Water outages, unreasonable court fees, pension and forensic follies, and other stories

In an ongoing effort to clear Grits' browswer tabs, here are a few items which merit readers' attention but may not make it into independent posts:

CCA 'patently unreasonable' in court costs opinion, says appellate justice
Texas First Court of Appeals Justice Terry Jennings issued a strongly worded 22-page concurrence declaring that Jani Maselli Wood was right about court fees, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was "patently unreasonable," and the high court should revisit the issue, reported Texas Lawyer. See related Grits coverage of fee litigation by Wood, herself a candidate for CCA judge in the 2014 GOP primary. She was quoted agreeing with the opinion, declaring, "They had to change decades of law to make me lose … The courts should not be revenue centers or tax collectors for the state."

Water outage ends at two TDCJ units
Nearly 2,000 prisoners and 400 staff at two Texas women's prison units, Hobby and Marlin, were without running water from Thanksgiving until Dec. 9, according to news reports. At the Hobby unit, for a while 1,400 people shared 27 portable toilets; 732 people shared 16 portables at the Marlin unit.

New juvie diversion programs starting up
Texas counties will soon begin diverting more juvenile defendants "from problem-plagued remote, state-run lockups into less costly community-based treatment and rehabilitation programs" closer to home which "produce better outcomes," reported Mike Ward at the Houston Chronicle. The plan amounts to "giving counties additional money to take care of youths in community-based treatment and rehabilitation programs instead of sending them to state lockups." Texas has already cut its youth prison population from more than 5,000 to around 1,000 now. But the reductions will be less than were initially advertised: "The state's five juvenile lockups hold just over 1,000 youths, down from more than 5,000 in state custody just seven years ago. The new plan would mean that at least 30 more youths would stay in local programs this year and 150 more next year." At one point, estimates were that hundreds more youth may be diverted, nearly depopulating Texas youth prisons entirely. That's not quite what's happening.

Why Argue? Stop arresting for minor pot possession
Dallas Police Chief David Brown says giving tickets for marijuana possession is "hard to argue with," but frets that people busted for pot might not be as easily coerced into becoming informants, and made some inexplicable noise about Timothy McVeigh. If that's all he's got, he really shouldn't argue. The full Dallas City Council will soon consider the issue. In 2015, how is this not a no-brainer?

Explaining Texas' prison boom and slicing the incarceration pie
Grits doesn't pay enough attention to the Prison Policy Initiative, which always produces useful, interesting work. Check out this post explaining the '90s Texas prison boom and another attempting to delineate the entire "incarceration pie" - i.e., a pie chart showing all forms of incarceration in the U.S. and their relative proportions. Notably, the thesis that more restrictive parole decisions caused the dramatic 5-year boost incarceration rates also works in the other direction. Slightly boosted parole rates primarily explain why Texas' prison population lowered enough in recent years to close three prison units.

Wishful thinking won't solve Dallas pension follies
What happens if pension obligations for Dallas police officers can't be covered by their failing investments?, wonders the Dallas Observer. The money shortfall begins 15 years from now but he budget-hole is so big, they must plan for a solution now.

Accreditation won't solve forensic follies
PBS Frontline had a good story in terms of articulating the scope of the national, indeed global crisis facing many traditional fields of forensic science. But it perhaps oversells the extent to which accreditation will solve the problem. It hasn't in Texas, though along with the Forensic Science Commission it's helped make the problems more transparent.

Summary: 2015 TX juvie and crimjust legislation
See a summary published in November of Texas legislative action on juvenile and criminal justice reform from the UT-Austin Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis.

Whitmire: Don't change TYC policy on 19-20 year olds for now

Despite a recent analysis by TYC's Ombudsman saying changes from 2007 resulted in more Texas youth being certified as adults for crimes committed as juveniles, Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire says the policy is unlikely to change this session, the San Antonio Express News reported yesterday ("More juvenile offenders landing in actual prison," Feb. 23):

Scores of youthful offenders are being sent straight into the adult criminal justice system - 246 of them last year alone - for crimes they committed as juveniles.

Juvenile justice advocates are blaming last year's 22 percent spike on a reform effort launched two years ago that was designed to protect younger offenders. They say young people who are easier to rehabilitate are being forced into a harsher adult setting that can't meet their needs.

After the Texas Youth Commission sex abuse scandal in 2007, state officials decided the agency would no longer handle offenders 19 to 21 - a move intended in part to protect younger children from older youths.

"It's pretty simple," said Jill Mata, Bexar County's chief juvenile prosecutor. "If we didn't have enough time to work with these kids within the juvenile justice system (before they turned 19), then we were faced with no option but to certify them as adults."

Bexar County certified 28 juveniles as adults last year, a 75 percent jump from a year earlier.

Tarrant County certified 11 juveniles as adults last year, nearly triple the number from a year earlier. Harris County saw a more modest rise in adult certifications since the TYC reforms passed in 2007, from 74 cases in 2007 to 76 last year.

Bill Hawkins, who until last month was Harris County's chief juvenile prosecutor, said the length of time a youth would have at TYC was one of the major factors for him in deciding whether to seek adult certification for particular kids. "When the window was shortened, certification became a more viable option in some cases," he said.

Texas allows juveniles as young as 14 to stand trial as adults for capital and first-degree felonies. Fifteen-year-olds can stand trial as adults for any kind of felony.

TYC ombudsman Will Harrell, who in a recent report highlighted the increase in adult certifications last year, would like to see the age limit restored to 21.

But with key lawmakers vowing to further reduce TYC's already dwindling population - calling the troubled agency a lost cause - it's not clear if there will be an appetite for raising TYC's maximum age past 18.

"We're not going to change anything at this stage," said Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee. "We need a greater sampling before we determine that there's a cause and effect. I'm not convinced."