Commission on Jail Standards, reacting to pushback by the counties over a plan to charge them fees for state inspections. (One suggestion was to let agencies use commissary profits to pay TCJS fees.) If the agency does not get enough GR funding they'll need new statutory authority to charge additional fees to fund their core operations.

Rebutting the Austin Statesman on cutting vocational ed for prisoners

The Austin Statesman today editorialized against providing post-secondary vocational courses to Texas prison inmates, and made this flawed argument (rebutted over the last few days in the comments to this Grits post):

So far, the state has spent $26.9 million on the program, which is based on the proven notion that recidivism rates can be lowered if inmates leave prison with more education than they had when they arrived.

The cost of the program was to have been borne by the inmates in it. After being released from prison, they are supposed to repay the state for the college-level and vocational courses they took while incarcerated.

Predictably, the repayment rate has been less than adequate. The American-Statesman's Mike Ward reported this week that only 6,630 of the 22,000 former convicts who took the courses have made full repayment. Overall, the state has received only $4.7 million in reimbursements.

And that means criminals are getting a taxpayer-funded higher education deal unavailable to folks who aren't criminals.

A case to shut this program down could be made even if we were not in a budget crunch of epic proportions. We're with House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, R-Richardson, who noted, "We don't provide free college tuition for anyone else like this, so with the budget crisis we're facing, why should we for convicted felons?"

Several things are wrong with this pronouncement. For starters, comparing post-secondary vocational classes available to prisoners to "higher education" of the type received at colleges is disingenuous. There aren't any prisoners taking English lit, philosophy, sociology, women's studies, etc.. The cuts under discussion are to vocational programs which, though recidivism studies have never been done, have proven successful at boosting employment rates after release for those who participate in them.

The Statesman editorial overlooks incarceration cost while drawing these false parallels between in-prison vocational training and traditional higher ed, ignoring the long-term costs of recidivism. Texas releases some 72,000+ convicted felons per year from prison, so the cost to taxpayers is much greater if, when they leave, they're unprepared, fail, and end up back in lockup instead of successfully reentering society. Prisoners receiving post-secondary vocational training are 1.6 times more likely to be employed one year after leaving prison than those who receive none. Given that unemployment is a pivotal predictor of recidivism, future incarceration for these offenders (in the near term, within three years of release) would cost substantially more than fronting costs for vocational programs today. If legislators cut vocational ed, drug treatment and other prison programming, taxpayers pay more overall because of higher recidivism. That's not speculation, it's exactly what happened last time vocational programs at Windham were slashed.

Even more flawed is the economic analysis presented by the newspaper about inmate repayment rates. According to the Mike Ward's reporting, the program is only ten years old and inmates can't participate until they have 7 years or less to go. That means many participants are still incarcerated and have had no chance yet to pay. So for 30% to have paid in full is really quite extraordinary. And presumably others have paid some but just not yet "in full," just like many people have outstanding student loans.

So in context, that's a relatively high rate. And of course since repayment happens through parole fees, there's arguably a stronger mechanism for securing repayment than there is for student loans. How many people have paid off their student loans in full two or three years after leaving school? If students in or out of prison could afford to pay up front, they wouldn't need to borrow or in inmates' case pay in installments after the fact.

Finally, and this is really my biggest complaint about the whole debate, legislative leaders are still talking about teeny-tiny numbers compared to the hundreds of millions in cuts needed at TDCJ, another instance of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Cutting programming that costs $4.4 million per biennium but that increases post-release employment rates and reduces recidivism is a meaningless, even counterproductive gesture when the Governor and budgetmakers in the House have demanded $786 million in cuts from TDCJ in the next biennium. To get there, they must reduce the number of inmates and expand community supervision programs, or else risk having to lease private beds for up to 12,857 extra inmates by 2013, which would cost an additional $200 million per year, give or take. So making a big deal out of a $2.2 million cut is really just a distraction. Nobody at the Legislature is talking yet publicly about real budget solutions, in corrections or for the most part anywhere else, and it's getting pretty late in the game.

See related Grits posts:

• Vocational ed boosts ex-offender employment: The counterargument to cuts at Windham School District   
• Cuts to vocational ed for prisoners will increase recidivism, near-term incarceration costs
• Waste alleged, budget cuts sought at TDCJ's Windham School District

Cuts to vocational ed for prisoners will increase recidivism, near-term incarceration costs

I can't tell if it's part of the $34 million already slated to be cut from the Windham School District, but Mike Ward at the Austin Statesman reports that key legislative leaders (Shapiro, Whitmire and Madden) want to eliminate funding for post-secondary education of inmates. Ward's story opens:

For the past decade, Texas' imprisoned criminals have been allowed to work on college degrees and take vocational courses while behind bars.

They're supposed to repay taxpayers once they get out. But of the more than 22,000 felon-students who are out of prison, only 6,630 have repaid the state in full, to the tune of $4.2 million, according to state records.

The remaining 16,088 ex-convicts owe the state $9.5 million, the records show.

Over the 10 years the program has been in effect, the state has spent $26.9 million on higher education for inmates, while getting reimbursed only $4.7 million.

$22 million (net) over ten years isn't much given the scope of the state budget, and the repayment completion rate (33%) is actually higher than I would expect. I wonder how many people attending college in the free world over the last ten years have fully paid off all their student loans?

This is a penny wise pound foolish cut. According to a recent report (pdf) on the Windham School District from the LBB, prisoners who receive college-level vocational training are much more likely to be employed upon release than their peers: "In the College Credit Vocational Program study group (including both the Prison & State Jail Group and the Intensive Treatment Programs Group), the vocational completers were 1.6 times more likely to be employed within one year of release (55.7 percent) than the vocational noncompleters (34.1 percent), and they were 1.4 times more likely to be employed within one year than the non-vocational offenders (39.8 percent)." TDCJ doesn't yet track recidivism data for Windham students, but the employment gains described for those attending college-level vocational classes are impressive. They also receive higher wages after they're out than other inmates and have better employment retention rates.

Those who completed college vocational programs (83-85% of those who enroll) have, by far, the highest employment rates among ex-inmates one year out. If cuts to vocational programming in prison reduces employment rates and increases recidivism, even by a few points, the amount spent on these programs will look like a pittance compared to increased incarceration costs. Already, the state faces a 10-12,000 bed shortfall by 2013 if suggested budget cuts are enacted, and any increased recidivism would boost those numbers even higher.

Consider: In 2011, according to LBB, there are 2,418 offenders enrolled in college vocational classes at a cost of about $2.2 million per year. Those offenders are 40%  more likely to be employed a year after incarceration than those who received no vocational training; 55.7% of them will be employed one year out compared to 39.8% for those without vocational training. Since unemployment is a major risk factor for reoffending, it stands to reason that reductions in programming that contributes to ex-inmate employment gains will increase incarceration costs down the line.

Meanwhile, $2.2 million per year is hardly a drop in the budget bucket when you consider Governor Perry has demanded TDCJ cut $786 million from its biennial budget. These type of nickel and dime proposals not only don't get close to the level of cuts needed, they set the agency up to fail in the long run by increasing recidivism and future incarceration costs.

This is happening because legislators so far can't seem to muster the political courage to take the obvious, big steps needed to reduce overall spending at TDCJ: Closing prisons, staff reductions, reducing the number of people we incarcerate, and ramping up much-less expensive community supervision, treatment and diversion programs. Instead, public debates have focused, for the most part, on suggested cuts that are trivial, harmful, or both. We're getting pretty deep into session for nobody to be talking about the big stuff yet.

RELATED: Vocational ed boosts ex-offender employment: The counterargument to cuts at Windham School District

Vocational ed boosts ex-offender employment: The counterargument to cuts at Windham School District

At the Fort Worth Strartlegram, Jill "J.R." Labbe takes aim at the Senate Finance Committee's call for cutting prison education programs at the Windham School District. Her column closes with a response to Sen. Florence Shapiro's challenge to justify spending on prisoners' education when schools are closing and teachers losing their jobs because of free-world budget cuts:

"When we're cutting funding for public schools and furloughing thousands of school employees, they're going to have to convince us why they should receive any continued funding," Shapiro was quoted in the Austin American-Statesman.

Let the convincing commence.

On a pure dollars-and-sense level, the state loses money. Lester Meriwether, who serves on the Governor's Interagency Literacy Council and is past president of Literacy Texas, said a portion of the allocation to the Windham school district counts as part of the state match for federal dollars to the overall adult education program.

Not enough? How about the Justice Department report that says the link between academic failure and delinquency, violence and crime is welded to reading failure. More than 70 percent of the inmates in America's prisons cannot read above a fourth-grade level. Trust me when I say Texas is no exception to that statistic.

Penal institution records show that recidivism rates for those who receive no education while incarcerated are almost 75 percent. Compare that to the 16 to 25 percent rate for offenders who receive literacy and vocational assistance.

The inmates who today are choosing to take classes can learn skills that put them on a road to productivity when they are released, or they can learn from their fellow cons how not to get caught the next time they burglarize your house or steal your car. Which will it be, Texas?

The point about federal matching funds is a excellent one that didn't come up in press accounts of discussions in the Senate Finance Committee on the topic. Indeed, as I understand it, accessing such funds is the reason Windham is organized as its own separate school district in the first place.

To be fair to would-be budget cutters, some of Labbe's arguments don't hold water: If recidivism rates for Windham School District participants were as greatly reduced as the (source-free, non-Texas specific) statistics she cited, there'd be little problem justifying the expense. However, according to the Austin Statesman, citing Sen. Shapiro, "The recidivism rates for graduates of some Windham programs were not much better than for other convicts."

That said, despite Sen. Shapiro's comments, to my knowledge, TDCJ can't actually provide recidivism rates for participants in Windham programs. A January 2011 report (large pdf, p. 15) on Windham from the Legislative Budget Board stated that the agency is currently "developing a plan to compute recidivism rates of participants in and graduates of the agency’s programs, as well as exploring strategies to compare these recidivism rates with those of the general TDCJ population and to assess the savings produced by any reduction in the recidivism rates related to these programs." So if they're "developing a plan to compute" those rates, that tells me recidivism rates are not being computed right now.

Also, recidivism rates in Texas are already far lower than in other states because we tend to incarcerate more low-risk offenders who were unlikely to commit more serious crimes in the first place. So recidivism reduction could never be as dramatic as what Labbe cites because Texas' overall three-year recidivism rate hovers at about 28%, roughly half the national average. (See this LBB report - large pdf.) When recidivism rates start out so much lower, any reduction will be less significant, by definition.

Though we can't speak with certainty about recidivism, something TDCJ has tracked systematically are employment outcomes for Windham graduates, and there the program can point to legitimately positive results. From the LBB report (p. 22)

• In the Prison and State Jail Group, 49% of the Windham vocational completers and 52.3% of the college vocational completers were employed within one year of release compared to 36.7% of the offenders who did not receive vocational training.
• In comparison to the 2009 study, some slippage is indicated with respect to the percentage employed. For example, for the Prison and State Jail Group, the percentage of employed offenders in the Windham vocational completion group decreased from 59% in 2009 to 49% in 2010. The percentage of employed offenders in the College vocational completion group decreased from 67.8% in 2009 to 52.3% in 2010. However, since the percentage of employed offenders in the non-vocational group also decreased (from 46.8% to 36.7%), it is believed that the slippage may be a reflection of the current economic conditions and record high unemployment rates throughout the country. 
• In the Prison and State Jail Group, 76.6% of the Windham vocational completers and 75.5% of the college vocational completers who were employed earned income working in an occupation related to their vocational training.

Grits would not attribute recent drops in employment success to failures in the programming, necessarily, because the time period where decreases occurred coincided with the onset of the current recession, when everyone (your correspondent included) had more trouble finding jobs. The percentage of employed ex-offenders among Windham participants was still more than 13 points higher than those who received no vocational training. That strikes me as a significant difference.

Further, those who complete vocational training in prison, LBB found, tend to have higher salaries upon release, according to a study of prisoners who exited state custody in 2008. Those who completed Windham programs averaged $9,384 per year in wages compared to $8,128 for those who did not participate. Another notable finding: Most offenders who enter vocational programming complete it, but those who drop out while in prison are at especially high risk of failing to find a job when they get out. Prisoners who enter vocational ed but fail to complete it have lower employment rates, even, than those who never participated in any programming at all. And they make less money: On average, just $7,698 per year. (Think about how difficult it would be to live on even the higher of those amounts, btw.)

If and when recidivism studies are conducted, to the extent unemployment is a major risk factor for recidivism, it's possible vocational programming may be as or more effective than drug treatment at reducing future crime: Right now we just don't have the data to tell. But since the two most important risk factors preventing reentry success are difficulty finding employment and drug use, to the extent vocational ed helps overcome the first of those barriers, it's likely reducing recidivism even if the studies haven't been done yet to calculate how much.

Bottom line: It might be possible with more information to make strategic cuts at Windham, but the lack of program-specific recidivism data prevents using a scalpel to carve out less successful programs while protecting the ones that work. If the Lege wants to slash Windham's budget without that data, their only option is to hack away at the topline number, inevitably harming programs that reduce crime in addition to those that aren't working well. As Grits opined when cuts at Windham were first proposed, "The prison system needs anti-recidivism programming and it also needs resources for evaluating how well it works so it can be adjusted and improved over time. I'm all for targeting ineffective programs for cuts and shifting resources to programming that empirically works." For now, though, Texas hasn't sufficiently invested in evaluating Windham programming (or new treatment and diversion programming, for that matter), so inevitably cuts will be made with all the subtlety of a blind man swinging a machete - there's just not enough information for them to reliably do otherwise.

UPDATE: from the Austin Statesman, "Senate cuts $34 million from prison schools."

Waste alleged, budget cuts sought at TDCJ's Windham School District

Senate Education Committee Chair Florence Shapiro called the budget of the Windham School District, which educates Texas prisoners at 112 prison units across the state, "the biggest waste of money I think I've seen," according to reports from the Austin Statesman and the Houston Chronicle. "With the state facing a massive shortfall, members of a Senate Finance subcommittee said they can no longer justify the $65 million a year in state revenue used by the Windham School District to provide approximately 5,200 high school equivalency certificates and other vocational training programs."

Writes Patricia Kilday Hart, Shapiro "zeroed in an a study by the Legislative Budget Board earlier this year examining the employment status of paroled inmates who had received vocational training. Lawmakers wondered why inmates who received the training did not seem to have much better luck finding jobs than those who did not."

The sources of savings suggested: Outsourcing to community colleges and other regional education programs and shifting to online education, which raises numerous logistical, infrastructure, and security concerns since inmates don't (legally) have internet access. That would probably require an IT investment at prisons the state isn't prepared to make.

It doesn't sound like they're talking about zeroing out Windham or eliminating the services, but scaling it back and looking for alternative means to educate inmates, which may or may not turn out to be any cheaper. Cutting education and  treatment programming is the wrong approach to cutting prison expenditures: If recidivism increases even a percentage point or two, a prison system already projected to be 10-12,000 beds short by 2013 will even further feel the strain.

Now, if the programming doesn't work as well as it should, that's a different matter. The prison system needs anti-recidivism programming and it also needs resources for evaluating how well it works so it can be adjusted and improved over time. I'm all for targeting ineffective programs for cuts and shifting resources to programming that empirically works.

I don't doubt there's waste at Windham, but I can also see why running a statewide school district made up entirely of prisoners would present unique administration challenges. Still, with regular school districts taking a major haircut and TDCJ needing nearly $400 million in annual cuts to meet the Governor's targets, Windham's $65 million per year looks like a juicy, almost irresistible target for budget cutters.

Haggerty: "We should be in prison for what we did in '03"

In response to HB 409 by Eissler proposing to require parolees to achieve a G.E.D to complete supervision, former Corrections Committee Chairman Pat Haggerty (R-El Paso) replied that the funding wasn't there to support it, and the failure of the Texas Legislature to provide that funding was "criminal."

The number of inmates served by the Windham School District, Haggerty told the Corrections Committee this morning, hadn't significantly increased since there were 38,000 inmates in Texas before 1993. Now we have more than 155,000 inmates, said Haggerty, and Windham School District is "probably about the same size" as in 1993. Worse, he said, Windham's budget was mercilessly slashed four years ago and never restored.

"The cuts we made in '03 ... were criminal," said Haggerty. "We should be in prison for what we did in '03."