Ridding South Texas of DPS part of forgotten populist agenda for the region

Many Democrats were surprised in November when their candidates lost ground in Texas border regions, but Grits was not: The party has no substantive agenda either to entice voters in rural areas or to address the unique challenges facing the sprawling mass of increasingly urban voters in the Rio Grande Valley.

Here's a topic state candidates could run on: From the Rio Grande Guardian, "Heavy DPS Presence in Starr County is Unnecessary." Starr County Judge Eloy Vera articulated populist criticisms of DPS' presence that would no doubt resonate with most border residents who don't profit from it:

Drive along U.S. 83 and they are parked every 100 or 200 feet, he said. Unless there is a speed chase they have nothing to do but write tickets for motorists with tail lights not working, the judge said.

“Our people are complaining that they are getting stopped and getting cited. So, even though that was not the purpose of DPS being down here, and I was assured that they were not going to be stopping people and giving a lot of warnings, that is what is happening,” said Vera, pictured above. “I think a lot of our people are being cited.”

Debtors-prison practices, including the state's Omnibase program which uses arrest warrants to collect debt, turn this over-policing into a de facto, year-round warrant roundup:

“The other problem this causes is on the warrant side. If someone has a warrant, and this is by statute, they (DPS) pick them up and they take them to the jail and that is putting a burden on our jail. Now, we don’t have beds for paying inmates because we have a bunch of ours.”

Vera said he wanted to reiterate that he is pro-law enforcement.

“I guess in a nutshell we certainly appreciate the law enforcement help that we are getting but again they must stick to what their mission is and that is to curtail drug and human trafficking. If someone has a lightbulb that is not working, there is not need to cite them or anyone else, in my opinion.”

For those who don't live in the region, these criticisms fly in the face of glowing praise from politicians for DPS' presence we routinely see in the press. DPS and the Governor will always be able to find locals to sing their praises because a small minority of people profit from their presence. But for average folks, it creates more problems, reported the Guardan.

The one good thing about having so many state troopers in Starr County, Vera said, is that they fill up the local restaurants and hotels.

“Our restaurants and hotels and those people, they love it because it is more business for us. But the average citizen that is barely making it, it is a big burden for them.”

These are not isolated sentiments:

McAllen Mayor Dim Darling has also spoken about the recent influx of DPS troopers to the Rio Grande Valley. Appearing on a Zoom conversation with U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar that was hosted by the Texas Tribune, Darling shook his head and rolled his eyes when asked a question about DPS.

“I’ve always said they need social workers not DPS. And we have a lot of DPS officers. If you ride around near Chimney Park and all that, I feel sorry for them. Sitting out there and there really is not much for them to do from the standpoint they do not have jurisdiction,” Darling said.

Chimney Park in Mission is on the banks of the Rio Grande.

“If you really want to do it, at least maybe split it half DPS and half social workers. The social work could get done by the people that know how to do it and send the Border Patrol back out to protect the border like they want to do and they are paid and trained to do,” Darling said.

“It is just ridiculous. If you talk to the average Border Patrol person, they are miserable, they are not doing what they are supposed to do. They are not trained to take care of kids. They are not social workers.”

It's been long acknowledged DPS border deployments have had little impact on drug trafficking. Meanwhile, DPS has pulled all these troopers from the rest of the state, contributing to DWI enforcement statewide declining despite large population increases during this period, after their border deployment began. Here's a graphic from the 2020 Office of Court Administration Annual Statistical Report depicting the decline:

So there's your political messaging: DPS over-polices border communities, resulting in ratcheting up debtor's prison practices along the border, while reducing DWI enforcement elsewhere and making all Texans less safe. Hell, I've even got theme music for the debtor's prison angle:

It's been years - maybe since Carlos Truan, God rest his soul, was state senator from the Valley - since I've heard politicians talking about a populist agenda to benefit South Texas. In recent years, the debate's all been about preventing imaginary terrorists from sneaking across the border. But for a Democratic statewide candidate, it wouldn't be hard to find a justice-reform-and-infrastructure agenda that would excite South Texans: Scale back DPS' presence; build a new, job-creating South Texas port and another international bridge to take traffic pressure off the Houston port and I-35. Tack on Medicaid expansion, and bada bing, bada boom, there's an agenda that would speak to South Texas voters.

You're welcome, Gov. McConaughey.

Texas prison gangs (still) responsible for much Juarez violence

Grits hasn't had the bandwidth to focus on border security topics for quite a few years, but I noticed a story from the El Paso Times which reminded me of themes this blog harped on back when it paid more attention to those subjects. A hit man from a Texas prison gang, Barrio Azteca, has been accused of at least 30 murders committed in Juarez, El Paso's sister city across the Rio Grande, which has witnessed more than 500 homicides this year, including the deaths of two police officers.

This brings up an issue related to the US-Mexico border which is almost never discussed, and which, in this era of fact-free partisan sniping over immigration, reflects a reality that the American political dialogue seemingly cannot wrap its head around: The real "spillover violence"  along the border results not from Mexican violence seeping northward, but from American criminals heading south to commit a large proportion of the murders we hear about on the other side of the river. And it's been that way for years.

Barrio Azteca has long hired out its services as contract killers in Juarez, sending gang members south to kill rivals then retreating back across the Rio Grande to safety. At one point, Mexican authorities estimated the Texas-based gang accounted for half of all homicides in Juarez. They have also for years operated massive trafficking operations on the US side.

I'm well past believing chauvinist American law enforcement cares about stopping this. As long as the violence stays on the other side of the border, they seem happy. It's one of the reasons Grits has always had trouble taking the most strident Drug Warrior rhetoric seriously. If you closely study cartel trafficking patterns and their seats of power (Texas law enforcement believes most cartels' "command and control" operations are on the US-side, primarily around Houston), and if you really wanted to disrupt the criminal gangs funneling drugs into the United States, the focus would be on these sorts of US-side activities, not "securing the border" with walls or other faddish solutions which seem to ignore the actual problems.

DPS surge resulted in harassment of border-area drivers

Grits isn't sure at this point why journalists bother examining performance outcomes or cost-benefit analyses when it comes to immigration or border security. Somewhere during the 2016 presidential campaign cycle, debates on these subjects passed wholly through the looking glass and pols now feel free to just say stuff without any reference to facts or reality.

Regardless, the Dallas News gamely demonstrated yet again, if further evidence were really necessary, that Texas' much-ballyhooed border security buildup has been a public safety bust. During the period after the DPS surge began, traffic tickets in areas with expanded patrols increased slightly. But the big change came in traffic stops resulting in warnings, which skyrocketed more than five-fold almost immediately.

That means DPS is stopping a lot more people but in most cases there isn't enough criminality present even to justify giving them a ticket. So tens of thousands of South Texans were being subjected to unjustified pretext stops which are basically fishing expeditions, not detentions based on legitimate public safety needs. Justifiably, reported the Morning News:

some critics continue to charge that DPS remains unable to prove real success at the border beyond boosting traffic enforcement. 

“For that level of scrutiny on your driving habits, what are we getting?” said Rep. Poncho Nevarez, an Eagle Pass Democrat who serves as vice chairman of the House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee.

Moreover, both citations and warnings dropped steeply across the rest of the state as DPS diverted resources to staff up the border surge, found the paper's analysis. "Comparing the two years after the surge against the two years before, citations spiked 30 percent and warnings rose 160 percent in Starr and Hidalgo counties. In nonborder counties, meanwhile, citations dropped 21 percent and warnings fell 25 percent."

Some individuals were subjected to a level of intervention which can only be described as harassment. Almost unbelievably, "Looking at the 22 months after the surge began, The News found more than 600 people in Starr and Hidalgo counties who were stopped at least 10 times. More than 300 were stopped at least 20 times. One person was pulled over 52 times in that time period."

With the new president pledging to begin construction of his "beautiful" new wall on "day one," we're already hearing open discussion among Texas Republicans of ending DPS' border deployment and letting the feds handle the job. Even though that's clearly a self-justifying fig leaf, IMO legislative critics should let them have this one, take "yes" for an answer, and seek to end the $800-million-per-biennium pork package, freeing up the money to use for other priorities.

State leadership isn't going to end this wasteful boondoggle because it's failing to achieve good outcomes or doesn't make cost-benefit sense. That ship long ago sailed. We must recognize that this budget item originated as a partisan slap at the Obama Administration, not in response to real-world public-safety threats. So, having been spawned of overt partisanship, that's probably the only basis on which the DPS surge can realistically be rolled back while giving state leadership sufficient political cover. I'd be fine with that.

Overhyped DPS border stats debunked, again, surprising no one who's paid attention

No one should be surprised that the Department of Public Safety overstated the number of "high risk" arrests they made as part of the border surge, as AP's Paul Weber ably reported last week. "Among the 'high-threat' incidents was a trailer that unlatched from an RV and rolled into oncoming traffic, killing another driver in a town more than 150 miles from the border. Other crimes lumped in with suspected killers and human traffickers were speeding teenagers and hit-and-runs that caused no serious injuries."

A scornful Caller Times editorial noted that, "many of these arrests turned out to be for drunken driving, failure to pay child support and minor drug possession. The DPS didn't bother to differentiate user amounts from smuggler amounts in its statistics. It also considered 60 counties to be border-region, which undoubtedly would tax the imaginations of even our best and brightest middle school geography teachers." Nearly half of the "high risk"  incidents were drug possession arrests, but mostly user level amounts, not big-time traffickers. State Rep. Terry Canales rightly chided the agency's hubris, "I would say it's shocking that a person arrested with a small amount of cocaine in Odessa is used to show supposedly high-threat criminal arrests on the Texas-Mexico border."

Grits readers may recall that this isn't the first time deceptive statistics have been used to justify Texas' dubious border security spending.

From the start, DPS has used loaded, overhyped language to justify a wasteful and unnecessary $800 million per biennium border "surge." The level of criminality Col. Steve McCraw near constantly attributes to the Texas border is simply false and always has been, a politicized misrepresentation held over from the days when his former boss and patron, then-Gov. Rick Perry, hoped the Texas border buildup would elevate him to the American presidency. From about 2006 on, Perry clearly understood the rising white voter animosity against Spanish speaking immigrants that Donald Trump has lately tapped into, conflating illegal immigration with drug smuggling and Islamic terrorism in ways that this blog called out as demagoguery. But to borrow and reverse a framing from Michelle Obama, when Perry went low, Trump went lower, calling Mexicans rapists and criminals in sweeping terms that the governor's sense of decency wouldn't allow him to match. The lesson: Among that pocket of voters, the "toughest," angriest message sells the best. Truth, until now, has been a mostly optional component of so-called "border security" debates.

With an oil-price-generated budget crunch upon us, there's no cost-benefit analysis which justifies Texas spending another $800 million on this boondoggle next session. If the Lege continues the effort, it will be to pander to Trumpian fears among white voters of some phony, imminent, brown-skinned takeover. The actual crime threat in border communities, which include some of the safest cities in the state, never justified what Texas has done in the name of homeland security.

Are Texas Rangers incompetent to confront corruption, or just disincentivized?

Does corruption flourish in Texas because of incompetent state-level law enforcement? A San Antonio Express News story documenting South Texas corruption (March 12) opened thusly:

After he lost his City Council seat four years ago, Richard Diaz outlined his concerns about local corruption in a detailed three-page complaint to the Zavala County district attorney.

“It was about the misuse of public property, and then, of course, they were (gassing) up their private vehicles from the city yard, and there were other violations of the charter,” Diaz said, referring to city officials.

“They talked to a lot of people who knew about this, and verified what I was saying, but for some reason they just dropped the investigation. They never told me anything,” he recalled.

District Attorney Roberto Serna, a Crystal City native, said he asked the Texas Rangers to investigate. In the end, however, after “a very diligent investigation, no prosecutable cases resulted,” he said.

The FBI, which later got the complaint, dug deeper and eventually hit pay dirt.

The DA said the Texas Rangers' investigation was "diligent," but it wasn't diligent enough to uncover wrongdoing. So how is it that the feds could get the job done? They found a "truckload of documents" they considered incriminating enough to seize as evidence and made numerous arrests.

Observing the slew of corruption cases in Texas, Grits has been struck by the fact that they typically are only ever prosecuted when the federal government steps in. Is this because the Texas Rangers are incompetent to the task? Clearly they blew it in Crystal City.

Reported the Express-News, "The FBI in San Antonio also has seen a sharp increase in corruption cases, rising threefold to 64 open cases, between 2012 and 2014." But corruption is illegal under state law, too, and these are local officials, for the most part, catching these cases.

Why isn't Texas law enforcement able to identify and prosecute corruption? Is it because Texas DPS's enforcement and spending priorities are focused on patrolling the border region, which ironically is the safest area in the state, instead of on officials who violate the public trust? Or might Texas fail to confront corruption even without competing priorities, simply leaving the task to the feds because it's easier, and you get to blame Obama if things go bad? It's not like state and local law enforcement were pursuing these cases before the border buildup.

It's embarrassing that the feds keep finding and prosecuting serious corruption, especially in South Texas but also elsewhere, while state and local law enforcement can't or won't get the job done. Too bad some of that misspent border security money allocated by the Lege last session wasn't designated for this purpose. Corruption is a greater threat to security than the next landscape worker or nanny who may cross the border illegally.

Robot parole boards, an All-American scofflaw, and other stories

Here are few items which haven't made it into individual posts but which merit Grits readers' attention:

• How overcharging and pretrial detention coerce plea deals: In Waco, a man spent 704 days in the county jail before pleading to a one-year misdemeanor sentence. Recently the Wall Street Journal published a column on "The Injustice of the Plea Bargain System," which Doug Berman excerpted here for non-subscribers. (See related Grits coverage.)
• The Houston Chronicle examined records surrounding suicides at the Harris County Jail: "In thousands of pages of autopsy reports and internal disciplinary reports, the Chronicle found 35 instances in which jailers skipped required cell checks or faked records to hide skipping them, a pattern that experts called a serious problem at county jails statewide." Further, "Screening and observation failures played a role in nine of the 28 jail suicides that occurred in the eight-county Houston metro area since the Texas Commission on Jail Standards began tracking those deaths in 2009."
• Not sure how I missed this, but a Houston PD officer was fired in October for pacing motorists' vehicles in his personal car and sending them tickets in the mail.
• A former Baylor football All-American and Dallas Cowboys draft pick was arrested in Waco with 22 active license suspensions: This is almost certainly a function of the Driver Responsibility surcharge. 
• Grits is unsure mentoring can solve indigent defense problems created by economics and the self-interest of institutional players. There's a robust mentoring program in Houston but Harris County courts are still essentially plea mills. Regardless, here's a new document from the Task Force on Indigent Defense touting mentoring programs for criminal defense lawyers who take appointed cases. I suppose it can't hurt.
• An SA Express-News story touts a new book, "Stolen Years: Stories of the Wrongfully Imprisoned."
• The Texas Observer on Border Patrol corruption: Who could have predicted that?
• Read a brief history of secret American prisons.
• Check out 60 Minutes coverage from Sunday on confidential informants and the drug war.
• Here's an important, seldom-asked question: Why punish drug users at all?
• While historically fears of robots taking people's jobs centered among the working class, lately automation has also begun to take over higher-skilled intellectual work that's repetitive and routine oriented. Which brings us to the question: Could robots replace judges or parole boards? This article ventures tentatively down the path of considering what that might look like, comparing decisions by the California parole board to outcomes from statistical models.

DPS border surge made rest of state measurably less safe

When the Department of Public Safety shifted its deployments to the border as part of "Operation Strong Safety," it measurably reduced DPS enforcement in the rest of the state, resulting in fewer citations and warnings issued statewide and corresponded to a period when traffic accidents increased. Further, arrests by DPS and especially the Texas Rangers plummeted in counties outside the border region. Check out discussions of the various data from three MSM outlets:

• Dallas News
• El Paso Times
• El Paso Times (editorial)
• Texas Monthly

This was always, obviously true - troopers displaced from their home beats to the border aren't policing the state's interior, where most of the traffic and crime is. But it's good to see it documented with numbers, even if pols quoted in the stories - particularly in the Times - seemed to be in flat-out denial.

The Times editorial and the TM piece by R.G. Ratcliffe ably parse the meaning underlying the new data so I won't replicate their work: Check out the above links for more detail.

MORE: From the Texas Tribune, "Lawmaker questions what DPS is achieving on the border."

Paper: DPS border deployment a 'political stunt'

The Beaumont Enterprise published a staff editorial yesterday which sums up my own views about the suggestion to hire 500 additional state troopers to guard the border:

If the Legislature wants to add 250 troopers to the Department of Public Safety at a cost of nearly $100 million over the next two years, that's fine. Texas is generally a safe state, but it's a big one too. There are plenty of places between Orange and El Paso where those new DPS troopers could protect taxpayers and fight crime.

Stationing them permanently on the U.S.-Mexico border, however, is a political stunt that should be nipped in the bud. That's not where they are needed, and it's not where they can be most effective.

They described the plan as an "active decision to shift first-responders with arrest powers from places where they can do a lot of good to places that make good background for campaign commercials," which quite honestly is a difficult point to argue.

Uptick in retirements casts shade on aggressive DPS hiring estimates

Another complication for the massive proposed DPS hiring boom to staff up the border was raised at a hearing yesterday, as reported in the Austin Statesman:

the recruiting effort looks to be complicated by a higher-than-normal number of troopers expected to retire over the next two years, which also will increase pressure to hire police officers from local departments as those officers’ DPS training is far shorter because they are already certified peace officers. ...

DPS Director Steve McCraw told the budget-writing committee Tuesday that hiring 250 new troopers is achievable by the fall of 2017. But he said the one big “wild card” is how many troopers will retire over the two-year budget cycle.

About 440 troopers are expected to do so, according to the Legislative Budget Board. That means DPS would have to hire 690 new officers to achieve a net gain of 250, which Otto said is not possible if the state sticks to its normal recruiting method.

Budget board analyst John Wielmaker told the committee the projected increase in retirements is due to the pay raises lawmakers gave to state law enforcement in 2013, which created an incentive for troopers who would have otherwise retired to keep working as their pension annuities are based on their final salaries. The trend has occurred in the past, he noted.

Asked by state Rep. John Raney about the link between the projected retirement wave and DPS needing to directly recruit officers from other agencies, Wielmaker told the College Station Republican that, “the agency would be very hard pressed based upon historical experience to add 690 troopers in two years without some other factors, including what you just mentioned.”

So, to the math: DPS is presently 243 troopers understaffed, wants to expand the total force by 500 beyond the current, budgeted number (250 of those coming in the 2016-17 biennium), and will lose 440 troopers to retirement in the next biennium. So the state would have to hire 933 troopers to reach its goal for the next biennium, with another 250 in the pipeline by 2019.

Regular trooper cadet classes graduate around 100 or so troopers, Steve McCraw told the House Special Committee on Emerging Law Enforcement issues last week, though the class expected to graduate in June will include only 56, bringing the number of unfilled positions down from 243 to 187. Cadet classes last 20 weeks and DPS will do three instead of two next biennium to fill these new extra slots.

For the rest, DPS has estimated it will cost $13.7 million per biennium per 40 person recruitment class for "lateral hires" poached from local police and sheriff's departments, but DPS only plans to hold six of those 8-week academies, which would bring in 240 extra, new troopers.

So where do the rest come from?

Border budget may top a billion; local enmity rising over DPS poaching veteran police

The Texas Department of Public Safety this morning told the the House Appropriations Committee that it would like to stage six additional cadet classes in the coming biennium for "lateral hires" who previously worked for a local law enforcement agency at least four years. Each such cadet class would add $13.7 million for the biennium to put 40 officers on the beat, plus more in the out years to pay for wages, retirement, equipment, etc..

Rep. Cindy Burkett roughly calculated that would amount to around $40,000 per trooper per week, a figure which DPS Col. Steve McCraw did not dispute. He and the support staff with him attributed the cost to both the training expenses and the cost of equipping additional troopers with vehicles, weapons, computer equipment, etc.. He also noted that "lateral hires" would begin their service at a much higher pay grade than entry level troopers, substantially increasing the cost. The cost figures include troopers' pay and support through the end of the biennium in addition to their time in the academy.

McCraw mentioned again that local police and Sheriff's offices had expressed displeasure at DPS for poaching experienced officers, some of them less than cordially. DPS has only ever done a "lateral hire" cadet class once before and fewer than 30 troopers graduated. Regular entry-level cadet classes graduate more than 100 new troopers.

These new troopers are part of an expanded border security proposal unveiled in the House yesterday whose price tag will overshadow even the budget busting $815 million proposal in the Senate, likely approaching or exceeding a billion dollars. The House plan was unveiled yesterday when:

More than 30 House members, along with local officials from the border, stood up at a Capitol news conference behind what they cast as a bipartisan, wide-reaching and permanent solution to enhance safety along the border and throughout Texas.

The push — outlined in three bills — would add state police to the border, use retired state troopers to assist police work, toughen penalties for smugglers, build southbound checkpoints and create a border prosecution unit, among other things.

See MSM coverage from the press conference:

• Dallas Morning News
• Texas Tribune
• Austin Statesman
• San Angelo Standard Times
• Houston Chronicle
• Associated Press

Meanwhile, the Texas Observer's Melissa del Bosque has written one of the first comprehensive journalistic critiques of the border buildup over the last nine months, suggesting that "The rush to militarize the U.S.-Mexico border has tragic consequences for Texas." Go read the whole thing, she's providing perspective on these issues that's sorely lacking in debates at the Texas capitol the last week or two.

Just a quick thought re: The National Guard. As the Statesman reported, "The rough plan now, as outlined by Gov. Greg Abbott, is to keep the guardsmen there until the Department of Public Safety can hire more troopers and handle the operation on its own." But Col. McCraw today reiterated that it would take four years for DPS to fully hire, train and deploy 500 new troopers, in addition to filling the 243 trooper vacancies on the books right now. It seems incredible/irresponsible to imagine Texas would continue to deploy the National Guard for that long, but that's where the debate stands at the moment.

See recent, related Grits posts:

• DPS border 'surge' failed to reduce drug supplies, which increased
• DPS surge will take four years to staff; apprehension rate abysmal on border crossings
• Lies, damn lies and drug war statistics: DPS edition
• DPS border 'surge' compromised crime fighting in rest of state
• If Lege can pay $735 million for border boondoggle, why can't they scrounge $220 million from the couch cushions to abolish the Driver Responsibility surcharge?

DPS border 'surge' failed to reduce drug supplies, which increased

Let's bottom line the effectiveness of Texas' border security measures. DPS and the National Guard aren't immigration enforcers and they score no "apprehensions" following the overwhelming number of documented "detections" of illegal border crossings (53 out of 113,000). So from a law enforcement perspective, drug enforcement vs. the cartels is the main reason they're down there (even if most of the GOP base fails to grasp the distinction). Jeremy Schwartz at the Austin Statesman (Feb. 27) further demonstrated the futility of that effort when he reported that the DPS surge has had no impact on retail drug prices in Texas, at all, meaning DPS has done nothing to reduce drug supplies and the whole "surge" gambit has been a pointless fiasco.

Indeed, reported Schwartz, drug prices declined during this period, meaning availabilty of drugs increased in response to the DPS surge, or at least in spite of it.  This exchange from a recent Texas Senate Finance Committee meeting captured the seldom-spoken reality:

“Can you sit there and say there’s been a reduction of street drugs in any of our major metropolitan areas?” [state Sen. John] Whitmire continued.

“I can’t say there has been,” [DPS chief Steve] McCraw responded. “The challenge we have now with numbers on street cost, there’s no question that it’s a good indicator of whether we are succeeding or not.”

Instead, “'We’re not seeing any slowdown in supply,' said Greg Thrash, resident agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Austin.' From the wholesale level, (illegal drug prices) are dropping like the price of gas (was).'”

Illegal drugs operate in an unfettered black market and their pricing reflects raw supply and demand. If prices are "dropping," more drug supply is entering the market, meaning DPS' "surge" not only didn't reduce drug trafficking, they presided over its statewide expansion with this misbegotten "Ready, Fire, Aim!" strategy.

See related Grits posts:

• DPS surge will take four years to staff; apprehension rate abysmal on border crossings
• Lies, damn lies and drug war statistics: DPS edition
• DPS border 'surge' compromised crime fighting in rest of state
• If Lege can pay $735 million for border boondoggle, why can't they scrounge $220 million from the couch cushions to abolish the Driver Responsibility surcharge?
• McCraw: Terrorist threat at Texas border a myth
• Do border surges work? For incumbent pols but not really for the rest of us
• Fiscal impact of border security: Spend less on roads
• Border boondoggle: Lack of goal, success metrics don't prevent squandering tax dollars
• Ramped up enforcement along Texas border failed to raise drug prices
• DPS won't use roadblocks without legislative approval
• DPS outsourced key border security tasks to shadowy private contractor 
  
• Is Texas border crime 'overwhelming' or at historic lows?
• DPS, border violence, and the boy who cried 'wolf'

Lies, damn lies and drug war statistics: DPS edition

The Austin American Statesman reported (Feb. 26) that the Texas Department of Public Safety inflated prices of seized drugs ten-fold just before issuing a pivotal report on its border "surge" to legislators. Reported  Kiah Collier and Jeremy Schwartz:

The agency now uses 2012 data based on national retail sales compiled by the White House; it previously had used 2014 Drug Enforcement wholesale prices specific to Texas.

As a result of the new accounting methodology, the agency said that more than $1.8 billion in illegal drugs had been seized during Operation Strong Safety, the state’s enhanced law enforcement effort in the Rio Grande Valley that began last summer.

Under its previous illegal drug price formula, the seizures would have been worth about $161 million, less than one-tenth of the figure presented to the Legislature and state leaders.

Experts in the story explained why the number DPS used previously is more accurate:

many criminologists say describing bulk seizures with retail-level prices presents a skewed picture of the value of the drugs when they were seized.

Peter Reuter, a senior economist with the RAND Corporation and criminology professor at the University of Maryland, said wholesale prices better measure the impact of the seizures on criminal organizations. “It’s more important to get a sense of the cost you have imposed on the traffickers,” he said. “But (higher retail prices) sound better. I don’t think it’s more complicated than that.”

Jonathan Caulkins, a professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, said many law enforcement agencies use retail prices because they are higher, but that “it would be more logical to value at the replacement cost for the organization.”

Still, I think this gives a good baseline for evaluating DPS' assertions of success in its border surge. Take what they claim to have done, divide it by ten, and you'll come close to assessing the real impact of their spurious, redundant border work. The idea that Texas would spend $815 million more on this boondoggle beggars belief. But we're in a through-the-looking-glass moment when failure is success and money apparently is no object. It remains to be seen whether state leadership cares at all about how this money is spent. So far, they seem perfectly willing to throw good money after bad without, apparently, caring a whit about whether it's worth the bang for the buck.

RELATED: Border surge didn't cause drop in crossings.

DPS border 'surge' compromised crime fighting in rest of state

Who is surprised to learn that the border "surge" by the Texas Department of Public Safety "compromised the Department of Public Safety’s ability to combat crimes elsewhere"? Or so the agency told the governor and state leaders in a secret assessment which was leaked to the Houston Chronicle.

According to the paper, "While the report gave more detail than has been publicly released about the claim often made by [Lt. Gov. Dan] Patrick and other state leaders that the deployment has reduced crime, it focused on illegal crossings and cartel activity in the operation zone, providing less detail about local crimes and leaving open the possibility that criminals have simply shifted their efforts elsewhere." The story noted dryly that "some experts have attributed [the reduction in illegal crossings] to other factors," which is a pretty dramatic understatement. The border was already the safest region in the state before DPS began any "surge" operations, which is probably why the agency didn't even attempt to claim it reduced crime in the area - any such claim would inevitably run afoul of contradictory Uniform Crime Report data in the medium to long term. We've been around this block many times.

The Texas Senate has proposed spending an astonishing $815 million over the next biennium on border security above and beyond regular DPS patrols in the area. That's an insanely large amount of money being funneled down a black hole. Grits has suggested the state could abolish the Driver Responsibility surcharge with a portion of that money and still spend well more than double what was budgeted last biennium on border security.

There's no public safety justification for spending that much at the border. Thumbing the state's collective nose at a president who will never again run for re-election just isn't worth that much scratch, and at root that's the only reason this is happening.

MORE: From Lisa Falkenberg at the Houston Chronicle:

Even the Legislative Budget Board, which is charged with making recommendations to lawmakers on spending, has acknowledged there's no way for it to measure progress toward the border security goal

A "law enforcement sensitive" report issued to lawmakers and obtained by the Chronicle on Tuesday offers little clarity, just page after page of anecdotes and unsubstantiated or ill-defined numbers. In it, DPS gives Operation Strong Safety II, as it is called, full credit for the dramatic reduction in last summer's border apprehensions, even though federal efforts to stem the tide of unaccompanied minors were well underway.

The one thing the report is clear about: The operation "does not secure the border." I think we knew that.

If Lege can pay $735 million for border boondoggle, why can't they scrounge $220 million from the couch cushions to eliminate Driver Responsiblity surcharge?

The 84th Texas Legislature should be the time and place to finally eliminate the Orwellian-named Driver Responsibility surcharge, that bane of low-income drivers which has taken driver licenses from more than 2 million Texans for nonpayment, more than 1.3 million of whom remain unlicensed. Texas drivers owe billions in unpaid surcharges, most of which no one believes can ever be collected. All of these are folks who've already paid their traffic tickets but were then hit with an extra, three-year civil penalty that most Texans aren't even aware exists until it's assessed against them.

Many Texas legislators by now are keenly aware of the problem, and if they're not, their staffers working constituent service are. Plus, this year the state enjoys billions in extra revenue (though admittedly there are many state needs competing for the money). So if there was ever a time in recent memory when it might be politically feasible to get rid of the program, on its face this would appear to be the year.

Presently the Driver Responsibility surcharge sends about $55 million per year to Texas trauma hospitals and a like amount to the general revenue fund. So if legislators want to abolish it, they must find at least $220 million to fill the budget hole.

That sounds like a lot until you realize Gov. Greg Abbott yesterday proposed to spend $735 million on redundant border security - approximately triple what the Lege budgeted in the last biennium. Abbott wants to add 500 DPS troopers to the state's border contingent and keep the National Guard there until they're fully deployed.

So if it's that easy to find an extra half billion to tack onto border security spending, it should be possible to find $220 million, even if it meant deploying 300 troopers to the Valley instead of 500. But really, even that tradeoff isn't necessary. The state has extra money beyond the governor's border security promises, if only the Legislature and Greg Abbot prioritized the surcharge issue as much.

The state gains virtually nothing from border deployments but a nine-figure budget line item - the National Guard aren't really allowed to do anything and DPS' roadblock program got shut down and is unlikely to be authorized by the Legislature. So really all they can do is drive around giving traffic tickets and hoping they inadvertently stumble across a drug runner, as though there aren't other parts of the state which could use help from DPS with traffic enforcement. The Texas border was the safest area of the state before DPS ever began the "surge," so it's hard to credit calm in the area with any great state success.

I get that the $735 million has more to do with primary politics than public policy. But I see no good reason legislative budget writers couldn't make it $515 million, spend the other $220 million to wipe out the Driver Responsibility surcharge, and still get to claim in 2016 that they sufficiently thumbed their noses at President Obama. In the meantime, they can solve a huge problem for 1.3 million Texas drivers without licenses and millions more suffering under the yoke of onerous, harmful, counterproductive, and arguably unconstitutional civil surcharges.

Public safety wouldn't be harmed at all - in fact arguably it would be improved - and legislators seeking re-election would have the added benefit of having performing a massive mitzvah for a millions of surcharge-owers and the 1.3 million who've lapsed.

Roundup: Jail foibles, judicial elections, border security and bitemarks

Here are several items that merit readers' attention while your correspondent is focused elsewhere.

• Entrepreneurial jail building has left Waco with an empty jail downtown and no revenue stream to pay for the bonds issued to build an unnecessary extra facility. Faulty projections of increased immigration detention have left McLennan County and others seeking to rent out extra beds in the lurch. See prior Grits coverage.
• This month saw a rough start for video visitation at the Denton County Jail.
• I can't imagine Rep. Jason Villaba's bill disallowing straight ticket voting for judicial, DA and sheriff's elections will gain much traction, but it would be a step in the right direction. Personally I'd prefer such elections were entirely non-partisan, but eliminating straight ticket voting would at least cause voters to make a specific choice. For the most part there's scarce little vetting of any of these candidates in local races and little viable means for voters to evaluate them.
• The Austin Statesman has an editorial supporting legislation by state Sen. Rodney Ellis expanded access to post-conviction DNA testing.
• The editorial page editor for the Corpus Christi Caller Times argued Sunday that DPS should let local police patrol the Rio Grande Valley. Meanwhile, the Texas Border Coalition, representing cities and counties from El Paso to South Padre Island, is making the case that border security should be left to the feds. The Beaumont Enterprise argued that the National Guard deployment along the border is unjustified.
• In the context of proposals to further downsize the Texas Juvenile Justice Department, I was interested to read "How communities are keeping kids out of crime" from the Christian Science Monitor.
• Here are five states where Republicans are getting serious about criminal justice reform.
• Radley Balko has a good piece on how flawed bite mark analysis has sent innocent people to prison. See also this academic paper on the topic and prior Grits coverage.

Chihuahuan prisons achieve ACA accreditation, end self-regulation by convicts

Read a feature story and editorial from Corrections Today on the transformation of prisons in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which includes the city of Juarez across the river from El Paso and shares borders with Texas and New Mexico. Over the last four years, funded through US grants via the Merida Initiative, they've made the shift from "self-governed" facilities ruled internally by convicts to being accredited by the American Correctional Association, a task which took about three years to renovate all facilities and hire and train staff. Since then prison authorities have seized:

1,500 gallons of alcohol; 73 long guns; 32 explosive, fragmentation and blast grenades; 13,762 steel-edged weapons; and other prohibited items as of Oct. 1, 2014. These seizures were only the “tip of the iceberg,” because every single action also detected illegal acts inside the prisons, such as cockfights, musical performances and even horse racing. This reflected the unlimited power and control the criminal groups used to have inside the walls of [Chihuahan prisons], enough to even plan and order kidnappings, extortions and other crimes.

The self-governing internal economy of Chihuahuan prisons was legendary so news of ACA accreditation, to me, is stunning. The professionalization of Mexican corrections, if sustained, would be a huge development, especially if other states replicate Chihuahua's model. Change can't come too soon.

I Can't Breathe, South Texas style, and other stories

Here's a browser clearing compendium of items  that merit Grits readers' attention even though I haven't had time to adumbrate them fully.

Wrong solution to culturally inept 'surge' participants
Is it true, as Valley legislators allege, that "Too many of the Department of Public Safety troopers assigned to the South Texas border region do not understand the local Hispanic culture and are unable to speak Spanish"? Perhaps. I'll even go with, "Probably." To me, though, the solution is to scale back the politicized, pointless, metric-free, "surge," not to build a damn training center down there to make it permanent! 

Lawsuit alleges sexual assault by employee of county jail contractor
A lawsuit by a former inmate alleges she was sexually assaulted by an employee of Community Education Centers, a private prison firm out of New Jersey that operates McLennan County's local jail, reported the Waco Tribune Herald. Jail privatization has already been a financial albatross for the county, but, if true, these allegations and the process of proving them in court might turn public opinion against the county's jail contracts more viscerally. 

I Can't Breathe, South Texas style
Eighteen students and staff members at a Raymondville ISD middle school were given medical treatment after they were exposed to tear gas during a training exercise at the neighboring Willacy County State Jail, reported KWTX TV.

New Tarrant DA will create Conviction Integrity Unit
The new Tarrant County DA Sharen Wilson will create a Conviction Integrity Unit. The fellow hired to run it, Larry Moore, said correctly that the lower number of exonerations in Tarrant may be because they “didn’t have the pattern of abuse you found in Dallas," as local officials have insisted. "But frankly, all the evidence was destroyed here, and Dallas kept it,” he added, which regular Grits readers know more accurately gets to the heart of the matter.

Priced to go
Outgoing Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Tom Price spoke to the Austin Statesman's Chuck Lindell about his last-minute declaration that he opposes the death penalty after sending hundreds of men and women to death. (Price's views have migrated greatly from those of the judge who was warned by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct in 2001 for a campaign message touting that he had "no sympathy" for the criminal.) Regrettably, Lindell's conversation with the judge did not stray from Price's new-found death penalty views to plumb other topics like ideological splits on the court, relationships among judges following the Charles Dean Hood debacle, or his reasons for switching sides in Ex Parte Robbins I and II. I understand Texas Monthly will publish an interview with outgoing CCA Judge Cathy Cochran early next year, though don't expect her to break decorum and speak about the insider baseball stuff.

Reddy: Pretrial detention of low-risk offenders 'counterproductive for public safety'
Vikrant Reddy of the Texas Public Policy Foundation authored an editorial in the Houston Chronicle explaining how "pretrial incarceration of those who do not pose a high risk of committing a serious crime is counterproductive for public safety." He argues for "developing pretrial risk assessment instruments that can be used to make sound determinations about who needs to be in jail and who does not."

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/bud-kennedy/article4119384.html#storylink=cpy

Mass imprisonment and public health
I'd missed a NY Times editorial from last month regarding harms to public health from mass incarceration. Here's a notable excerpt from its opening:

When public health authorities talk about an epidemic, they are referring to a disease that can spread rapidly throughout a population, like the flu or tuberculosis.

But researchers are increasingly finding the term useful in understanding another destructive, and distinctly American, phenomenon — mass incarceration. This four-decade binge poses one of the greatest public health challenges of modern times, concludes a new report released last week by the Vera Institute of Justice.

For many obvious reasons, people in prison are among the unhealthiest members of society. Most come from impoverished communities where chronic and infectious diseases, drug abuse and other physical and mental stressors are present at much higher rates than in the general population. Health care in those communities also tends to be poor or nonexistent.

The experience of being locked up — which often involves dangerous overcrowding and inconsistent or inadequate health care — exacerbates these problems, or creates new ones. Worse, the criminal justice system has to absorb more of the mentally ill and the addicted. The collapse of institutional psychiatric care and the surge of punitive drug laws have sent millions of people to prison, where they rarely if ever get the care they need. Severe mental illness is two to four times as common in prison as on the outside, while more than two-thirds of inmates have a substance abuse problem, compared with about 9 percent of the general public.

Common prison-management tactics can also turn even relatively healthy inmates against themselves. Studies have found that people held in solitary confinement are up to seven times more likely than other inmates to harm themselves or attempt suicide.

The report also highlights the “contagious” health effects of incarceration on the already unstable communities most of the 700,000 inmates released each year will return to. When swaths of young, mostly minority men are put behind bars, families are ripped apart, children grow up fatherless, and poverty and homelessness increase. Today 2.7 million children have a parent in prison, which increases their own risk of incarceration down the road.

If this epidemic is going to be stopped, the report finds, public health and criminal justice systems must communicate effectively with one another.

Houston chief says war on drugs a failure, and other stories

Here are a few items which deserve Grits readers attention as my own is focused for the moment outside the blog.

Houston police chief: War on drugs a 'miserable' failure
Houston Police Chief Charles McClelland on Friday called the war on drugs a "miserable" failure and suggested political attitudes have sufficiently shifted, even in Texas, to the point where altering marijuana laws could happen "soon." He declared that "people are beginning to think about this issue differently, and they know that we've got to do something different than what we're doing."

Prison doc: death by natural causes; ME: homicide
The Lubbock Avalanche Journal recently reported that "Six Montford Psychiatric Unit detention officers have not been reprimanded after using force to restrain a 63-year-old inmate who died shortly after the incident earlier this year." The episode may involve a coverup. The paper investigated "after a Lubbock County medical examiner’s ruling this fall contradicted previous rulings by the state." "A Montford doctor originally reported McCoin’s death as natural" but a Lubbock medical examiner declared the case a "homicide."

'Bad traffic law has to go'
The San Antonio Express-News had an editorial calling for abolition of the Driver Responsibility Surcharge.

Jail phones profit from a 'Captive Audience'
The Dallas Observer recently ran a cover feature on Securus and the rise of privatized jail phone service and video visitation at Texas county jails. The topic will be familiar to Grits readers but the coverage was thorough and reaches a new, different audience, one hopes, than this stodgy old blog.

Newspaper calls for mental health investments
The Houston Chronicle editorial board called for construction of a new state mental hospital in the Houston area. According to the paper, "When the Neuropsychiatric Center at Ben Taub Hospital in the Texas Medical Center is out of room, our law enforcement professionals must drive around in their squad cars with people suspected of mental illness, waiting for a bed to open up or looking for an alternative. This happens not infrequently, according to mental health professionals." They also complained of a shortage of competency restoration beds and the aging and outdated Rusk State Hospital, which is a three hour drive from Houston.

Juvenile justice and the arts
Ronnie Sanders, who serves on the Texas Commission for the Arts, wrote a column praising a Bexar County juvenile diversion program with remarkably low recidivism rates in which "Students who have often resorted to violence in the past are taught methods of conflict resolution through writing, acting, team-building and communication skills." Says Sanders, "We should all celebrate when people can be earnestly reformed through the arts," and "we should seek more opportunities and increase funding that could allow more young Texans to transform their criminal past into a life sentence of positive choices and a realization of their potential as a contributing citizen to Texas."

News flash: Crime labs screw up outside of Texas, too
The Jonathan Salvador fiasco was one of five recent misconduct scandals at U.S. crime labs described in this article from Chemistry World. Can you guess the other four? Perhaps, in the near future, Grits will compile Texas' own top five. Hard to believe we only got one in a national top five list on this topic; author Rebecca Tragle should Google "Houston police crime lab scandal" for the granddaddy of them all in Texas.

No way feds reimburse Texas on border security
Texas' request to the feds for reimbursement for the Great Border Security Boondoggle is a laughable exercise in hubris. Given that, IMHO, the entire spending program serves no real security purpose but instead is a political expenditure aimed at snubbing the Obama Administration, why would the feds ever consider paying for it. They're basically asking them to pay for an extended, years-long Rick Perry campaign commercial.

Ten predictions about police bodycams based on experience with dashcams
Having been deeply involved more than a decade ago in the effort to get dashcams in police cars in Texas, I find the description of their effects from The Atlantic to be fairly accurate. However, I disagree that past is entirely prologue when it comes to bodycams, which IMO may have greater deterrent effects for police misconduct because they're recording personal interactions, not just views from a distance. Time will tell. In practice, they support officers stories more often than contradict them and make report writing more accurate. There's as much incentive for police to adopt them as for reformers to support them.

Advice for 1Ls and lawmakers: Don't make laws you wouldn't kill to enforce
Yale law prof Stephen Carter in a recent column offered sound advice to law students that goes double or triple for lawmakers: "On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you."

McCraw: Terrorist threat at Texas border a myth, or, In favor of reality-based border-security policy: A minority view

The dumbest part of Texas' border "surge": There are no, none, zilch, zero viable metrics for measuring success. It's a truism in public policy of any sort that one cannot solve a problem one cannot measure. A Dec. 4 Austin Statesman story said DPS claimed this week that the surge worked because of increased illegal-immigrant apprehensions. but Rep. Donna Howard called them on this particular line of bullshit, pointing out “that officials also have claimed success when the number of apprehensions is down, which she said has been described as a sign of deterrence. That makes it difficult for lawmakers to figure out 'how much money to appropriate for this activity,'” she said. That's an understatement!

It's not that data-driven policy isn't possible. The McAllen Monitor recently offered thoughtful, incredibly detailed suggestions for fixing federal immigration courts that made loads of sense. (Read them, a summary won't do them justice.) Problem is, at the federal level neither party is advocating an approach that actually processes cases faster. These are good ideas, though, showing the problems are not insoluble if politicians actually wanted to resolve them.

Instead, the state plans to add 4,000 cameras along the border, another initiative that Grits considers a complete waste. There's little evidence cameras work even in crime-ridden inner-city hotspots, much less out in the boondocks along hundreds of miles of border. Then you have to pay people to watch them as well as waste manpower on responding to lots of false positives.

Finally, in a rare moment of (post-election) candor, DPS Col. Steve McCraw affirmed to the committee what anyone with access to Google already knew: That "there is 'no credible information that a terrorist has crossed or will cross' the Texas-Mexico border." I'd add one caveat: There's no evidence that terrorists are coming from Mexico to the United States to do harm. There's evidence that Texas prison gangs crossed the border south to work as soldiers in the Juarez cartel wars and may be responsible for hundreds or even thousands of murders there. Whether one considers them "terrorists" is a political and semantic question.

Otherwise, Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick and other state officials should adjust their rhetoric to reflect acknowledged reality from the state's top law enforcement official. Perhaps it would help to stand before a mirror each morning and recite McCraw's words aloud three times before the day begins - there is no credible information that a terrorist has crossed or will cross the Texas-Mexico border. (In particular, perhaps Breitbart Texas editors would benefit from such an exercise.) Barring that, I don't know what it will take to get Texas politicians to stop telling lies about border security threats.

What big ticket criminal-justice items might TX Lege fund with 'surplus'?

Wow, I'm surprised at the size of the spending cap increase the Texas Legislative Budget Board estimated for the 2016-17 biennium: $3.4 billion above the amount of revenue allocated in the last budget, or $1.7 billion per year. Grits had guesstimated they might have about 2/3 that amount.

Of course, they could spend all of that on transportation and still not remotely fill the need. Ditto for public schools, where that amount hardly scratches the surface of what the state will likely owe when pending litigation is complete. And naturally, the Lege could always (in theory) keep spending the same and use the extra $3.4 billion for tax cuts; there will be pressure to go that route.

But let's imagine for a moment what the state might spend money on if they used some of that "extra" cash on prominent, big-ticket criminal justice needs. What would they be? In order from largest to smallest, here are several criminal-justice items the state can in theory afford to fund in light of this blithesome budget news:

Pay for TDCJ prisoner healthcare, guard raises, programming (w/o AC): $546.6 million
The Legislature has already been told that, unless the state changes policies to incarcerate fewer people, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice will need $175 million more in the next biennium just to pay for healthcare for current levels of inmates, in part driven by the aging of the prison population as a result of long, punitive sentences. (Plus, the agency's front-line medical competence is still recovering from 2011 budget cuts.) In all, TDCJ has asked for $546.6 million in "exceptional items" including a 10 percent pay raise for guards to compete with oil field work. Of course, diverting more offenders from prison and shuttering understaffed facilities would relieve the problem, too, letting the state pay for staff raises with savings from facility closures. But TDCJ brass has suggested no such alternative. (There are a few exceptional items for probation and diversion funding in TDCJ's budget request, but overwhelmingly their request for new spending would go to running and staffing facilities.)

Two caveats to this already-large number: First, all this assumes that, while the 84th Legislature in session, the 5th Circuit or a federal district judge doesn't require the state to provide air conditioning at the state's hottest prisons; then the extra expenses get much higher, especially if the prison population doesn't decline. Second, the Lege could and likely will reduce these figures significantly by cutting either the size of raises and/or diversion programming. The latter risks higher recidivism, the former risks unplanned, forced closure of facilities because TDCJ can't find sufficient staff in rural areas. According to the Texas Tribune, "Statewide, the agency has left roughly 1,400 prison beds empty since 2012 because of staff shortages." Pick your poison.

Eliminate the Driver Responsibility surcharge: $110 to $340 million
From a standpoint of bypassing the most vocal political opposition, the shortest distance to abolishing the ignominious Driver Responsibility surcharge would be for the state to find some other way to fund Texas trauma hospitals, which have been receiving about $55 million per year or $110 million per biennium from the DRP. Otherwise, most everybody agrees the program is a failure that's making worse the problems it was intended to solve, as well as creating new ones. Complicating matters, though, the state also mulcts $85 million per year, or $170 million per biennium, from the DRP for the general fund, and uses another $30 million or so to feign balancing the budget. So really, to replace the whole pot of money would cost around $340 million; just to make the hospitals whole (letting the surplus take care of the GR cut) would run $110 million.  On the bright side, about a third of phone calls to the DPS drivers license division related to the surcharge, according to the LAR (pdf, p. 184, formally p. 3B 13 of 23), so eliminating the surcharge would free up significant internal resources to focus on serving other motorists.

Expand Texas' Great Border Security Boondoggle: $105.4 million
Otherwise, Governor-elect Greg Abbott has said he wants to double state spending at the border, but DPS has suggested even more than that. So, as insensible as your correspondent considers that ridiculous, politicized policy, let's add it to the list. In its 2016-17 Legislative Appropriations Request (LAR), DPS has $73.9 million in its Legislative Appropriations Request for its Goal Number Two, "Secure Border Region," and has requested an additional $105.4 million for the biennium, or $179.3 million total, not including the National Guard, etc.. Elsewhere in the budget, there's another $17.4 million for the biennium under "Local Border Security"  to pay for overtime for DPS troopers already stationed along the border, bringing the total to $196.7 million, if all of DPS' border-security dreams were realized (not including the National Guard deployment, grants to local law enforcement, etc..) Of that, the $105.4 million would be considered "new spending" outside the LAR, though in truth it's all part of the same, politicized gallimaufry. Make me Philosopher King, of course, and I'd cut these entire line items from the budget, saving the state $74 million instead of spending nearly three times that on already-dated political theater.

Cover 'unfunded mandates' from Fair Defense Act: $100 million
The Texas Indigent Defense Commission has requested just shy of $100 million per biennium as an "exceptional item" to reimburse counties for increased indigent defense costs since the 2001 passage of the Fair Defense Act. There are reasons to believe that number is slightly overstated (e.g., inflation and population growth account for some of the difference), but in 2013, according to the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, "Texas counties paid approximately $189.7 million [for indigent defense] compared to the State’s $27.4 million." County spending on indigent defense more than doubled from 2001 to 2013. If the state chooses to fund indigent defense at that level, it should exercise more say in its efficient delivery via public defender systems as opposed to the sorts of screwy, outlier systems (I'm talking to you, Comal County) the TIDC has taken to funding of late. This would also give the state incentive to reduce petty offenses like possessing less than 2 ounces of pot or driving with a suspended license (second offense and beyond) as Class B misdemeanors, since the Lege won't like paying for those folks' lawyers any more than the counties do.

Confront competency restoration crisis: $55.7 million (or more)
Grits dislikes having reached this conclusion, but in the wake of court orders and persistent, problematic backlogs, Texas should expand the number of state mental hospital beds available for competency restoration and simultaneously fund local in-and-outpatient competency restoration programs at the county level, particularly for, say, the state's 20 largest counties. The Department of Health Services requested an additional $55.7 million for state hospitals to address this problem, so I've put the price tag in the headline at that amount. But in addition there needs to be new funding for handling competency restoration at the local level, at least in the larger counties, to permanently calm the waters on this topic. That might cost $15-20 million per year as a fully fleshed out, statewide program, substantially less on the front end,  Either way, if the state doesn't act soon - whether to construct extra hospital capacity, to facilitate the diversion of incompetent inmates into local, pretrial outpatient treatment, or both - then in this non-lawyer's opinion, sooner than later the courts will mandate more expensive solutions than the Legislature might prefer if it addressed the problem head-on. (N.b., these sorts of outpatient competency restoration programs should IMO also be a priority for grants from the Governor's Criminal Justice Division.)

Expand crime lab capacity: $15.7 million (at least)
Among its "exceptional items," DPS requested an extra $15.7 million for crime labs over the biennium, or a 19 percent increase over their base budget. Given current backlogs, plus extra caseloads thanks to revisiting hundreds of cases from the Jonathan Salvador debacle in Houston, not to mention the recent expansion of blood-alcohol testing (at least before Villareal), that amount probably underestimates what's needed just to remain afloat. Unless case volume somehow declines, DPS crime labs could spend that much and still be falling behind. The only other solutions are to  appropriate more money or have DPS shift to a fee for service model.

Other potential crim-just investments
With the exception of abolishing the surcharge, which is the subject of perennial legislation, these are all agency requests representing their ideas how to solve the problems facing them, not necessarily my own, personal preferences. If I were mocking up budgets, for example, I might have included an extra $100 to $150 million in TDCJ's for diversion programming and reduced probation caseloads and suggested cutting 3-4 private prison contracts. Texas' $200 million or so investment per biennium in diversion programs starting in 2007 prevented the state from having to build and operate more than a billion dollars worth of new prisons and let us close three instead. Doubling down on that investment, combined with adjusting sentence thresholds for nonviolent offenses, would let Texas close even more, saving money overall and easing managerial pressures on an array of labor and health-cost related problems. Otherwise, prison costs will continue to grow well beyond the effects of inflation and population growth.

Grits would tack on an extra $10 million or so for the biennium, for starters, for county level outpatient competency restoration in addition to the state hospital funding. (Texas may right now need extra beds - in fact, the $55.7 million number sounds low to me - but the state should plan how to not need them in the future.) Just a few million dollars in additional resources aimed at prisoner reentry could have a big impact; I'd focus in particular on people who spent a significant amount of time in solitary confinement while they were incarcerated. The state could set up a fund to pay for local department's police body cams they way they did in 2003 for dashcams in police cars (with a voter-approved bond issue). Finally, I'd bolster crime-lab funding with money for contractors to get rid of backlogs, while expanding the state's own capacity even more with an eye toward the future.

* * *

This blog post was a thought experiment to identify big-ticket criminal-justice budget asks at the 84th Texas Legislature, but it is certainly not exhaustive. E.g., if I weren't limiting the list to criminal-justice topics, I might have included judicial pay raises. Nor should it be read as an endorsement of every expenditure listed. Grits wouldn't agree with reimbursing counties for indigent defense, for example, without statewide standards and accountability. And regular readers know I wouldn't spend another dime on Texas' border security boondoggle.

Leaving aside Grits' personal preferences (i.e., the items under the final subhed), let's focus on already existing proposals we know the Legislature will be facing. If one totals the above sums requested by big criminal-justice agencies then add in the cost of abolishing the Driver Responsibility Program, one gets to around $1.2 billion per biennium in new spending on criminal justice - more if federal courts mandate installation of air conditioning in Texas prison units.

Compared to what's needed on roads, education or healthcare, that's a small sum. But with only $3.4 billion in new funds available and enormous transportation and education costs looming, it's also unlikely a third of the extra will go toward those purposes. So what should be prioritized? And what other big-ticket items did I miss? Let me know in the comments.