Data: When Texas ↓ pot prosecutions, the system focused more on violent crime

Grits has been tracking what I've called "The Great Texas Hemp Hiatus," referring to the Texas Legislature's legalization of industrial "hemp," requiring a THC test to prosecute for marijuana possession. It was ostensibly a legislative accident, but it appears the change is going to stick: No legislation was filed to remove the testing requirement when the bill filing deadline passed on Friday.

From the Office of Court Administration's 2020 annual statistical report, here's how that impacted marijuana prosecution in Texas:

In 2018, by contrast, there were 87,618 misdemeanor drug cases in 2018. That's a 55% drop from before the new testing requirement was implemented.

Marijuana has been one of the most common charges Texans are arrested for in recent years. In 2020, though, more people were arrested for Class C misdemeanors at traffic stops (41,731) than were prosecuted for marijuana possession.

Polling consistently shows most Texans favor full-blown legalization of marijuana for recreational use, and an even greater number endorse more widespread legalization of medical cannabis. So for the average Texan, it's a big yawn. They wouldn't care if that 39,000 number dropped to zero.

For the system, though, it's a big deal. Drug arrests gave 80,000 cops across Texas at more than 2,000 agencies something to do when crime declined but cities kept hiring more of them. From the 2018 OCA Statistical Report:

In 2020, by contrast, drug cases' contribution to misdemeanor caseloads had dropped from first to third in the prosecutorial pecking order on the misdemeanor side, replaced after DWI by "assault."

So when police and prosecutors reduced emphasis on marijuana prosecution, the result was an increased focus on violent crime as a proportion of how they spend their time. This seems like an outcome most Texans would support.

Make Grits Philosopher King and Texas would legalize pot for recreational use, just as 14 other states have done, or at least decriminalize, as have another 16. In the scheme of things, marijuana is safer than alcohol by a country mile, and research on the substitution effects for everything from booze to opioids makes me wonder if its role as an agonist might reduce overdose and/or DWI deaths. But Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick have declared that option off the table. Until then, Grits supports narrowing the funnel facilitating criminal prosecutions for pot at every level. Texans are less safe, not more, when the government criminalizes markets this large with no public-safety imperative driving it.

Oklahoma! (does #cjreform); HPD raid response doesn't address phony informant; why do probationers die at high rates? And other stories

Here are a few browser clearing odds and ends:

One out of 8 Travis County jail bookings in 2018 was for Class C misdemeanors
In Travis County last year, more than 5,000 people were arrested for a Class-C misdemeanor only - about one out of every eight people booked into the county jail. Between the Freedom Cities ordinance restricting Class C arrests, beginning in January, and the elimination in June of the local no-sit-no-lie ordinance aimed at the homeless, those bookings should decline significantly for 2019.

Post-raid HPD reforms don't address faked informant that got 4 officers shot and killed 2 innocent people
After a no-knock drug raid in Houston this spring killed two innocent people and left four officers shot, HPD Chief Art Acevedo has announced he's creating a special division of the narcotics unit to execute search warrants in drug cases. But as I told the Houston Chronicle:

“His reform is not on point to what caused the problem,” said Scott Henson, policy director with the criminal justice reform nonprofit Just Liberty. “It’s not solving the problem that your investigators are relying on fabricated informants — [it] wasn’t a function of who’s doing the raid, but why you’re doing the raid, and the reliance on this informant, who it turns out didn’t exist. That’s what caused everybody to get shot. It just elides the core issue of what really happened.”

Attacking junk blood-spatter evidence
Check out an amicus brief arguing to disallow blood-spatter evidence in the Joe Bryan murder case that was the subject of Pam Colloff's massive NY Times Magazine/Pro Publica feature. In it, Duke law-school faculty and students argue that, based on current standards, the blood-spatter expert in Bryan's case could not today testify to the main points used to convict him.

Not so natural after all
His death in the Victoria County Jail was attributed to "natural causes." It turns out, he was denied his methadone prescription and died from preventable withdrawal symptoms. Read the excellent Victoria Advocate account from Kali Venable. See also the Advocate editorial board's condemnation of using jails and prisons to treat addiction.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand ..."
"... it never has, and it never will," said Frederick Douglass. So Grits doesn't feel too bad that elected officials in Austin consider criminal-justice reformers excessively pushy, as several implied in this Austin Statesman article about a string of successful, capital-city #cjreform campaigns. Nobody was going to do any of those things if reformers said "Pretty please" and then waited politely for a response.

Own it!
Gov. Greg Abbott's intervention into Austin's homelessness crisis means he now owns the issue. If it isn't solved, it's his fault. Not sure that was the wisest political choice, but it's the one he made. MORE: Now the governor "owns" his own homeless encampment, with neither a budget line item nor any apparent exit plan besides providing still hypothetical services to Austin's homeless ad infinitum. That'll teach 'em! 

Why do probationers die at high rates?
Here's a possible, future, Suspicious Mysteries segment for the Reasonably Suspicious podcast: Grits has long been aware of research showing incarceration in prison reduces life expectancy. But a new study shows that being on probation is associated with a much higher morbidity rate than being in prison or jail, much less in the free world. I don't know how to parse these competing claims. One one hand, while prison healthcare isn't great, being in prison makes it easier to treat chronic conditions because the patient is always available and can't easily decline treatment. On the other, prison can make you sick; e.g., people who contract Hep C in prison  may suffer liver failure later, once they're out. Meanwhile, to the extent criminal laws in general target the poor, the developmentally disabled, substance abusers, the mentally ill, minority communities subject to discrimination, etc., it's not surprising probationers would be an especially sick lot. Or maybe the difference is that people in prison aren't at risk of dying from car crashes! Who knows? Grits would like to better understand this nexus of corrections, health, and morbidity rates. I haven't yet wrapped my head around it. When people die in prison or jail, there is an independent investigation; no one investigates when probationers die, so outside of the above-linked study, we don't have very much information at all regarding why that is.

The Probation Trap
Probation as an institution changes its form and purpose depending on the angle from which one looks at it. Viewed one way, it diverts people from prison. Viewed another, it's a net-widening trap. The Philadelphia Inquirer has published an excellent series expounding the latter view. Via SL&P.

Oklahoma!
As much as it pains me to say so, Oklahoma has now definitely out-paced Texas as the red-state poster child for criminal-justice reform. Also via SL&P:

• Boston Globe, "What a conservative state can teach us about progressive criminal justice reform"
• US News, "Oklahoma Focuses on Criminal Justice Reform"
• Washington Post, "Oklahoma approves largest single-day commutation in U.S. history"

On the ground, #cjreform is not really a red-state-blue-state issue.

When smelling pot is pretext for a search
In Philadelphia, police officers who said they searched a car because they smelled marijuana were extremely unlikely to find any and disproportionately searched black people. When the data was gathered, public defenders argued that "the odor of marijuana [should] no longer be considered probable cause for officers to believe a crime has occurred and conduct a search."

Breathalyzer tests as junk science
The New York Times took a trip down the rabbit hole of DWI breath-test forensics. Like DNA mixture software, analysts treat breathalyzers as a magical black box they simply assume supplies reliable results. The problems, however, have been long known.

'Five facts about crime in the U.S.'
Read this from the Pew Research Center.

Podcast: New evidence of Rodney Reed's innocence, first thoughts on the Atatiana Jefferson shooting, and the Mystery of the Disappearing Misdemeanor Arrests

Here's the latest Reasonably Suspicious podcast from Just Liberty:


This is the October 2019 episode of Just Liberty's Reasonably Suspicious podcast covering Texas criminal-justice policy and politics. This month, my cohost Amanda Marzullo and I interviewed attorneys for Rodney Reed, who is on death row with an execution date of November 20th. We plumbed unknowable but interesting questions about misdemeanor arrests, discussed the sad, grim, story of Atatiana Jefferson's shooting in Fort Worth, and complained that the moments spent reading and talking about a new ACLU report on how to end mass incarceration are time we'll never get back. :)

Intro

Okay, it's probably a crime for a former justice of the peace to pimp slap a Yankees fan at an ALCS game in Houston and make him cry, but it's also pretty funny.

Top Stories

• First takes on the Atatiana Jefferson shooting in Fort Worth (2:34)
• Evaluating ACLU decarceration recommendations for Texas (8:34)

Interview

This month, Mandy and I spoke to Bryce Benjet of the national Innocence Project and Quinncy McNeal of Mayer Brown in Houston on the Rodney Reed case. Reed is scheduled to be executed on November 20th. (14:38) This is excerpted from a longer conversation. I'll publish the full interview, which goes into more detail about debunked forensic testimony in the case, separately in a couple of days.

Suspicious Mysteries

Why have misdemeanor arrests declined? Why didn't they decline earlier when crime first dropped? What do we really know about why crime dropped or the relationship between crime and arrests? Mandy and I discuss some known unknowns. (27:15)

The Last Hurrah (36:40)

• Hard to reprimand Texas judges
• Years-long backlogs at crime labs
• Message sent by jury in prison-guard murder trial

As always, I've ordered a transcript and will add it below the jump when it comes back. Enjoy!

Texas trends follow national decline in misdemeanor arrests

The Wall Street Journal on Sunday published an item reporting on a nationwide decline in misdemeanor arrests, a trend this blog has been documenting for several years. So Grits thought it worth comparing the national trends cited to Texas data.

The WSJ article focused on jurisdictions where misdemeanor arrests could be broken out by race, with arrests of black people accounting for a disproportionate share of  the decrease. Texas data don't immediately allow us to make similar, racially delineated analyses, but the overall trend of reduced misdemeanor cases holds for Texas.

Texas misdemeanor cases by the numbers
Looking at top-line stats from the Office of Court Administration's 2018 Annual Statistical Report (from which all graphs below are screenshots), the number of non-traffic misdemeanor cases in Texas peaked in 2007 at 585,499, declining to 404,001.

When you consider Texas' dramatic population growth over these years, the decline appears even more significant.

Texas witnessed especially large declines over the previous five years in misdemeanor theft (-47%), theft by check (-81%), and driving with an invalid license (-25%), with small increases (less than population growth) for family violence (5%), marijuana possession (4%), and 1st offense DWI (2%).

Grits finds especially interesting the decline in misdemeanor-property-theft cases. Texas raised property-theft thresholds in 2015, so that one must now steal $2,500 to be charged with a felony. Felony-theft cases predictably declined in response, but misdemeanor theft cases declined even more. Perhaps that's a function of cops being less willing to focus attention on low-level cases, the tuff-on-crime crowd will surely say. But both reported crime stats and the National Crime Victim Survey tell us property thefts declined throughout this period. So if police did de-prioritize them, then policing clearly wasn't having the crime deterring effect that traditional models might predict. In fact, if such "de-policing" occurred, it correlated with less theft, not more. This raises a counter-intuitive possibility: Maybe what police do after the fact doesn't have that much to do with crime rates in the first place?

The 2018 data don't capture the period after the Texas Legislature accidentally made pot cases more difficult to prosecute without a lab test, but before then, both misdemeanor drug cases (mostly pot) and felony drug cases (mostly harder drugs) were a big source of growth in prosecutions:

Here's how new Texas misdemeanor and felony cases broke out in FY 2018:

The biggest decline, however, has been in traffic cases and other Class C misdemeanors, a trend which this blog has documented in the past.

Delving more deeply into these Class Cs, every category except local traffic ordinances have declined over the last five years. (I'm curious if readers have any suggestions why enforcement of local traffic ordinances would increase by a third over the last five years while enforcement of state traffic laws declined?)

Moreover, juvenile Class C cases have plummeted, driven largely but not entirely by the state's decriminalization of truancy:

Reporters or policy makers who would like to replicate these data for their local area may use the OCA's data query tool to break them out by jurisdiction.

What's going on?
So why is this happening? Some of the trends cited in the WSJ article don't apply to Texas - e.g., marijuana legalization or decrim hasn't happened here, and Texas' car-patrol-based policing doesn't see as frequent use of "stop and frisk" tactics as do jurisdictions where officers walk a beat.

The WSJ cited FBI statistics to document "steady declines in disorderly conduct, drunkenness, prostitution and loitering violations," which arguably could be a function of the rise of smart phones, gaming, and internet culture. Much "disorderly conduct" now occurs online, much to the detriment of the political culture, while "loitering" these days may more frequently involve staring at a telephone. Similarly, prostitutes in 2019 are less likely to stand out on the street and more likely to respond to text messages or queries on a website.

IMO, researchers have probably understated significantly the impact of digital culture on (downward) crime trends. Indeed, Grits considers the incapacitative effects of video gaming so significant for young males, in the past I've pondered the idea of issuing gaming consoles to high-risk probationers to reduce recidivism.

Grits has written before about declines in DWI and public drunkenness arrests, which I suspect may also related to the rise of car sharing apps that can easily get drunks off the streets or out of their own cars.

On Twitter, Grits asked a couple of national experts their opinions on sources of declines in misdemeanor arrests. Megan Stevenson, an economist and legal scholar at George Mason Univesity, suggested, "Broken windows policing going out of vogue. Gentrifying cities means poor people no longer live where rich people work. Increased surveillance technology reduces willingness to shoplift/graffiti. Lower blood lead levels in children." She also wondered if the trend may be influenced by "Shifting law enforcement to private security companies who intimidate but don’t arrest?"

And our pal Alexandra Natapoff, now of UC Irvine and author of Punishment Without Crime, a book-length treatment of misdemeanor questions, suggested the trend might also relate to "changes in police arrest quota and promotion policies" or attempts to reduce "Jail costs."

Austin's recent brouhaha over decriminalizing sitting, lying and camping in public spaces makes Grits give extra credence to Professor Stevenson's hypothesis about gentrifying cities removing poor people from the places rich folks live and work. Austin has always had a significant homeless population during the 34 years I've lived here. But as long as they were sleeping in creek beds and behind dumpsters where no one could see them, for most of the city's more affluent population, "out of sight, out of mind," was good enough. As soon as middle and upper class folks began to see homeless people in their daily lives - mostly under highway overpasses and in tents on roadsides - the weeping and gnashing of teeth began (with GOP officials at the local, state and national levels fanning the flames of discontent as vigorously as they could muster).

Grits considers these interesting suggestions, but all of them beg the question, why were misdemeanor arrests going up before 2007? After all, both reported and unreported low-level crime (as judged by the National Crime Victim Survey) has declined dramatically since the 1990s, and we didn't see arrest reductions until relatively recently.

Since we don't know why arrests continued to rise as crime declined, it's equally hard to tell why arrests went down as crime declined even more. For that matter, no one knows for sure why crime has declined in the first place. There are many hypotheses.

In an era when economists have built out a sizable cottage industry developing Bayesian "causal inference" models that supposedly flesh out specific causal relations for crime trends, in reality, nobody really understand the whys and wherefores of even the most basic tendencies of the justice system. Your correspondent has come to believe that running ever-more regression analyses on the same, extremely limited datasets is unlikely to cast more light on the subject.

Regardless of the cause, the footprint of the Texas justice system has reduced dramatically over the last decade, even if prison populations remain stubbornly high. These misdemeanor data provide further evidence of that trend and arguably played a big part in creating that outcome.

For my part, Grits considers the decline in misdemeanor arrests and cases mainly a positive development, not a problem to solve. Others' mileage may vary.

Judge abused discretion, violated due-process rights, by revoking probation w/o a hearing: Will he be sanctioned?

A misdemeanor DWI case out of San Antonio deserves broader attention, with interesting and important implications on several levels.

Wayne Christian - a Republican county-court-at-law judge in Bexar County first elected in 1996, who ran unopposed in the 2018 election - has routinely inserted himself on behalf of the state in lieu of county prosecutors in probation revocation cases, often refusing to allow testimony and deciding them with no evidence. But thanks to appellant Allison Jacobs, her attorneys, and perhaps most interestingly, new Bexar DA Joe Gonzalez, that practice will now be revisited.

Here's Judge Christian dressed in a camo robe. (source)

According to columnist Josh Brodesky of the SA Express News, Judge Christian's court "leads all County Court-at-Law judges in what’s known as MTRs - motions to revoke probation. He also leads other judges in jail bed days."

In Jacobs' case, she'd been a model probationer but failed three urinalysis tests toward the end of her 14-month probation period. Her attorney wanted to argue that this was a false positive caused by a diet pill she'd been taking, which long-time readers know is not an implausible scenario, particularly in Bexar County.

But Judge Christian refused to hold a hearing and based his decision to revoke on a brief conversation with the court liaison from the probation department. This violated Jacobs' due process rights, which should have entitled her to challenge evidence against her in a hearing before she's revoked to jail. But Christian went even further. Reported Brodesky:

Not only did Christian sentence her [to jail], but court records show he also denied her appeal for reasonable bail. He then modified a district court judge’s order of bail for $1,600 to make conditions more onerous. Another district judge lessened those conditions, and when Jacobs was finally released from the Bexar County Adult Detention Center in November, Christian responded. 

According to court filings: Upon release on bail, Jacobs was scheduled for a pretrial services orientation on Nov. 19, 2018. But Christian called pretrial services and had the orientation changed to Nov. 13, 2018. Pretrial services was unable to notify her about this change, so she missed the orientation. The next day Christian revoked her bail, issuing a warrant for an arrest. 

What gives? This is a defendant who was two weeks away from completing 14 months of probation for a serious, but misdemeanor charge. 

[Jacobs' attorney Jodi] Soyars said she likes Christian personally, and, obviously, has concerns about crossing him. She has other cases in his court. But she viewed this as representative of a broader issue and unfair to her client.

“He routinely denies defendants the right to due process,” she said.

So the judge routinely disallows prosecutors from participating in revocation decisions, acting himself on behalf of the state. And he doesn't allow a defendant to present evidence of possible actual innocence, simply declaring the allegations "true" by fiat without, as Soyars said in her brief, a "scintilla of evidence."

And it wasn't an isolated incident. Again from Brodesky: “There have been situations where our prosecutors have been placed in positions where they are not in agreement with going forward on a motion to revoke,” District Attorney Joe Gonzales said. “And they have made the decision to not sign off on the motions, and the judge has moved on them on his own.”

Let's delve into the secondary issue of denying the defendant bail while her appeal was litigated. The actions attributed to Judge Christian, who went out of his way to thwart the decision of a district judge in a habeas corpus writ, seem like extraordinary measures for a judge to take. The brief from Jacobs' attorney includes a footnote - which the DA's office corroborated (more on this later) - describing the remarkable sequence of events in more detail (citations to the record omitted):

While the appeal and motion for new trial procedures were taking place, some additional procedural issues arose and were dealt with, which are evident in the clerk’s record. A brief explanation to make sense of the clerk’s record follows: After a Notice of Appeal was filed, a Motion for Reasonable Bail Pending Appeal was also filed. . This is a misdemeanor case and bail was required to be granted. Judge Wayne Christian denied bail. An Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus Seeking Setting of Reasonable Bail was then filed and heard by District Court Judge Melisa Skinner in the 290th District Court. Judge Skinner granted the Writ and ordered bail of $1,600 and SCRAM as a condition. . The same day, Judge Christian called his clerk and added full GPS, daily reporting, and daily UAs as conditions of release, effectively changing the order of a District Court judge. A second Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus was then filed, requesting reasonable release conditions. Judge Joey Contreras in the 187th District Court set this Writ for a hearing on October 17, 2018. At the hearing, Judge Contreras granted reasonable conditions. After several weeks passed with Jacobs unable to meet the bail requirements, Judge Contreras amended his bond order to allow Jacobs a way to be released pending the appeal.  Jacobs was released from jail and given an orientation date of November 19, 2018 to report to pre-trial services. On November 13, 2018, Judge Christian called pre-trial services and ordered pre-trial services to require Jacobs to report on that date. Pre-trial services was unable to contact Jacobs and Jacobs had not yet had her orientation that would put her under the requirements of pre-trial supervision. Judge Christian then required pre-trial services to send over a violation report on November 14, 2018, whereupon Judge Christian revoked her bail and issued a warrant. Judge Contreras again intervened and reinstated Jacobs’ bail on November 16, 2018.

This conduct to my mind, deserves public censure if not ouster by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct. And indeed, in its opinion, the 4th Court of Appeals called Christian's actions an example of "an unsuitable practice by a county court at law judge."

All of this is remarkable, and more than a bit concerning. Judge Christian seems intent on ignoring the mandates of his job and substituting his own judgments for the process. In doing so, he's also increasing incarceration - keep in mind he has the highest numbers of all Bexar-county-court-at-law judges on both revocations and resulting jail-bed days.

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the case was the fact that District Attorney Joe Gonzales joined with defense counsel to dispute Christian's "unsuitable" practices, which apparently had been tolerated by his predecessors without contest for many years. 

One aspect of electing reform-minded prosecutors Grits had not fully considered (or perhaps more accurately, had not dared dream possible) is that they could challenge unconstitutional court practices from the inside, or join those challenges, as happened here. So kudos to Gonzalez for his stance here, that's a big deal!

Prosecutors' role should be to "seek justice." But too often, they see themselves as on a side, and it's the opposite side from the defendant. So when the judge plays prosecutor as well, as is the practice in Judge Christian's court, defendants without means to pay a phalanx of private lawyers have little chance.

Finally, Grits was interested in the Express-News' analysis that Christian leads all other Bexar judges in motions to revoke. How do we know? That's something tracked in state-level court data, but totals are only available in Office of Court Administration queries at the county-wide level.

Grits doesn't immediately know the data source from which Brodesky identified the number of probation revocations by court. (If any readers know how to access this data from public sources, please let us know in the comments.) But that's a useful figure because, as regular readers are aware, probation revocations are a significant cause of Texas prison admissions, and revoked misdemeanor probationers go to county jail, contributing to local costs. 

So, to summarize, here are the implications and questions Grits would take away from this episode (feel free to suggest more in the comments):

1. A judge for years felt free to ignore his duties to hold probation-revocation hearings and neither local defense attorneys nor the DA's office called him on it. Is this happening elsewhere?
2. Will the State Commission on Judicial Conduct sanction Judge Christian?
3. Does this flagrant disregard for judicial duties rise to the level of the state bar challenging Christian's licensure?
4. Will media in other jurisdictions begin analyzing which judges have the most probation revocations and hold them accountable for successes/abuses?
5. An under-examined aspect of evaluating "progressive" prosecutors will be how they respond to appeals challenging unconstitutional practices and other reform litigation. People have discussed this in the context of bail reform, but Jacobs case shows there are potentially many more areas where this could become important.  

This is quite a significant case, I think, certainly for San Antonio, and potentially exposing an area where judges may be abusing their discretion in other jurisdictions as well, if reporters and advocates were to look. The pressures on ADAs and defense counsel to acquiesce in judges' abuses for the sake of other cases certainly aren't unique to Bexar County.

Modifying 3-strikes theft enhancement would ↓ TX state-jail population

On Monday, the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee will hear a good little decarceration bill modifying the enhancement for misdemeanor three-strikes theft. This one should have been changed long ago.

Under current Texas law, if at any time in your life you commit three incidents of misdemeanor theft, regardless of the value of the property, prosecutors can charge it as a state-jail felony. Even if the third "strike" is stealing candy from the grocery-store check-out line, prosecutors can seek a felony conviction and sentence.

HB 1240 by Rep. Yvonne Davis would revise this statute in two important ways: First, it would require that the lower-level thefts be within five years of one another to count toward a penalty enhancement. Piecing together a new, theft with two others that are decades old will no longer be allowed.

Second, the penalty increase stemming from a third "strike" would only bump the charge up by one category. So if the third strike were a Class A misdemeanor ($750 to $2,499.99), it would make no difference. But if it were a Class C or B misdemeanor, the penalty would still be a misdemeanor.

This change will further reduce the number of inmates entering Texas state jails, which notoriously have the highest recidivism rates of any facilities in the system.

Just Liberty reviewed Texas Department of Criminal Justice datasets and discovered that three-strikes theft accounted for almost 2,400 state-jail admissions in the 2018 fiscal year. This is the second most common reason for a state-jail sentence after possession of a controlled substance.

A few of those folks would have still gone to state jail under HB 1240. But because most theft involves low-value items, many more people would have been charged with misdemeanors instead of felonies. Grits wouldn't be surprised if HB 1240 all but eliminated three-strike theft offenders in Texas state jails.

Hard to argue with this one: Reduces incarceration in state jails where recidivism is high, reduces public perceptions of unfairness, but still sends a message that repeat theft won't be tolerated. Grits is delighted Rep. Davis proposed the bill and pleased that Chairwoman Nicole Collier is taking it up on the early side this session. HB 1240 deserves strong, bipartisan support from criminal-justice reformers.

SA bail tragedy illustrates how misdemeanors can ruin lives

One of Grits' favorite thinkers on justice topics, Alexandra Natapoff, whose new book about the misdemeanor system, Punishment Without Crime, I hope to review in the coming week, had a column in the New York Post with a Texas anecdote in the lede. It began:

Just before Christmas, Janice Dotson-Stephens died in a San Antonio jail. The 61-year-old grandmother had been arrested for trespassing, a class B misdemeanor in Texas. She couldn’t afford the $300 bail, and a mere $30 payment to a bail bondsman would have let her out. She stayed in jail for nearly five months, waiting for her case to be handled, before she died. Her family has sued, and an independent agency is currently investigating the cause of her death. This is how the American misdemeanor system quietly and carelessly ruins millions of lives. 

Dotson-Stephens was a victim of a vast misdemeanor machinery that routinely and thoughtlessly locks up millions of people every year. America is already infamous for mass incarceration — with 1.5 million state and federal prisoners, we put more people in prison than any other country on the planet. But nearly 11 million people pass through over 3,000 US jails every year, according to a 2016 report by the Department of Justice. On any given day, there are approximately 700,000 people in jail. One-quarter of them are there for misdemeanor offenses; the majority of them, like Dotson-Stephens, have not been convicted of anything and are therefore presumed innocent. 

Given the minor nature of most misdemeanors, it is shocking how often they send people to jail. Amazingly, people routinely get locked up when they are arrested for petty offenses even if they could not be sentenced to jail for the offense itself.

On that last point, Texas is beginning to consider reforms to the misdemeanor system along the lines Natapoff envisions. This legislative session, we've already seen HB 482 filed by Rep. Senfronia Thompson to restrict arrests for Class C misdemeanors, which carry a maximum punishment of a fine, not jail time. This would impact a lot of cases: In Harris County, for example, 11 percent of all arrests are for Class C misdemeanor violations, mostly traffic offenses.

Most famously, Thompson's legislation would have denied the state trooper who pulled Sandra Bland out of her car the authority to arrest her for failing to signal a lane change - the trigger event in a series of injustices that led to her globally publicized death.

Meanwhile, bail reform, the need for which Ms. Dotson-Stephens' case in San Antonio ably demonstrates, will be filed on Monday in conjunction with the State of the Judiciary speech. Maybe that bill would have helped her. Or maybe, when the courts finish articulating the constitutional standards for pretrial release in Texas and the 5th Circuit, ongoing federal litigation will address the problem. Much is uncertain. But one thing is for sure: whatever reforms occur will happen too late to help Sandra Bland or Janice Dotson-Stephens.

RELATED: Here's more background on the case from The Texas Observer.