Bring on Austin's police staffing debate: Proposal to hire 400-800 new cops would require budget tradeoffs the public won't support

In Austin, the Republican-led group that ran a successful ballot initiative criminalizing homelessness has put another one on the ballot for November that would require the city to hire hundreds more police officers. Their main backers so far are the police unions, who're salivating at the prospect of hundreds of new dues-paying members. Backers think the folks who voted to criminalize homelessness will now support a vast expansion of the police force.

Grits isn't so sure. I think they've overreached. And the biggest reason is the budget math, which has been called "irresponsible" but may be straight-up "impossible" without massive tax increases the Legislature has forbidden via municipal revenue caps. 

Yesterday, the city council put the Save Austin Now initiative on the November ballot and the financial services department released an estimate of the proposal's cost. There's some fuzzy language in the measure using undefined terms, so it's a range: To meet the requirements of the initiative, Austin would need to hire somewhere between 400-800 more police officers than it employs today, at a cost of $54 million per year on the low end to $120 million on the high end.

The difference arises in part because the initiative calls for officers to have 35% "community engagement" time. Currently, they have about 1% "community engagement" time, based on definitions the city has used in the past. But the phrase is sometimes used interchangeably with "uncommitted time," which includes things like checking email or restroom breaks, not necessarily "community engagement." The low estimate assumes the latter definition; the high-end estimate assumes the former.

Courts may eventually decide which definition to use. But even on the low end, increasing the budget by $54 million per year - given legislative revenue caps - would force draconian cuts. 

The other factors driving the cost estimates are wage increases and the size of Austin's population. The $54 million figure assumes lower population growth and police wage increases than we've witnessed in recent years. Grits believes that figure is probably too low and the real number will be closer to the high end of the range.

SAN suggests all this could be paid for by eliminating money spent on homelessness. But even if you closed all the shelters and eliminated every service to that group (which doesn't sound particularly wise), it wouldn't raise nearly enough money. Money for recent expenditures purchasing hotels to get folks off the street came from the feds as part of the COVID stimulus: That's one-time money, not an ongoing revenue stream from which the city can pay salaries. 

The truth is, you can't get to $54 million per year without cutting things the public STRONGLY supports: The entire budget for the city's animal shelters is about $10 million, for example. You could eliminate them entirely and still not be 1/5 of the way there.

Thanks in large part to the 40% of the city budget already spent on police, the overwhelming part of the city budget arrives at city council every year fully baked in: The amount they have for discretionary budget choices is generally in the low seven figures: a few million dollars. $54 million in new spending can't be done without closing things most Austinites don't want to eliminate.

This is the police unions and the Republican party doubling down on their anti-homeless ballot initiative this spring, but Grits predicts they'll find this a much harder sell. For starters, they did the last one during the legislative session when most of the criminal-justice reform advocates in town were focused on fighting bad bills at the Legislature. SAN outspent their opposition by more than 15-1 and the opposition campaign was led by inexperienced folks with nonprofit backgrounds who'd never run a campaign before.

This time, they'll find groups like the Austin Justice Coalition and its allies more fully engaged in the fight. A new PAC was formed to oppose the measure and experienced campaign staff has been hired, so don't expect the fundraising gap to be nearly as significant. And whereas the Mayor and most city council members stayed out of the homeless fight, the outlandish budgetary issues ensure they'll be vocally opposed to this one.

Local TV news has been SAN's biggest ally, giving their leadership a platform to spread misinformation with impunity. (The local FOX station has the SAN leader on frequently to "debate" different folks but the supposed debate moderator never fact checks his lies: It's really pretty embarrassing.) That's the biggest risk of this thing passing; if they let SAN pretend Austin can hire hundreds of new police with no budget tradeoffs, people might be duped into backing something they otherwise wouldn't support.

But the upgraded opposition campaign means there will be somebody out there informing the public besides local TV news. It's not going down like Prop B, where the opposition didn't have resources to counter the message.

Indeed, Grits welcomes this debate and am near-giddy that SAN has framed it this way: The anti-homeless initiative passed because West Austin was mad about public camping and wanted homeless folks out of their sight line. Now, the policy discussion shifts to the real-world tradeoffs involved in spending so much new money: A very different debate.

Prop B passing left the impression that Austinites oppose criminal-justice reform. Defeating this measure will reverse that false meme and perhaps give local media a chance to reboot their sycophantic cop coverage.

On the Myth of Prison Closures Generating Cost Savings: How TDCJ can ↓ prisoners by 20% and still see costs rise nine figures per biennium

From the earliest days your correspondent first showed up at the Texas Legislature, I've been grumpy about how they score "fiscal notes" related to bills increasing incarceration. Dr. Tony Fabelo and I used to go round about this when he led the Criminal Justice Policy Council.

Bills that increase incarceration are deemed to have no significant cost, even though every additional prisoner requires supervision, food, healthcare, etc.. And bills that decrease incarceration weren't deemed to generate budget reductions on the grounds that no real money was saved unless the state closed prison units and could save money on guard salaries.

So, for years, bills increasing incarceration were treated in the state budget as freebies while bills reducing incarceration received no credit from budget writers. 

Then, in 2013, Texas finally broke through and reduced incarceration enough to begin closing units. Since that time we've closed about a dozen of them. And yet, every session, TDCJ's budget goes up and up.

It turned out to be a myth that closing prison units would reduce the budget. Frankly, your correspondent is as surprised as anyone, though with 20/20 hindsight it's easy to see why.

Texas has reduced its prison population by about 20 percent, but most of that reduction has come among prisoners with shorter sentences. Meanwhile, the big cost drivers at TDCJ are 1) healthcare for elderly prisoners and 2) deferred maintenance on old units.

So, even with the lowest prisoner population in the 21st century and a dozen units shuttered, TDCJ's latest budget includes huge, nine-figure increases:

Turns out, elderly prisoner's healthcare costs and deferred maintenance are bottomless pits and reducing prisoner numbers hasn't slowed them down much at all. Whenever costs are reduced from prison closures, there's a massive backlog of expenses they want to spend that money on, so the budget never goes down. Prison closures could theoretically be targeted to units with the highest maintenance costs. But there are other factors like terrific staffing shortages at certain rural units that also drive closure decisions.

It's now clear TDCJ's budget growth can't be contained without reducing incarceration among the cohort with the longest sentences. The Life Without Parole cohort has exploded since 2005, and thousands more prisoners in their senior years face decades-long sentences that could conceivably keep them there until their deaths.

Many Texans might think that's okay for murderers, sex offenders, and others with especially long sentences. But those cohorts also have among the lowest recidivism rates among releasees (they've typically long-ago aged out of crime, and most murders are one-offs). And here's the catch: Medicare doesn't pay for prisoner healthcare, so if Texas chooses to keep them incarcerated, it must pay 100% of costs for long-term and ultimately end-of-life care. 

That said, this is a surmountable problem using mechanisms available under current law. With the exception of those with LWOP sentences (who're mostly not elderly yet, anyway, though they'll contribute to the problem soon enough), some 60 percent of TDCJ prisoners are eligible to be paroled immediately. Indeed, some 15,000 of them have already been approved for release but remain incarcerated because TDCJ only provides treatment services post-approval. Legislation to move the treatment timeline up passed the Texas House but the Lt. Governor as of this writing has refused to refer the bill to committee.

So for the time being, expect Texas prison costs to keep ballooning: Looking at the bills still moving in the waning days of the 87th Legislature, the state doesn't appear poised to change any of the dynamics causing it.

Might "anti-defund" legislation demilitarize and redefine 21st century policing? On the predictable if unintended consequences of micromanaging city budget decisions

Grits has been thinking about "defund the police" legislation (HB 1900) at the Texas Legislature, which seeks to punish Austin's budget decisions from last year shifting money from police to EMS and making the crime lab and 911 call center independent. The bill would punish cities that reduce police budgets unless the overall budget reduces by the same proportion. If the overall budget increases, the police budget must increase to retain its prior, overall percentage of spending. In other words, henceforth, in cities with more than 250,000 population, every new investment in roads, parks, housing, infrastructure, mental health, addiction treatment, homeless services,  etc., would have to be matched with increases to the police budget.

On its face, this would bind Texas cities' hands and make them all but unmanageable. After all, the biggest problems they face stem from the fact that their predecessors over-invested in police, jails, and prisons to confront social problems instead of investing in other solutions (e.g., mass transit, mental-health-and-addiction services, transitional housing and services for the homeless).

I believe that's the goal: A feature, not a bug. Governor Abbott intends to make Texas cities unmanageable and then blame Democrats for mismanaging them. If Republicans ever regained control of these jurisdictions, his office would cease to enforce the "defund" strictures (it's 100% at his discretion), and I wouldn't expect these requirements to ever be imposed on Republican-led cities, even though several of them in recent years have reduced their police-department budgets.

But for large cities which for the foreseeable future are governed by Democrats, this creates a conundrum. Big-city police chiefs have been complaining for the past decade that their officers are being asked to impose criminal-justice solutions to what are essentially social and healthcare problems they're ill-equipped to handle. Now, though, the Legislature is poised to insist cities can only confront these problems with police: A full-blown Catch 22 from a management perspective. They're leaving cities with no good options to address urban problems, which again, Grits believes is the point.

That said, I also believe this ham-handed attempt to bludgeon city leaders underestimates the variety of tools at their disposal and the wide array of methods available for cities to get around any strictures.

I'm sure there are many options, but here's my first thought: If the anti-defund bill passes, cities should begin to deploy unarmed officer cohorts whose primary functions fulfill the needs they'd otherwise fund in other parts of the budget.

Anyone who's traveled to the UK has seen unarmed police officers ably enforcing the laws as surely as American cops do with guns, and when they're needed there are special armed squads which can be called out or beat officers can be armed in a pinch. 

Here, though, Grits suspects squads of unarmed officers might be deployed much differently. For example, using money diverted from the police budget, Austin has begun having EMS respond to certain mental-health calls, with impressive early successes. If they're not allowed to expand that going forward because money must be spent on police, that won't obviate the need for non-carceral solutions to untreated mental illness. 

So what should they do? No one but fools think Texas can arrest its way out of these problems. And once legislators go home (without having expanded Medicaid, I should add, which might pay for non-carceral mental-health treatment), cities will still have to confront these issues with whatever tools are left in their toolbox. 

Consider the possibilities of unarmed social-or-health workers with a badge but no gun responding to homeless and mental health calls, possibly working closely with or even for the expanded EMS cohort recently created for mental-health first response and various city service providers. Whereas past protocols put officers in charge when they were on site with EMS, those roles could just as easily be reversed, particularly for the squad of unarmed officers whose primary role isn't arrest-and-incarcerate.

Such a program could include specialized recruitment and training to get people with relevant backgrounds in health care or social services who want to, say, work with the homeless or the mentally ill but don't want to carry a gun, enforce traffic laws, fire bean-bag rounds at protesters, etc..

These unarmed officers could always call their armed colleagues if needed but would primarily be deployed at tasks where it's not. Over time, cities could identify other activities where unarmed officers could fill roles that, in a more rationally governed state, might not normally be associated with law enforcement. But if cities are only allowed to fund cops, don't be surprised if the definition of "cop" inevitably expands.

The governor and his allies intend to box cities in, but I suspect they're making a strategic error. There's a bit of common military advice dating to Sun Tzu: Never completely surround an enemy's army; surround them on three sides and leave open the path you want them to take. The "defund" legislation does the opposite, attempting to surround cities completely and give them no path at all to move forward. Sun Tzu counseled that this could lead to either a) desperation and a bloodbath or b) creative tactics by the enemy that exploit one's army's overreach.

The latter is where I think this is headed: The Legislature meets only once every two years while city councils meet all the time and deploy vast bureaucracies to find ways to bypass legal barriers erected at the capitol. There will be several obvious workarounds, but here's a starting point: If the "punish defunders" legislation passes, Grits believes it will mark the beginning of a transformation of the definition of "police officer" as cities deploy services under the policing banner to confront problems they're not allowed to pay for in other parts of the budget.

If cities can only spend money on cops but the problems they must confront are only tangentially crime-related, inevitably they will begin to adjust what police do to deploy the only resources at their disposal at the biggest problems facing their constituents.

If I'm right, the "defund" legislation could have an unintended consequence of rapidly altering the definition of what it means to be a "police officer" in this state. How ironic would it be if this train wreck of a policy, promoted in the name of defending law enforcement, ends up being the trigger that launches its devolution into a less militarized, more service-focused 21st-century institution?

That outcome's not inevitable - the police unions would fight it, just as the Roman legions resisted pounding their swords into ploughshares - but Grits wouldn't be surprised: As the prophets foretold: The arc of history is long, but bends toward justice.

Five Observations and a Prediction: Why police budget hikes could become a thing of the past in Texas if HB 1900 becomes law

In no particular order, here are five observations and a prediction about a week filled with losses for the Texas criminal-justice reform movement at the Texas Legislature and in San Antonio and Austin.

#1: Policy fights now head to the courts

Every policy fight can and frequently does play out in an array of venues and the legislative process is only one of them. Some of the legislative losses this week are on topics - more restrictive detention policies from bail reform, limiting prosecutor discretion on new anti-homeless laws and arrested protesters, dictating home-rule-cities' budget prerogatives, etc. - that Grits expects to be litigated as soon as they're implemented. Some of it will stand, some of it won't. ¿Quien sabe? E.g., Austin changed its homeless arrest policy after federal court rulings deemed similar laws in California unconstitutional. Once it's changed back, those precedents will now be litigated here. Hell, if it's extended statewide, litigants can cherry pick which judge they want to bring it before. Right now, debates at the Texas Legislature on everything from bail to homelessness to abortion have become rather unhinged from and not particularly cognizant of nor in any way aligned with federal court rulings governing the same topics. Sign of the times, I guess: Picking needless fights on every front. I can't always tell if it's intentional or they just don't know any better. Little of both, probably.

#2: Ex Post Facto: Know the term

The "defund the police" legislation which will likely pass the Texas House today is a rather blatant example of an "ex post facto law" banned in Art. 1, Sec. 16 of the Texas Constitution and Art. 1, Sections 9 and 10 of the US Constitution. House Parliamentarians don't rule on constitutional issues (with few exceptions, they stick to interpreting the House rules), but IRL, courts do. And the originalist history of the ban on "ex post facto laws" is well established: While more commonly used today in terms of criminal law, it was created so that governments couldn't arbitrarily invalidate budgeting and spending decisions.

#3: The push to disconnect policing from policy makers

An oddity of both the anti-homeless legislation in the Texas Legislature and Prop B approved by Austin voters is the proposal to divorce law enforcement decision making from the policy making bodies that set their budgets and supposedly provide oversight. The state legislation would extend this to prosecutors, limiting prosecutor discretion in Class C cases against the homeless and creating a bizarre situation where prosecutors have more discretion to be lenient to murderers than the poorest of the poor. There are long-term implications for divorcing the armed agents of the state from the control of legitimate democratically-elected policymaking authorities: Examples are numerous, dating at least to the Roman legions' repeated usurpations of the Imperial Senate and various emperors in ancient times. That's more or less how your correspondent views the police-union cabals to whom legislators are kowtowing, and it's hard to see much good coming from disconnecting those folks from the constraints of civil authority.

#4: Why the folks shouting "Back the Blue" don't mind risking cops' lives

The most remarkable thing about this week was that MANY of the same legislators who've been crowing "Back the Blue" for months ignored widespread warnings from law enforcement to pass unlicensed-carry gun legislation. And I mean didn't give a damn: Lip service paid, then vote the other way on a party line, with cops telling them openly, in numbers, "this puts us at risk." Pairing that with the "defund the police" debate on the House floor, one witnessed legislators touting near the top of their lungs that cops deserve absolute deference, then in nearly the next breath insisting the cops were overstating the risks they faced because they were intimidated by some kind of woke, Big Government liberalism from the cities. It was bizarre, and only makes sense if one assumes the love of police is conditional on their political utility. Tbh, I always have, but this made it obvious and nearly inarguable.

#5: A craven betrayal

The word that keeps coming to Grits' mind for the Austin city council restarting cadet classes without demanding a reformed curriculum is "craven." They promised there'd be community participation in the process and then plowed forward without it. And while they added an amendment to the item requiring a report from the City Manager on the progress of curriculum change before the new class starts (June 7), the amendment created no process to halt the class if the curriculum isn't ready. That's because the council majority DOES NOT CARE ABOUT REFORMING THE ACADEMY. It was a promise several of them made when they were running for re-election. But now that they're safely back in their seats, having secured all the support they needed from grassroots reformers in their districts, they don't mind screwing over the Chas Moores and Meme Styles of the world: West Austin brings more votes. Adding insult to injury, most of the key, Austin police-reform leaders skipped the meeting at City Hall to show up at the Legislature and try to fight the "defund" bill, scheduled for the same day on the House floor. No good deed goes unpunished. This was a betrayal and your correspondent won't soon forget it.

Prediction: If "Anti-Defund the Police" bill passes, police budget hikes are a thing of the past

The Legislature gets to write the laws, but even they are not immune from the Law of Unintended Consequences.  I don't think legislators have considered the incentives they're putting in place in HB 1900 punishing cities that "defund" police department (by which in Austin's case they mean delaying cadet classes by one year). Going forward, cities that increase police spending can never again lower it. But they often need to do so. Now, cities will decline to spend more, knowing they won't be allowed to spend less. Bill authors even rejected amendments so that overtime for one-off special events - like a Super Bowl weekend in Houston - would be counted against them the following year. If I'm right about the new incentives facing city councils under this legislation, the result will be to suppress police spending instead of bolster it. I predict that if HB 1900 becomes law, when we look back five years from now the growth rate in police budgets will have flattened, not rallied.

Indeed, the most delicious irony may well come if HB 1900 ends up itself defunding the police! 

Wealthy communities without much police presence have for decades coveted caps on utility rates and property taxes. Some of them also want de-annexation (the recent Austin lakeside de-annexation dispute a case in point). They don't see police much and most of their thinking on this is based more on ideological and partisan predilections than a hard-nosed assessment of self interest.  HB 1900 could well create a "run on the bank" with voters at both ends of the spectrum showing up to defund the police, reallocate hundreds of millions of dollars, and trigger revenue caps and de-annexations that could change fundamentally how cities are constructed and managed in Texas.

Is that the intent of the legislation? No, the intent is to "own the libs." And the libs don't want to be "owned." Other than that, very few under the Pink Dome have thought through the implications of this legislation at all. And it shows.

Boost Texas prisoner food budgets 39 cents per prisoner/day

If your annual food budget was $800 per person and that money had to last all year, how would you spend it?

I'll give you a moment: Try to imagine what that would look like.

Having recently spent >$250 at my big, post-SNOVID trip to HEB, Grits can hardly fathom eating for a year on that amount. But that's the dilemma facing cafeteria cooks and nutritionists at TDCJ, where prisoners have been receiving food during COVID more suitable for pig slop than human consumption.

This is what Texas feeds prisoners
on an $800/year food budget

That said, in Texas prisons the pigs are air conditioned while the prisoners and guards are not, so it's likely the pigs eat better than this.

With the Texas Department of Criminal Justice poised to realize nine figures in budget saving thanks to newly closed prison units, the Legislative Budget Board had suggested the agency reduce its budget by $148 million and send that money back to the General Revenue pot. The group I lead, Just Liberty, is requesting they spend that money instead on two items: 1) Expanded treatment funding to move paroled prisoners out of lockups sooner, and 2) increasing prisoner food budgets by $17 million per year.

We discussed the treatment funding in the last post; let's delve deeper into TDCJ food budgets.

Food spending at TDCJ peaked at $106,601,431 paying for food for 155,076 inmates as of 8/31/09. That comes out to $687.41 per inmate spent on groceries in 2009, if you can imagine! 

If that amount had risen with inflation, food spending at TDCJ would currently be at $854.51 per prisoner.

Today, Texas incarcerates fewer people than we did back then - 119,541 as of January 2021 -  but only spends ~$810.56 per prisoner on food.*

Just Liberty is recommending boosting the food budget by 39 cents per day, per prisoner. That comes out to $17 million per year total, or roughly $952.77 per inmate. That's still an insanely small sum to eat on for a year, but it should give the agency enough leeway to improve prisoners' fare.

A final note: We only know how bad prison food is thanks to photos sent to reporters from contraband cell phones. Staff portray cell phones as dangerous contraband, but IRL they're the most important innovation in carceral accountability we've witnessed in the 21st century. Similar to bystander video of police brutality, cell phones in prisons have documented treatment long-alleged but difficult to prove.

Now, thanks to documented, firsthand examples across many units, we know complaints about Texas prison food aren't just whining from criminals: No one would feed this slop to anyone related to them.

With only a few exceptions, most Texas legislators consider themselves Christians. Well, this is one of those moments implicated in Matthew 25:40, wherein the disciples protested that they'd never visited Jesus in prison or fed him when he was hungry, as he'd described. Christ replied that, "whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." Grits wants to ask state budget writers directly how they'd answer that question at the Pearly Gates: Is 39 cents per day too much to ask for the "least of these"?

Texas doesn't pay prisoners for their labor and, thanks to widespread guard understaffing, the truth is at this point they're largely who's keeping the prisons running. A decent meal isn't too much to ask.

For Keri Blakinger and thousands of hungry Texas prisoners.

*Prison populations have been dropping during COVID; when they budgeted for this fiscal year, the Legislature had been told to expect a much higher prison population, so these per-prisoner numbers look much better than they could have.

#Txlege should use savings from closed prison units to fund needed treatment services

The Texas Legislative Budge Board has "Recommended funding maintains correctional security operations, with a decrease totaling $148 million, primarily related to recent facility closures and 2020–21 repair/renovation projects."

Grits is glad for more prison closures, but it's a mistake simply to reduce the budget by the amount of those units' costs. TDCJ has significant unfilled needs that those savings should pay for. 

One of the biggest: The agency doesn't fund treatment service sufficiently so that thousands of people are approved for parole but must remain in prison until they complete any required treatment. TDCJ doesn't enroll them in treatment until after they're approved for parole.

At any given time, there are around 15,000 people in TDCJ who've already been paroled but can't be released until they've completed treatment. If TDCJ paid for treatment BEFORE people were approved for parole, when they're approved they could leave prison immediately. This would further reduce the prison population and allow even more units to be closed, resulting in even more savings down the line.

The $148 million savings projected would go a long way toward solving this issue, resulting in less incarceration and greater savings down the line. From a management perspective, it should be a no-brainer.

UPDATE: Just Liberty is walking around at the capitol promoting the idea of shifting money to fund these treatment services and to spend a little more on the prisoner food budget, which has been slashed in recent years. Here's the flyer we're distributing.

TDCJ savings from prisoner reductions significant, but probably not $1 million per day

Recent incarceration reductions are saving the Texas Department of Criminal Justice $1 million per day, according to the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition's Doug Smith in testimony to the Texas House Appropriations Committee. But that figure seems high to me.

In the footnotes, Smith informs us that, "Monthly commitments to TDCJ declined by more than 16,000 during the period between March and August 2020 compared to the six-month period prior to the COVID-19 emergency declaration." Assuming each inmate costs $62.34 per day, as LBB finds in its uniform cost assessment, 16,000 fewer prisoners would indeed give you a million per day savings. 

But that's an average cost that includes overhead which won't go away just because prisoner numbers decrease. TDCJ doesn't really save much money until it actually closes units. Texas reduced juvenile incarceration numbers, for example, but didn't close large youth prison facilities. So the cost per prisoner went up. The same thing will happen at TDCJ if more prison units don't close.

I mention this only because I'd hate for Appropriations Committee members to read TCJC's testimony and think the state prison agency has extra money to give back. The agency is primed to save that much money if they close additional units, but it hasn't happened yet.

The rest of TCJC's analysis was spot on: In particular, I agree with their warning that reductions may be short-lived, including this assessment of incarceration in Texas and what it would take to avoid budget hikes in the future:

As of August 2020, there were 124,181 people incarcerated in Texas prisons,1 following a recent population drop of approximately 16,000 people; this is the result of rapidly declining crime rates, decreased felony court activity due to the COVID-19 emergency declaration, and stalled transfer of individuals committed to state prison from county jail.

While this reduction in incarceration seems promising – and is saving the state approximately $1 million per day – the numbers will likely rise again once the pandemic subsides. Currently, 891 of every 100,000 Texans is incarcerated (either in a state or federal prison, a juvenile facility, or a county jail). This rate of incarceration eclipses the national incarceration rate by 27 percent and dwarfs many other NATO member countries’ rates altogether.

Unless the system is downsized and funding is shifted toward programs known to prevent crime, including substance use recovery programs, Texas will be forced to increase funding every year for maintaining its 100+ units, many of which are more than a century old.

The group's main recommendation: "Rather than allocating additional state dollars to facility costs, we urge the committee to recommend closing aging and under-staffed facilities across the state." Hear, hear!

Speaking of closed prisons, in its own communication to legislators, TDCJ updated the Appropriations Committee on the status of the 11 prison facilities Texas has already closed: 

Over the last decade the TDCJ has experienced a decline in the offender population. Due to the declining offender population, the TDCJ has closed/idled eleven facilities. Six of these facilities have been sold through the GLO, or were privately owned and operated. The remaining five facilities are not currently being used to house offenders. The five facilities include the Bartlett State Jail, the Bradshaw State Jail, Jester I Unit, the Garza East Unit and the Ware Unit. The agency is currently working with the GLO regarding the sale of the Jester I Unit located in Sugar Land, Texas.

TDCJ's presentation included handouts with details about each of the five, shuttered properties.

"Defund the police" is the new "Obamacare": The Texas #cjreform landscape post-election

Now that the most divisive presidential election in 50 years is over and, win, lose or (largely) draw, everybody can take a deep breath, it's time for criminal-justice reformers to peek our heads above the wreckage to see what remains of a state and local agenda after a tumultuous year and a grueling election season which, at the state level in Texas, resulted in a complete stalemate, from a partisan perspective.

Criminal-justice reform is the new Obamacare

It's been quite a year for criminal-justice reformers. And we've learned some things. Although the public doesn't like the phrase "defund the police," they tend to like all the policies that might allow police to be defunded. Grits sees this a bit like "Obamacare," which of course, really, was the "Affordable Care Act." Republicans branded it with a president who was unpopular with their base and then railed against it for years, passing dozens of weird, Pyrrhic votes to abolish it. For a while, "Obamacare" polled very badly.

But this election cycle, you saw bipartisan support in campaign commercials for most of the underlying policies "Obamacare" was about - particularly forcing insurance companies to accept customers with pre-existing conditions. That's because the policies being discussed had broad popular support. Opposition was largely based on a partisan strategy to misrepresent what the Affordable Care Act did in order to undermine Democrats and then-President Obama.

Similarly, the phrase "defund the police" polls badly (to the extent we should ever believe polls again - a topic for another day), but the policies of sending someone besides cops to respond to addiction, mental illness, and homelessness garner bipartisan support.

Austin's ballyhooed budget cuts

That makes Austin an important bellwether example, as the only city in Texas and one of the only cities nationwide to actually reduce its police budget (by 4.6%) and invest in alternative approaches.

Granted, in a year when COVID shrank local budgets everywhere, that's not much. It's in the ballpark of the 4% reduction approved by Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick in 2017 for the Texas Department of Public Safety, for example. But that didn't stop those two from parading around the state holding press conferences in police-union halls bashing Austin for being soft on crime.

Even as political theater, some of this was downright surreal: Like Abbott, Patrick, and damaged-goods House Speaker Dennis Bonnen holding a press conference in Fort Worth with the Mayor saying that city did it the "right way." But Austin still spends more per capita on police than Fort Worth, and their murder rate is much higher. Indeed, if Austinites were murdered at the same rate as the citizens of Cowtown, our annual murder tally would double!

Justice policy as political strategy

So why go to Fort Worth to hold a press conference telling Austin how to be more safe? Because of contested races in Tarrant County; no other reason. It was just a political tactic.

Did it work? Sort of. But it definitely cut both directions. According to an enormous national survey, about three quarters of all voters this year said the Black Lives Matter protests were a big factor in why they voted. The meme did inspire some Trump supporters, but Biden benefited more: "Among those who cited the protests as a factor, 53 percent voted for Mr. Biden, and 46 percent for Mr. Trump, according to the survey."

Houston police chief Art Acevedo blamed Austin's "defund" budget on Democrats' state House losses, but it didn't help local police-union bloviator Justin Berry, who ran on an anti-reform agenda and lost in a critical swing district Rs held a couple of cycles ago. In that race, the Democrat probably benefited from supporting police accountability.

Bashing Obamacare worked for a while, too, until it didn't. Ditto for bashing gay marriage before the Supreme Court took that issue off the table. Now it's criminal-justice reform's turn in the barrel. 

Look, there, over the horizon: It's hope!

And yet, Grits is largely more hopeful about criminal-justice reform than I was when 2020 began (at which time, admittedly, I was recuperating from throat surgery that left my granddaughter comparing me to "Nearly Headless Nick" from the Harry Potter series). 

After all, 2019 was the worst year for criminal-justice reformers at the Texas Legislature arguably in the 21st century. It was hard to see what if anything we had to lose; the system had stopped responding to those concerns. As I wrote in May at the height of the rioting, "I'm not sure burning a police car would accomplish more, but I'd be hard pressed to conclude it would accomplish less."

With reform paths at the Legislature appearing all closed when 2020 began, Grits would have told you that made local work even more important. But Texas is a big state with a lot of local jurisdictions. And even in the big cities, there was little local momentum for reform.

In Austin, it got so bad that in April, a month before George Floyd died, more than two dozen community groups banded together to call for the police chief's ouster because he opposed and stifled even the smallest reformist changes. The protests reversed that momentum and began a process of rethinking policing based on different priorities.

Even in Texas cities that didn't go so far as Austin, new reform currents were ignited over the summer that didn't exist before. In Houston, the Mayor's Task Force on police reform issued dozens of recommendations and sparked important discussions which may still yield fruit. In Dallas, the chief  left in response to criticisms of her department's handling of the protests, and a new civilian oversight board was conceived, though its early stages have been tumultuous. In San Antonio, advocates have launched a petition drive to remove SAPD from the state civil service code, and the city council has included police reform on its legislative agenda.

The remnants of Republican #cjreform

Meanwhile, to the surprise of #cjreform advocates and police-union leaders alike, the latest Texas Republican Party platform included provisions opposing police brutality, limiting "no-knock" raids, supporting "independent review" of police shootings, and most astonishingly, a suggestion the Legislature should "ban collective bargaining with police unions." When Allen West took over as party chair after a contentious election, he withdrew the platform developed through the convention process and substituted a new one a couple of weeks before the election. So much of what was in there was new even to people who participated deeply in the process.

The GOP platform once again endorsed legislation to limit arrests for Class-C misdemeanors, which in the House in 2019 was carried penultimately by Democrat Senfronia Thompson, then in the end by Republican Corrections Committee Chairman James White. It also recommended that bail be set "based only on a person's danger to society and risk of flight, not on the person's ability to pay."

So there remains a clutch of #cjreform issues that still have bipartisan support. That didn't change with this election cycle, but reform-minded legislators in both parties do seem more energized. And who knows? A few more may join their ranks.

Preparing to play defense

But the elephant in the room remains the Governor and Lt. Governor pledging to attack Austin for its local budget decisions. Presumed next Speaker Dade Phelan, a prominent member of the House Criminal Justice Reform Caucus, was notably silent on this debate during the election, so who knows if he's on board with the punish-Austin agenda? But even if he were, Grits doesn't necessarily expect the Lege to take over APD or even restrict Austin's property tax revenue. Those are complicated, ambitious legislative projects and there's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. We'll see.

Grits feels like, once they get into the weeds, many of those ideas won't seem feasible. For example, Austin cops are paid significantly more than DPS troopers and most other cops in the state. Will the Lege reduce Austin cops' pay, increase troopers', or create a new class of state police who're better paid than the Texas Rangers? How will rural legislators justify paying Austin cops up to double what their local police get? Those are highly political decisions, but the politics aren't remotely partisan; they fall along different axes.

Similarly, the governor threatened to freeze Austin's property tax revenue because the city "defunded the police" (by which I mean cutting them about the same amount the Governor and Lite Guv cut DPS in 2017). But conservative activists have been fighting for years to have property taxes frozen statewide. How to explain to them that Austin benefits from a policy they covet, ostensibly as a punishment? It's hard to envision that idea going far; Grits views it largely as a campaign stunt.

There will surely be some effort to retaliate against Austin for daring to inject an element of fiscal conservatism into management of the city's largest agency, but the election results don't mean Austin cops will be state employees by the end of 2021. I highly doubt that.

Austin had better get this right

What's clear is that the public narrative in Texas over the efficacy of criminal-justice reform hinges on whether Austin remains a safe city relative to the rest of the state as it moves forward with its "reimagining" process.

Thankfully, the elections ousted Travis County prosecutors who opposed or slow-walked reform and installed a DA and County Attorney who say they want to cooperate with alternative approaches, not undermine them. And the new County Judge is a more enthusiastic reform supporter than his predecessor. Those are big, positive changes. So is the addition of a public defender to the mix, though COVID has slowed the process of that new agency getting off the ground.

The biggest fly in the ointment remains Austin's obstructionist police chief. But the political leadership seems largely on board and, at this point, committed.

Of the Austin city-council races up this cycle, two incumbents went into a runoff. Both are in swing districts that were held by Republicans in the past, and the local party here has been treating them as though they're partisan races. Both incumbents enter their runoffs with significant (but not insurmountable) leads, and Grits expects both to win. Either way, those races will be seen as a referendum on police reform, and not just among the city's most Republican voters. Losses by the incumbents would give an excuse for inaction to Democrat electeds around the state, many of whom spent their careers in the police unions' pocket and prefer not to be pried from it.

Locally, those runoff races arguably don't matter as much. Even if both incumbents lost, reformers would hold the council 10-2. And the base of those 10 overwhelmingly supports them continuing down the path they've started. The only way out is through. Austin electeds must spend the next two years demonstrating that a reform agenda can be implemented and the sky won't fall.

Honestly, I think that's a low bar they should clear easily. Crime in Austin has been portrayed in such apocalyptic terms, mere normalcy undermines critics' message. The only reason it's worked as well as it has is that COVID prevented Texans from visiting Austin for concerts, high-school basketball tournaments or UT football games, so they can't see for themselves that the town is largely safe. But that won't last forever.

Plus, with the passage of time, data will replace speculation about crime trends, putting the lie to the most outrageous claims. The reasons Austin is a fundamentally safe place have little to do with APD deployment patterns.

If, by 2022, armies of antifa-inspired homeless aren't swarming Congress Avenue burning cars and tagging buildings like a scene from Mad Max, then the governor's concerns will appear overstated. As with Obamacare, popular policies need time to kick in and prove themselves. The reforms just can't be a clusterf#@k.

A chance to expand police oversight: Why Texas should begin charging cops and jailers licensure fees

Readers may recall Grits recommended over the summer that the agency licensing Texas peace officers, the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE), begin charging licensing fees to Texas cops and jailers. The idea was that they could use the "extra" money to expand their oversight role. 

But a new document from the Legislative Budget Board shows that TCOLE may need to begin charging licensure fees just to keep its funding at current levels. Here's why:

Since 2004, TCOLE has funded most of its activities using General Revenue–Dedicated Funds from Account No. 116, which is composed of consolidated court fees collected pursuant to the Texas Local Government Code, Section 133.102. Currently, multiple agencies spend funds from Account No. 116, including TCOLE, the Comptroller of Public Accounts, and the Department of Public Safety. In addition, employee benefits are paid from this fund. The amount of revenue collected has been decreasing for at least the past 15 fiscal years.

Check out this chart showing the rate at which this account has been outspending intake:

So the account balance is scheduled to drop below expenditures by the end of the next biennium, meaning TCOLE and other agencies funded by Account 116 must turn elsewhere for funding. Or as LBB put it, "Without replacement, the loss of this funding would halt the majority of TCOLE operations." In that light, for TCOLE, charging licensure fees makes loads of sense.

LBB suggested four options for raising revenue for Account 116, but none of them involved licensure fees. That's a mistake not even to consider it. The people who license doctors, lawyers, plumbers, etc., are all financed via licensing fees, why not police and jailers?

Grits wanted more money for the agency to facilitate more oversight and compliance functions. E.g., in FY 2019, LBB reported, TCOLE audited 770 agencies for "law and rule compliance" and found "deficiencies" in 349 of them. It's great that they're catching violations after the fact, but that's an awfully high rate of deficient audits.

Moreover, Texas is one of only a handful of states where the peace-officer licensing agency can't revoke licenses of officers for serious misconduct. Here, we require them to be convicted of a felony first, which almost never happens. But a decertification program would require resources, particularly for attorneys, and licensure fees are the most obvious way to pay for them. 

At the moment, TCOLE's budget runs around $4 million per year. Assuming a) a 95% payment rate, and b) licensure fee rates of $50/year for police, $40/year for 911 operators, and $30/year for jailers, Grits estimates about $4.9 million could be generated. One could fiddle with those fee amounts to adjust that figure up or down.

There are also nearly 3,000 agencies authorized to provide training who could also be asked to pay for the privilege. At $500 per year, ~$1.4 million could be generated from that cohort.

If Texas must begin charging licensing fees, anyway, it should do so at a level that lets the state expand oversight functions, not just keep up the status quo.

Related: See Grits' discussion of TCOLE's Sunset review.

Dallas chief resigns; Manley remains: WTF?

Grits should have mentioned Dallas police Chief Renee Hall's resignation in yesterday's post about the Dallas budget, but it seemed like a separate topic. She wasn't resigning over budget cuts, like the chief in Seattle. Rather, she left after a half dozen city council members declared they'd lost confidence in her leadership, largely as a result of a tone-deaf after action report that seemed to pre-exonerate officers for misconduct while overstating protester "violence." I wrote at the time:

In a way, I empathize with [Chief Hall]. Generations of white male chiefs in Dallas have gotten away with feeding the council and the press a load of horse shit and insisting they eat it. They always have done so before. Now a black woman is chief and they're going to hold her accountable?

But as my octogenarian father likes to say, "Fair is a place where they judge pigs." The George-Floyd protests were a polarizing experience for everyone involved and the DPD report came off as one-sided, defensive, and tone deaf.

Not very long ago, it would have been enough.

That said, if at any time over the last several months you'd told me they were replacing Brian Manley with Renee Hall, Grits would have taken that trade in a heartbeat. At least she did an after-action report! Austin hasn't seen one.

Viewed from afar, Chief Hall has appeared more open to the sorts of proposals put forward in Austin's 2020 budget than our own apparently un-fireable Chief-for-Life. For example, when the city and the Meadows Foundation proposed having mental-health professionals take the lead instead of cops on certain calls in a Dallas pilot program, even Sen. John Cornyn supported the idea. Chief Hall cooperated and helped figure out ways to make it work.

By contrast, APD under Chief Manley did everything they could to thwart and minimize a similar program in Austin, which ended up serving hardly any people. This year, the city council doubled down on the idea, overruling the chief's explicit and implicit objections. The new budget uses savings from delayed cadet classes to staff up extra paramedics to handle the mental-health and addiction caseloads, as well as separating the 911 call center from police control to keep officers from being sent to every scene.

Hall's departure highlights the difficulties old-school police chiefs are having coming to grips with the new, post-George-Floyd political reality. When what used to be veto power becomes advice ignored, we've seen life-long cops around the country take it as insulting and walk away from the chief's job. We've yet to see if a new crop of reformist chiefs step up or if departments keep recycling the same names from one city to the next.

Gee, I wonder what it's like to have your opinion ignored by decision makers? Well before George Floyd died, dozens of Austin groups called for Brian Manley's ouster, and we still can't get rid of him!

In many ways - whether regarding police accountability, bail reform, budgeting, arrest policies for marijuana, or other matters - law enforcement leaders appear unprepared to accept civilian leadership, or at least that's a theme that keeps cropping up. That's 100% what led to Brian Manley's troubles in Austin. The council would pass resolutions, directives, budget riders, you name it, and he continually kicked the reform can down the road. Finally, well before the George Floyd protests began, a huge swath of the community wanted him gone. I bet Spencer Cronk wishes he'd swapped Manley for Chief Hall back in April!

Chief Hall wasn't perfect. Her department's response to protests this summer was regrettably violent and ham handed and she seemed to be less of a reformer than perhaps "reform-tolerant." Grits didn't view her as a champion of change in Dallas, but neither was she its biggest opponent. (That would be the police union.)

Still, that Renee Hall is gone in Dallas and Chief Manley - a much more energetic reform opponent - remains in charge of the Austin Police Department speaks to the unpredictable nature of protest movements. How officialdom reacts can be quite localized and based on a handful of individuals' personal decisions. That's true both of Chief Hall's decision to leave and also Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk's decision to stake his own tenure on Chief Manley after the City Council issued a unanimous "no confidence" vote criticizing his leadership.

In Dallas, #DefundThePolice becomes epithet to describe any cut, even amidst COVID revenue shortfalls

Debates over "defunding the police" became even sillier this week with Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson trotting out the phrase to oppose a $7 million cut to police overtime that's almost trivial in the scheme of a) the overall Dallas police budget and b) COVID-driven revenue shortfalls.

Because our friends in the MSM can't keep from saying Austin "cut" a third of its police budget when the IRL cuts were less than 5 percent, Grits can almost understand the public's confusion over whether cuts are a good thing. They've been repeatedly lied to, after all. If Austin had done what the governor and police unions pretend they did, it could be alarming. But it's just not true.

In Dallas, though, Mayor Johnson is using "defund the police" as an epithet to characterize a far smaller cut that only affects a few million dollars in police overtime. (As an aside, this comes as the press airs headlines about DPD officers scamming the overtime system.)

In the wake of that dramatic 13-2 loss, the Big D Mayor could have considered that politics is the art of compromise, understand that he'll have to work with these 13 council members going forward, and simply accepted the L. Instead, he's doubled down, echoing GOP talking points and earning enthusiastic Republican praise, while isolating himself from council members who said his comments were "insulting" and accused him of "grandstanding." 

The net result of this pointless display was to invite Greg Abbott to include Dallas in his attacks on Austin, and siding with him instead of the city. Viewed generously, I guess, at least we know Mayor Johnson is not letting his re-election prospects dictate policy positions. He's in the process of alienating big chunks of Democratic base that he may later discover he needs.

Manley: "Oh, no! I have the same number of officers I did yesterday! Must make radical cuts to popular units to maintain patrol at current levels"

Austin Police Chief Brian Manley's disingenuous response to modest budget cuts (and major disempowering of him) demonstrates why, long before the George-Floyd protests began, a wide array of local community groups beyond criminal-justice reformers had called for his ouster.

Manley petulantly reacted to the council's new budget by presenting a plan to slash popular units and assigning those cops to patrol, claiming he was forced to do so to address 911 and traffic enforcement. This is a lie. I'd say it's silly, and it is, except that it has serious consequences because the local media takes his lies seriously and promotes them as "news." (Looking at you, Ryan Autullo and Tony Plohetstki!) That's the problematic part. All the insiders know what's really going on.

IRL, nothing changed for police management thanks to Austin's new budget. Several key units like the crime lab, Internal Affairs, and the 911 call center are being taken from the department's control, but none of that would affect patrol. Shortly after the new budget takes effect, there will be significantly more EMS staff in place to handle 911 calls that police admit should be handed off, so the budget decisions actually reduce pressure on patrol to respond to 911.

The only actual "cuts," $21 million, come from delaying the police academy. But it was already delayed until the department can finish an (overdue) audit and revamp problematic training practices. Just reviewing video will take months. I've not spoken to anyone who thinks a new curriculum can be developed before next year. Once a new training program is ready, cadet classes are eight months long. 

So APD wouldn't have had any new officers this fiscal year even if city council had granted them a spring cadet class. The idea that a vote in August necessitated radical staffing changes before the budget even takes effect on October 1st just isn't credible. There were no layoffs. APD has and will have the same number of staff that they did before. 

Finally, other units are being reevaluated, but that doesn't necessarily mean the jobs are on the chopping block. In fact, that process could free up officers. For example, it's possible the mounted unit could be disbanded because stabling the horses is too expensive. But I haven't heard anybody say those cops should be fired. Similarly, using park rangers instead of APD to address park safety doesn't necessarily mean police will be lose their jobs. It could, or those officers could become park rangers, or they could be absorbed back into the force to perform other tasks. Those decisions have yet to be made but for now, those officers are still on the force.

Because there are other initiatives being launched to try to peel tasks away from APD to reduce the need for more officers, it's not clear whether we'll need those extra officers from the mounted unit or park police in the long haul. But alternative programs may take time to ramp up and City Council has left themselves plenty of flexibility if they need to keep them.

Staffing isn't the problem. Crappy management is the problem. Brian Manley should be fired. And if he won't do it, so should Spencer Cronk. It's time Austin had a police chief who's willing to collaborate with the City Council and not make specious staffing changes to embarrass them.

Legislation filed to abolish driver surcharges

Yesterday, Texas Senate State Affairs Committee Chairwoman Joan Huffman and House Appropriations Committee Chairman John Zerwas filed companion bills which appear to be the leadership-driven abolition proposal for the Driver Responsibility Program (DRP) that will be the main focus this session.

SB 918 and HB 2048 aren't perfect, but they're certainly headed in the right direction. The bills suggest an array of new funding sources for trauma hospitals, most of which are less objectionable than the reviled Driver Responsibility surcharge.

The bill increases a fee on auto insurance policies by two bucks, 60% of which would go to the trauma fund. It diverts money from a vehicle-registration fee that was already authorized to fund the DRP. And it raises the state portion of traffic fines on certain moving violations from $30 to $50, while lowering the municipal portion from 5% to 4%; however, only 30% of that money will go to trauma centers, with the rest headed to the general revenue fund.

Perhaps the most controversial funding source would simply rename surcharges for people convicted of DWI, calling them "fines" but applying them in exactly the same way.

So, "in addition to the fine prescribed for the offense," which is set by the judge, the bill proposes that first-time Class B DWI offenders pay a "fine" of $3,000 spread out over three years; $4,500 for second offenders; $6,000 for third. Thirty percent of this money will go to trauma hospitals; the rest goes to the state's general-revenue fund.

Here's the rub: When those same fines were "surcharges," a majority of drivers could not pay them. And in an era when the Federal Reserve tells us 40% of the American public cannot pay a surprise $400 bill without going into debt or selling something, there's little reason to expect that will change.

Unless judges are given the ability to waive or reduce those amounts at sentencing, this is going to create the same problems we saw under the Driver Responsibility Program with respect to high nonpayment rates for DWI offenders. Indeed, low payment rates inevitably will make these fines another unreliable funding source for trauma hospitals, just as surcharges never remotely paid hospitals as much as the Lege originally predicted.

In Texas, DWI is presently a Class B misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $2,000 fine on the first offense. This bill would add a mandatory $3,000 fine on top of that, which we already know from experience most people can't pay.

To Grits, the more rational approach would be to increase the max fine for misdemeanor DWI to $3,000 ($4,500 on the second offense, etc.), letting judges set the number, taking into account ability to pay. Then fund trauma hospitals from a general-revenue line item to ensure stability. (They're generating quite a bit of new, general-revenue money in this bill.) That way, legislators could signal their disapprobation for DWI by increasing fines, but avoid replicating predictable failures we've already seen from unpaid surcharges.

Even Mothers Against Drunk Driving supported allowing judges to waive or reduce surcharges in the interests of justice. The Legislature should do the same with DWI fines.

Regardless, all these problems with high fines are happening now in the status quo for DWI offenders, and the bill would eliminate surcharges for hundreds of thousands of people going forward. By any measure, it's an improvement.

CORRECTION: The original version of this blog post indicated that people with existing surcharges would not receive amnesty under the bill. That was inaccurate. Grits regrets the error.

Considering long DPS license-center lines and ballooning prison-healthcare costs at House Appropriations

The Texas House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday will consider two items this blog has covered quite a bit heading into session: Long lines at DPS driver's license centers, and prison healthcare costs. For any staffers reviewing in preparation for the hearing, here's some background on those two topics:

Reducing DPS License-Center Lines

In the Texas Senate, the conversation centered almost entirely around how much money the Legislature should spend to expand license-center capacity. But they should also be considering ways to reduce the number of people in line, whose volume is exacerbated by hundreds of thousands of people with suspended licenses trying to get legal. Here are some suggestions for tackling that problem:

• Senate Finance debate ignores policy solutions to excessive DPS license center lines
• How the Driver Responsibility surcharge contributes to long lines at DPS license centers
• Long DPS lines making costs of TX driver surcharges more apparent, outweigh revenue to trauma centers
• Texas DPS acknowledges short-staffed call center in budget request to reduce long license-center lines

Limiting Prison Healthcare Costs

Texas ranks near the bottom among states in per-prisoner healthcare spending. The state has under-funded prison healthcare for years, with increases over the last couple of sessions never quite making up for draconian cuts in prior sessions. Texas can't reasonably cut further. The only reliable way to reduce healthcare costs is to reduce the number of people incarcerated to whom the TDCJ is providing medical care.

• #txlege budget writers in denial on prison healthcare
• Guard understaffing just one reason the #txlege must reduce inmate populations and close more state prisons
• Texas' 'secret death penalty': inadequate prison healthcare

Senate Finance debate ignores policy solutions to excessive DPS license-center lines

The Texas Senate Finance Committee this morning had a quite-animated discussion over long lines at DPS driver license offices. But nobody yet has raised the topic Grits considers the most significant in this debate: state-driver's-license-revocation policies contributing hundreds of thousands of extra people annually to DPS license-center lines. I'd written about these issues last fall.

• How the Driver Responsibility surcharge contributes to long lines at DPS license centers
• Long DPS lines making costs of TX driver surcharges more apparent, outweigh revenue to trauma centers
• Texas DPS acknowledges short-staffed call center in budget request to reduce long license-center lines

Sen. Kirk Watson bemoaned DPS asking the state to throw money at the problem without a plan to fix it. He's right.

To me, there are obvious policy solutions to reduce the number of people unnecessarily in line at driver-license centers. But first, the state must stop the myopic focus on solving the problem through staffing, and focus on measures to reduce the number of people in line.

It's not that more staffing wouldn't help, especially in the Customer Service Center where drivers' questions might be answered over the phone without waiting in line at the license center. But the biggest problem, by a country mile, is that Texas suspends more driver's licenses than any other state.

Most suspensions occur because of the Driver Responsibility surcharge. About 3 million drivers have incurred 16 million surcharges since its inception. Of those, 1.4 million  currently have suspended driver's licenses. Another 300K have suspended licenses because of unpaid traffic tickets. Adding all these people with complex license-restoration cases into the lines at DPS when they otherwise may not need to renew for years contributes greatly to long license-center lines. How could it not? A conservative estimate of the number of additional, unnecessary license-center visits generated annually because of driver-license suspensions runs into the high nine figures.

There are other, smaller contributors to license-center lines: E.g., 100,000 sex offenders are not only required to maintain registry requirements with the state, they must renew their driver's licenses annually. There's no added safety benefit to doing both, and it's making the lines for everyone else longer.

Similarly, everyone convicted of marijuana possession has their license suspended for six months, after which they must go back to the license center to get it renewed. There's no public-safety reason for these extra license renewals, and they also make the lines longer. The state Republican Party platform endorsed making pot possession a civil offense, in part to avoid these sorts of collateral consequences.

Here's an outline of budget and policy measures that would reduce license-center lines:

• Eliminate the Driver Responsibility surcharge and give amnesty to the 1.4 million people whose licenses have been suspended over it.
• Stop requiring sex offenders to renew their driver's licenses annually.
• Punish low-level marijuana possession with a civil penalty instead of criminal charges to bypass federal license-suspension requirement.
• Fully fund the DPS Customer Service Center and increase pay for call-center staffers to stop high turnover.
• Consider renewing licenses every eight years instead of every seven years.

If and when the DRP is eliminated, there will be an initial surge as people with suspended licenses get them renewed. But after that, these measures would dramatically relieve pressure on license-center lines.

The only alternative to reducing pressure on license-center lines is throwing more money at a failing system. No matter which agency is in charge of licensure, there is no third path.

Guard understaffing just one reason the #txlege must reduce inmate populations and close more state prisons

Budget hawks at the Texas Legislature should be taking a close look at the state prison system this year. Without significant policy changes to take some of the stress off of the agency and its employees, the system is on the verge of crisis along several axes.

As the Texas Senate Finance Committee prepares to hear testimony today on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's budget request, the Houston Chronicle's Keri Blakinger reported over the weekend that understaffing at several rural prison units is reaching crisis levels, with system-wide turnover approaching 30 percent. Overtime last year cost $80 million, the most ever spent, and overtime hours were nearly triple 2012 levels.

TDCJ is asking the Lege to solve the problems by raising salaries by $156 million. And salaries should be higher. But that wouldn't cause staff to magically appear in Kenedy or Hartley Counties, for example. There just aren't enough people there to entice with dangerous, low paying work. And if you're willing to move, there is dangerous, high paying work to be had in the oil fields. It's not hard to see why folks leave rural prison jobs as soon as they can find something else.

Grits has been harping on understaffing at rural units for years, and consider those prime candidates for closure. It's pretty easy to envision sentencing reduction packages for low-level drug offenses and probation reforms to reduce revocations that would let the Lege close several of these far-flung, understaffed units. I'm hoping we see some of those filed this session.

These days, lots of people want to reduce mass incarceration simply because it's the right thing to do, and your correspondent counts himself on that list. But even for policymakers who lack that predilection, there are strong arguments for reducing the size of Texas' prison system based in pragmatism and fiscal conservatism.

Guard understaffing is just one reason the Lege might want to reduce prison populations. Others are, in no particular order:

• Prison healthcare costs are skyrocketing: TDCJ says it needs $247 million to continue providing current levels of services. The draft Senate budget reduces prison healthcare by $1.3 million, while the House budget only gave them $160 million of what they need. Reduce the number of prisoners, reduce medical expenses.
• Maintenance costs rising: TDCJ has asked for $146 million in new maintenance spending this biennium. They're going to ask for another nine-figure maintenance bump next biennium, as well. Some units should be closed instead of repaired.
• A/C litigation may be tip of an iceberg: TDCJ agreed to install air conditioning at the Wallace Pack unit after federal litigation. But the standards the court set for heat sensitive inmates there are violated at other units, and it's likely the agency will be required to air condition more if not all units if other, related litigation succeeds. Reducing inmate populations before that happened would lessen the impact. (Ironically, paying for A/C would go a long way toward boosting staff retention.)
• Prisons are not hospitals: Many addicts and mentally-ill people should not be there. (I realize expanding Medicaid in Texas is a non-starter given the current statewide leadership, but that's the best public-safety strategy for dealing with those populations.) That observation leads us to ...
• Penalty reductions could free up money for treatment: Presently, treatment dollars are scarce and waiting lists for substance-abuse treatment are long. Reducing user-level drug possession to a Class A misdemeanor would free up nearly $200 million per biennium. A budget rider could designate that all savings certified from the change be spent on drug treatment.

Crime has been declining for a long time now, but Texas prisons remain full. That can change - we can reduce incarceration without reducing public safety - but it will require viewing the question through a policy lens, not just a budgetary one. Throwing more money at prisons without addressing policies that keep the prisons full will just kick the can down the road. Eventually, the Legislature must reduce incarceration. It would be better if they did so before understaffing flowers into a full-blown public safety crisis at remote, rural units that gets people killed.

County Judge blames #txlege for indigent defense costs, but local officials' choices are to blame

Having written yesterday about Texas counties portraying their core, criminal-justice responsibilities as "unfunded mandates," this morning Grits was treated to a column in the Dallas News by Cooke County Judge Jason Brinkley. Cooke County is a mostly rural area hugging the Oklahoma border north of Denton; Gainesville is the county seat.

After rightly complaining that the state's under-funded school-finance system, not county expenditures, were driving property-tax increases, Mr. Brinkley veers off into bizarro-world. Nearly all of this reeks of falsehood and misrepresents reality:

When new state mandates cost money to carry out but don't come with state funding, they act as state-imposed local property tax increases. Either way you look at it, these are costs that counties must cover, and they are increasing. 

For example, in Cooke County our indigent defense costs have increased by 80 percent over the past eight years and the criminal caseloads have more than doubled. 

We have seen a 50 percent increase in our jail population over the past eight years and in our costs for food and inmate health care. The upcoming requirements of the Sandra Bland Act are estimated to cost our county $400,000 a year, a 10 percent increase in our jail budget.

Let's dig into these claims. First, he's right that Cooke County's indigent defense costs have increased 80 percent, as the Indigent Defense Commission corroborates. And since Cooke County's population has only nudged upward over the last decade, on its face that seems alarming.

What Judge Brinkley fails to tell Dallas News readers, however, is WHY indigent defense costs are rising. As it turns out, ALL of the increase may be attributed to increases in the total-case count, not new-state-government requirements. Despite crime declining throughout this period, the number of Cooke-County cases with appointed counsel rose from 379 in 2001 to 850 in 2018, or a 124 percent increase.

Why might that be? One possible answer: Prosecutors control how many cases are brought, and continued to increase case filings even after crime had been declining for years, not just in Texas, but nationally.

That's what seems to have happened in Judge Brinkley's jurisdiction. Cooke  County's population increased only slightly over the last decade, and crime went down. But in FY 2011, according to Office of Court Administration data, felony district courts in Cooke County added just 430 new cases. In FY 2018, they added 1,289.

That's a 200 percent increase in felony cases brought by local, elected prosecutors in Cooke County during an era when crime declined. The Gainesville Register has reported that much of that increase stemmed from increases in user-level drug prosecutions.

Obviously, most of the jail increase stemmed from the increase in cases. But it's also a function of a refusal to enact bail reform. According to the Commission on Jail Standards, 63% of inmates in the Cooke County Jail as of December 1st were awaiting trial, but were being held because they couldn't make bond.

Judge Brinkley is blaming state government for problems being caused by local, elected officials. Both increased indigent defense and jail costs in his county resulted directly from decisions by local prosecutors, not anything the Legislature did.

Finally, the idea that the Sandra Bland Act will cost Cooke County $400,000 sounds like a major reach. I don't doubt there are additional costs, mostly for additional training and record keeping; installing sensors or cameras so the jail can track whether guards actually make their rounds is probably the biggest one, but they don't require cameras can view every cell. Looking at the full panoply of new requirements, it's difficult to imagine the cost to tiny Cooke County coming close to $400k. The claim appears especially suspect once you understand how much Judge Brinkley misstated other criminal-justice costs.

I'm not sure why county officials would want to pit themselves against the popular Sandra Bland Act. The new requirements were de minimis, and from a tactical perspective, they lose that debate, even if they win!

Nobody forced Cooke County prosecutors to increase felony prosecutions 200 percent over a period when their population barely inched upward and crime (real crimes, with victims, not prosecution of addicts) declined. And it's childish to mask responsibility for those choices by loudly blaming someone else for them in the Dallas Morning News.

County officials should stop conflating the very real challenges facing the Legislature over school-finance and property taxes with their whining over having to pay for traditional duties they've been performing for decades. It's reasonable to seek relief regarding property taxes, but the state legislature isn't responsible for most of the justice-system problems county officials are decrying in their media blitz.

#txlege budget writers in denial on prisoner health care

In its Legislative Appropriations Request, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said it needs an additional $247 million in order to continue delivering inmate healthcare at current levels, and ideally would like tens of millions more to make salaries more competitive. In response, the initial Texas House budget authorized an additional $160 million, and the Senate budget cut medical care by $1.3 million, reported the Texas Tribune.

The House clearly came up with the $160 million number because that's the amount they're having to pay in TDCJ's "supplemental" budget, meaning the amount the Lege under-funded services during the last biennium. But that ignores to the extent to which under-funding led to denied services, and it also doesn't account for medical inflation. Bottom line: The Senate number is pure fantasy, and even the House budget under-funds medical services for prisoners, ensuring the Lege will face another large supplemental appropriations request in 2021 if they don't increase the appropriation before May.

This has been going on for so long, budget writers have run out of options. Every biennium, they must start by writing a nine-figure check to cover un-funded costs in TDCJ's healthcare budget. A few years ago, the Legislature tried to make prisoners' families pay for inmate healthcare, extracting money from their commissary accounts. But the fees didn't raise as much as projected, while prisoners deferring doctor visits for financial reasons led to higher overall costs because of a lack of preventive care. So we've been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

At this point, Texas prisons already operate on a bare-bones budget. It's a non-controversial fact of life that healthcare costs will continue to rise by nine-figure amounts every biennium without significant policy changes to reduce incarceration.

Whether or not legislative budget writers want to acknowledge it, the only reliable way to lower the medical-services line item at TDCJ beyond current, rock-bottom levels is to reduce the number of prisoners for whom the state must provide health care. If Texas wants to lock up more people than any other state in the union, state government must pay for medical care while those folks are incarcerated.

Fixing longstanding criminal-justice problems in a black-ink budget year

Comptroller Glenn Hegar gave the Texas Legislature some good news with a black-ink budget projection for the coming biennium, suggesting they may have more than $9 billion more to spend than in 2017. Some of that will go for Hurricane Harvey costs (thought the Rainy Day fund should also contribute to that), some will get gobbled up with increased costs for entitlement programs, and any school finance fix will almost certainly consume the lion's share of the rest.

But it's not inconceivable that the Texas Legislature could use some of that money to solve ongoing problems in the justice system. What might that look like? Here are some ideas Grits brainstormed; let me know in the comments if you think of others:

Eliminate the Driver Responsibility Surcharge: $300 million

Both Texas political parties and every politician under the Pink Dome you ask wishes the Driver Responsibility Surcharge weren't the law. But the program brings in roughly $300 million per year - half goes to the General Revenue fund, half goes to hospital trauma centers - and politically, the surcharge can't be repealed unless the state comes up with the money.

Raise the Age: $45 million

When the 85th Texas Legislature ended, Texas was one of seven states that prosecuted 17 year olds as adults. Today we're one of only four. There's a decent chance that, if the Lege doesn't change the law this year, we'll be the only one when the 87th Legislature convenes in 2021. The Legislative Budget Board estimated making the shift would cost $45 million during the first biennium of implementation, and $70 million per biennium after that, to send youth through juvenile corrections systems instead of the adult side. (There's some evidence these costs are overstated, under-estimating related savings.) The House has passed RTA legislation two sessions in a row, but senators and the Lt. Governor are unlikely to bite without a dedicated allocation in the budget.

Boost reentry funds: $30 million

Increasing funds to prisoners leaving TDCJ from $100 to $300 would cost ~$13 million per year, $26 million per biennium. Tack on another $4 million per biennium to make sure they have driver's licenses or ID cards when they hit the streets, and mandate that DPS issue them based on information provide by TDCJ. Neither of these were in the agency's appropriations request, but they should have been.

Crime labs: $8-10 million

The Legislature either needs to boost funding for crime labs by perhaps $8-10 million per biennium or start charging for services. The DPS LAR only asked for $5.8 million that was taken away from the agency in user fees. But that amount was insufficient to solve the months-long backlogs presently being experienced. Legislators should find out what would be needed to reduce backlogs to a reasonable period then fund DPS crime labs at THAT level. Or, alternatively, Grits supported the user fees the Governor rescinded in the interim and think they're a reasonable way to fund this service.

Prison costs soaring: Cuts needed

TDCJ's appropriations request asked for an increase of more than $700 million beyond what's already a $7.3 billion-with-a-b budget. The LAR suggests the agency needs $247 million over the next biennium to maintain current (low, perhaps even unconstitutional) standards for provision of inmate health care, and another $32 million for probationer treatment funds. They also asked for $156 million for staff raises and $146 million in facility repairs. These are not unreasonable requests, but Legislature should enact further decarceration reforms and close understaffed, rural prison units and those requiring costly repairs to pay for those requests and reduce upward cost pressures.

Indigent defense: Est. $10 million

Counties want the state to pay 100% of indigent defense costs. For reasons Grits has articulated previously, that's a specious and self-interested position that flies in the face of the traditional state-county roles in the justice system. That said, the state would benefit from additional, targeted investments in the indigent-defense system. They should prioritize Texas Indigent Defense Commission grants for public-defender officers, which are the most effective and efficient way to deliver legal services where they're needed most. They should finance a capital defender office to handle indigent death penalty cases. ($1 million per biennium.) They should boost funding for the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs. And they should take Judge Elsa Alcala's advice to fund counsel for indigent defendants filing habeas corpus writs related to ineffective assistance of counsel. Obviously, public-defender grants could be of any size, but $10 million added over the biennium to these priorities would make a big difference.

I didn't include an estimate for upgrades to mental-health services because a) I have no idea how to evaluate costs or need, and b) my sense is the state would be better off if these services were primarily utilized outside the justice system, breaking from past practices. But that's certainly another area in need of investment. And there are probably specific investments to reduce competency restoration waits and to better meet the mental-health needs of incarcerated people that deserved to make this list. The Lege could boost state investments well into the nine-figure range and it still wouldn't be enough.