Gov. Abbott: raise the age at which youth are considered children, but only for purposes of gun-storage rules (?)

In his plan to address school shootings, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called on the Legislature to "to raise the age at which someone is considered a child from whom adult gun owners would have to secure their guns; Abbott wants to raise that one year to include 17-year-olds like the shooter at Santa Fe High School," reported the Austin Statesman.

Grits' thought: Isn't there a philosophical link between the Governor's proposal to consider 17 year olds "children" for purposes of gun ownership and the "raise the age" proposal to charge 17 year olds as juveniles instead of adults in criminal court?

If someone should be "considered a child" at 17 for purposes of access to firearms, can Texas really justify prosecuting 17-year olds as adults in other contexts?

After all, what is the nature of the developmental deficiency among 17-year olds that the governor thinks a birthday will fix? Why might one consider 17 year olds less than reliable when it comes to prioritizing firearms safety?

Why, it's for the same reason most states don't charge 17 year olds as adults when they commit crimes: The portions of their brains responsible for cognitive reasoning are less well developed than they will be when they are older. Or, in layman's terms, 17-year old youth are not yet as mature as adults.

Surely, if that's his position, the Governor should get behind raising "the age at which someone is considered a child" in general from 17 to 18, not just on this one, narrow, gun-safety provision.

Either 17-year olds are adults who're prepared for all of life's responsibilities, and the resulting consequences from not fulfilling them, or they're not.  And clearly Gov. Abbott doesn't believe Texans can rely upon 17-year olds to behave in a responsible fashion, or such a law wouldn't be necessary. (Indeed, most parents of a 17-year old would likely tell you themselves that their child isn't prepared to face the world on their own as an adult.)

Gov. Abbott's proposal challenges the legalistic pretense that 17-year olds can and should be expected to behave as responsible adults. But he should be consistent. If parents are still responsible for their children's 2nd Amendment rights at 17 because a 17-year old's cognitive reasoning is under-developed, surely it make little sense for the criminal-justice system to prosecute those same youth as adults when they break the law?

Gov. Abbott's arguments for raising the age in this narrow context highlight how inappropriate it can be to assign adult expectations to 17-year old actors. These are lessons state leaders must eventually embrace much more broadly, but journeys of a thousand miles always begin with first steps.

Why train drivers to tolerate aggressive police tactics when we could just end aggressive police tactics?

Grits had wondered if the proposal to educate Texas ninth graders about police interactions at yesterday's Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee meeting would move beyond the standard "comply and complain" model taught in Texas drivers ed for decades to include more useful information on how to assert one's rights to end police interactions as quickly as possible. Seemingly not.

There are somewhere north of 60,000 law enforcement officers in Texas and more than 28 million residents. If education is going to solve the problem, pure practicality would dictate beginning with the 60k instead of the 28 million, even if you're doing it just one generation at a time as they pass through the ninth grade. But suggestions for police deescalation training were vague and nebulous, while a curriculum for ninth graders was discussed in much more concrete terms.

Sandra Bland's case was held up as an example of citizens needing better training, but I don't wholly agree. (Let's put aside for the moment that Sandra Bland grew up out of state and came to Texas to go to college, so the proposal couldn't have impacted her situation.) If you watch the video, at the moment the trooper put his hands on Ms. Bland and told her she was under arrest, she had done nothing more illegal than failure to signal a lane change and was being arrested for a Class C misdemeanor. She resisted - because the arrest was complete and utter bullshit and the trooper was a jerk - so that got her a more significant charge. But what started it all was Brian Encina getting angry because Sandra Bland wouldn't put out her cigarette, grabbing her to yank her out of the vehicle, and announcing she was under arrest for failure to signal a lane change.

If the trooper were better trained and never laid hands on Ms. Bland, OR if the Lege had changed the law to ban arrests for Class C misdemeanors (for which the max punishment is only a fine, not jail time) so he couldn't have legally arrested her, that may have prevented her eventual, tragic death. Bland's instinctual impulse to resist never arises if the trooper doesn't try to bully her and improperly assert his dominance. It's hard to see how you can educate that sort of basic human reaction away, any more than abstinence-only education in high school stops teens from having sex.

The problem is you're trying to educate people to accept being disrespected and demeaned by someone whose salary is paid from their taxes. The SA Current reported a telling exchange from the hearing which encapsulates this problem:

Shortly into this morning's Senate hearing on criminal justice, Senator José Menéndez, a San Antonio Democrat, brought up his own experience with law enforcement.

"I've gotten pulled over a couple times," he said. "And the first thing the officer asks is, 'Is this your car?' And I want to ask, 'Why, is it because it looked like I borrowed it?'"

Sen. John Whitmire, chair of the Senate Committee on Criminal Justice replied, with a chuckle: "That's what we're going to teach in the class not to say."

But exactly why should the senator avoid reacting to the officer's implication that he stole the car he was in if he thinks he's being racially profiled? I don't understand. The officer asked what the senator viewed as an insulting question. Why is it on the driver to withstand and ignore the insult? Why shouldn't it be on the officer (and by extension, those who trained her) to behave more respectfully? If the driver asks questions that imply the officer is corrupt, a wife-beater, a thief, a liar, etc., would we expect the officer to react calmly?

Here again, as with Sandra Bland: An officer instigates, the driver reacts (or at least considers it), and somehow it's the reacting driver, not the instigating officer (the only person in the interaction actually employed by the government), who this proposal seeks to hold responsible for bad outcomes. This is a basic cart-before-the-horse situation: If government can control its own employees and train them to behave more respectfully - not turning every citizen interaction into some investigative detention or petty personal power play - the state won't need to "educate" its citizens on how to successfully survive interactions with them without being killed.

Sen. Menendez's experience also brings up a point about the proposed curriculum that Grits mentioned over the weekend:

Teaching them to "comply" cannot mean "comply with questioning." Drivers must submit to short-term detention if they're pulled over but they're under no obligation to explain where they're coming from, where they're going, what they're doing, consent to a search, etc.. If the curriculum does not acknowledge those limitations on officers' ability to enforce compliance and ignores drivers' civil liberties in favor of emphasizing cops' authority, it won't solve the problem and may make it worse.

Bishop James Dixon from Houston similarly pinned blame for negative interactions on officers seeking to use traffic stops as a platform for investigating the driver on unrelated offenses for which the officer has no evidence:

Bishop James Dixon of the Community of Faith congregation in Houston told the committee about being followed by a police officer for two miles before he was pulled over and surrounded by four police cars. “I don’t think that’s happening to my white brothers and sisters,” he said.

“I feel threatened whenever the police stop me,” Dixon said. “I am an endangered species. So is my 9-year-old son.”

During traffic stops, Dixon suggested requiring officers to identify themselves and state why they pulled the driver over before asking questions. “I have been asked, ‘Is that car yours? Where are you going?’ — as opposed to, ‘Good afternoon, my name is officer so-and-so and the reason that I stopped you is,’” Dixon said.

“The tone the officer uses to ask me a question lets me know if the officer is simply trying to provoke me or if he’s trying to get information,” he said.

That's an accurate assessment - the officer is trying to provoke the driver. So the state can train millions of people to withstand provocation by government employees, or teach a few thousand of its agents to not intentionally provoke people. On its face, which do you think would do more to reduce problematic traffic stop interactions?

Beyond pragmatism, there are at least three good reasons the officer in that situation bears the lion's share of responsibility compared to the driver. 1) It's their job for which they've received extensive, detailed training while the driver is a random person chosen literally off the street. 2) The power differential - in terms of legal authority, strategic positioning and firepower - is all in the officer's favor, and power exercised arrogantly spurs resentment. And 3) The officer initiated the interaction, the driver did not ask for it and does not want it. The driver is reacting, while the officer is in control or, in cases such as Trooper Encina's, looking to establish it. But often, deescalation is more appropriate and would prevent these sort of negative outcomes. Limiting aggressive police tactics at traffic stops can reduce animus and ill will from the public. Sandra Bland couldn't make Trooper Encina NOT put his hands on her, that was his choice. (And it rightly cost him his job.)

At the hearing, Whitmire's proposal faced no opposition. But the Texas Observer quoted a spokesman for Black Lives Matter: Houston who dubbed the proposal victim blaming: “It’s an insult. It just seems to me that they are trying to satisfy the demands and needs of the police unions.” The liberal site Think Progress called it a "well-intentioned, backwards plan to improve traffic stops with police," complaining that "the proposed curriculum assumes that the people targeted during those stops are the problem— not the officers."

To be fair, at one point Chairman Whitmire did opine that, “It is not as simple as 'obey and complain' – it’s too simplistic.” Reported the  Tribune:

Officers also have to shift from an "I caught you" mentality to a protective one, Whitmire said.

"If you see young people out at night on a corner, instead of driving up like you're trying to see who's got some dope, would it not be better if you drove up and see if something you can do to help them get home safely?" he said.

But the comply-and-complain meme (Whitmire's "obey and complain" is a better description), which has been a cornerstone of how students are taught to interact with police officers in Texas drivers ed courses for decades, dominated the ledes of much of the MSM coverage from the hearing as though it were something new under the sun and not a theme countless black parents have pounded into their children's heads for generations, too often to no avail.

That's the dilemma: Compliance won't always protect you and complaining generally hasn't made a difference. Without addressing those failures, which are problems for police agencies and legislators to confront, not the public, there's not much you could tell kids in a ninth grade classroom that will fundamentally alter this dynamic.

Finally, Clay Robison of the Texas State Teachers Association made an important and largely neglected point from the perspective of educators: "To make such a lesson work, there would need to be uniformity in what students should expect from law enforcement across jurisdictions." Right now that's not the case. So again, the first thing to do if we want this education to happen is focus on police disciplinary systems and training, so students receiving the curriculum in one part of the state will know it applies when they travel to another. Without that uniformity, there's no way for TEA to develop a consistent, statewide curriculum.

Police shooting too many people is the government's problem to fix. Training youth how to exercise their rights in ways that end police encounters as quickly and safely as possible - and to demand an attorney if the officer wants to question them further - might in the long run help the problem. But just telling kids "shut up and do what you're told" won't be sufficient. In the near term, we'd get a lot more bang for the buck training officers in PERF-approved deescalation methods and empowering departments to punish bad cops.

RELATED: What should we teach ninth graders so police won't shoot them?

What should we teach ninth graders so police won't shoot them?

What might Texas ninth graders be taught about interactions with law enforcement that could prevent police from shooting as many of them later on?

That's the question posed by Sen. John Whitmire's suggestion that they be "taught how to properly interact with police when they are stopped for traffic violations or if they are detained," as the Houston Chronicle's Mike Ward reported on Thursday.

Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston, said his proposed legislation would require the Texas Education Agency to develop curriculum "in law enforcement duties and interaction."

If eventually approved by the Legislature, the law would be the first of its kind in Texas.

"There is no home team or visiting team. We must all come together to develop the best strategies to improve relations and trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve," Whitmire said. "Increased training and education for both peace officers and our students will help foster positive relations and interactions."

A few paragraphs down from the "first of its kind" claim, though, we learn that "state-required driver training programs already instruct teenagers how to act when they are stopped by police for a traffic violation." So we're assuming this instruction would be somehow better or different than what's taught in driver's ed, which is essentially the cop-centric "comply and complain" model - comply with the officer's instructions at the traffic stop and complain later if your rights were violated. Wrote Ward:

"Too often police encounters are ending in a tragedy, and that's what we want to stop," Whitmire said. "If you feel an officer does you wrong, you don't take it up with them out on the street, you take it up with an administrator. That's one of the things I think we'll teach."

But there has to be more to it than that. You can't just tell kids that the police officer's life, their rights, and their most unreasonable instructions matter more than the life, rights, or most reasonable demands for respectful treatment of a detained driver, and if you don't like it, shut up and complain later. Sure, you can tell people their rights and even their lives don't matter as much as the officers' under the law. But it's more difficult to convince an individual to abnegate their own personhood in a real-life situation than it is to do so in statute or a judicial opinion.

Regardless, since teaching "comply and complain" to generations of Texas drivers ed students hasn't done the trick, what should be in this new curriculum that would make a greater difference?

Perhaps it should be sort of an institutional version of "The Talk" which many black families have with their children as they begin to come of age. Texas collects rudimentary racial profiling data at every agency which makes traffic stops, and more detailed data on after-stop activities like searches at some agencies, including DPS. Texas could make every department gather the same data DPS does and then 9th grade schoolkids could be told: If you're black (or Hispanic, etc.) in our town, you're X times as likely to be stopped by police as your white schoolmates, Y times as likely to be searched during a traffic stop, and Z times as likely to be shot and killed. If you're white, you still might be stopped, searched, or killed by police (more whites than blacks are killed by law enforcement, though the per-capita rate is lower), so they should still know this information. And it won't hurt white kids to understand that things are different for some of their classmates than for them.

People want this information about how to interact with cops in a way that protects their rights. When I was Police Accountability Project Director at ACLU of Texas during the implementation of Texas' racial profiling law, we were asked to do "Know Your Rights" trainings all over the state about how to interact with police. A lot of people think they have more rights than they do, in some ways, but also fewer than they tend to understand at specific points in the process. Let's teach them both.

Students should be taught that police can arrest them for petty offenses, like Sandra Bland's failure-to-signal-a-lane change, at the officer's discretion, even when the law envisions no jail time as punishment for the offense. (Gov. Rick Perry vetoed legislation in 2001 to limit such arrests, but Republican state Sen. Konni Burton, who is on Chairman Whitmire's Criminal Justice Committee, has vowed to carry a newer, beefed up version in 2017. So if that passed, students could be informed in the new curriculum that they cannot be arrested for Class C misdemeanors, or whatever the rule turns out to be.)

It's true the safest time to take up an officer's misbehavior is after the fact; confronting it at the time could get you tazed, beaten, or shot. But will students be taught how seldom officers are held accountable after citizen complaints, even when there's video? In Austin, for example, "Less than 5 percent of the complaints from the public resulted in officer discipline," an audit found. The Statesman's recent look at DPS showed none of the racial profiling complaints from the public were found to be justified by the agency, even though video posted by the Statesman showed drivers being treated with open disrespect. We shouldn't advise people to complain without also telling them complaints tend to be fruitless. The purpose here should be to educate students, not propagandize them.

A curriculum which taught students the legal limits of their personal rights when interacting with police might be useful, but only if it empowers students to END interactions with police as soon as possible and explains why that's always in their personal best interests when being questioned without a lawyer. Teaching them to "comply" cannot mean "comply with questioning." Drivers must submit to short-term detention if they're pulled over but they're under no obligation to explain where they're coming from, where they're going, what they're doing, consent to a search, etc.. If the curriculum does not acknowledge those limitations on officers' ability to enforce compliance and ignores drivers' civil liberties in favor of emphasizing cops' authority, it won't solve the problem and may make it worse.

There are also plenty of facts, figures, history, and basic civics they could be taught which might help provide meaningful context, perhaps dating back to the Fourth Amendment's creation in response to unreasonable searches by law enforcement under King George which helped spark the American Revolution. Students could be shown video montages of unarmed people being shot or assaulted by police - perhaps even video from Rodney King's beating - so they can understand fully that being unarmed or even submissive will not necessarily keep a cop from assaulting, shooting, or even killing you. Such a curriculum would truly inspire caution, perhaps even sufficient to make an impression strong enough to be recalled during those critical, decisive moments when a wrong move might get a kid killed.

Grits believes this more catholic approach could do more to reduce police shootings than teaching pure "compliance." Help the kids understand their own self interests, how and why they (in some cases literally) have skin in the game. People will never believe they have no rights and are powerless. Told so, teenagers inevitably will seek to take power themselves in unpredictable and unproductive ways. ("Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," wrote the bard.)

Education that empowers students to fully exercise their rights to limit police intrusion into their lives might reduce negative interactions by giving ninth graders tools to peacefully get away from those cops who might hurt or even kill them if they mouth off or reach into their pockets. However, such proposals mustn't divert legislative attention away from systemic changes also needed to deescalate the unnecessary aggression some police officers bring to interactions with the public. The police are the agents of the state, after all. Those ninth graders are its future rulers.

No rampant crime wave resulted from massive decriminalization of Texas juvenile life

Grits focuses mostly on the adult justice system, which in Texas still has the largest prison population in the nation, so it's sometimes easy to lose hope. But with school restarting this week, it struck Grits that there's a resonant, unrung bell on juvenile justice whose absence might go unnoticed if one doesn't listen carefully, like a dissonant chord was removed from the middle of some dystopic symphony, resulting in a welcome, if unexpected, major bridge.

In the past decade, Texas has undergone a massive decriminalization of juvenile life, reducing juvenile incarceration and an array of lesser penalties. But juvenile crime dropped the whole while. There was no resulting rampage of criminality sparking a backlash.

When our pal Nate Blakeslee broke the story of sex scandals involving staff and youth at the old Texas Youth Commission back in 2007, the Texas Lege enacted a series of reforms to whittle away the size of the juvie prison population, which dropped like a stone from more than 4,000 when the scandal broke to just more than 1,000 now.

Meanwhile, three years ago the Legislature, led by state Sen. John Whitmire, eliminated ticketing in Texas schools for a host of offenses, a move which reduced the number of Class C misdemeanor tickets issued to students annually by almost 400,000 fewer tickets per year - prompting Huffington Post to declare that, "Texas is doing something genuinely progressive."

Then last year, the Lege moved in a bipartisan fashion to decriminalize truancy.  According to this source:

Officials from the Texas Office of Court Administration testified last month on the effects of the truancy reform legislation and the results are dramatic: Decriminalizing certain truancy offenses, the expunction of 1.5 million prior cases, removal of jail as an option for truancy, and changes to fines. Comparisons of the first four months of 2015 with the same period this year show truancy filings have dropped from 60,000 to 5,000, and parent contributing to non-attendance filings have dropped from 45,000 to 8,200.

So that's 55k fewer truancy filings per year, 37k fewer parent contributing filings, nearly 400k fewer Class C tickets in schools, expulsions down 28% since ticketing reduced, and less than 30 percent as many youth locked up behind bars.

Texas has successfully reduced juvenile incarceration and the overall criminal-justice footprint affecting juvenile life, with juvenile crime continuing to decline the whole time. That's a far bigger deal than the paltry "Texas model" being touted on adult decarceration (based on Texas 2007 adult probation/parole reforms).

How is this transformation of the Texas juvie system not a massive success story that's being trumpeted from the rooftops? And why aren't we talking more about replicating those successes with large-scale decarceration and a reduced justice-system footprint on the adult side?

Houston ISD employs more cops than counselors, social workers

Houston ISD is one of four out of the nation's ten largest school districts analyzed in this article which employs more police officers and security personnel than counselors. HISD has 1.16 cops per 1,000 students, compared to .78 counselors per 1,000 students. Even when you add in the number of social workers to the counselor total, security staff outnumber them.

"In Houston, that means there’s only one counselor for every 1,288 students." In fact, "Not one of the top 10 districts, where counselors may be particularly beneficial for low-income students, meets the American School Counselor Association’s recommendation of one counselor for every 250 students — most weren’t even close."

On arresting kids for their electronics

Once they figure out it's battery charger, not a bomb, couldn't the arrest and two nights in juvie for a 12-year old kid of Indian descent be avoided? (Not the clock kid, another one, this time down the road in Arlington.)

We're in an era of DIY electronics, robotics, Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, the Internet of Things, etc., where lots things in a prototyping stage and even, apparently, some finished projects "look like bombs" based on pop culture, with all sorts of wires and components which seem inexplicable to the uninitiated but are entirely benign.

Circuitry to control 2 DC motors with an Arduino

Your correspondent has been teaching an after-school group one day a week at the granddaughter's elementary school where, this year, we took apart a broken printer to harvest the motor systems and will wire one of them up independently to make what we're dubbing a laser shooting robot. ("Robot" is strong - the kids will control it, it's not autonomous - but I find they're bored by "electronics" and love "robots," so it's a robot.)

Though I didn't blog about it, Grits must admit to watching the whole "clock boy" episode with great interest because our project poses similar risks of misinterpretation by the ignorant. When you use an Arduino, breadboard and H-bridge chip to control a simple DC motor, the resulting patch of wires would "look like a bomb" once it's jammed into a briefcase or backpack, even though it couldn't be more benign.

Partly for that reason, after the clock-boy incident I decided to hunt down a pre-fab part that would control a motor without them having to wire up a chip themselves. The last thing I want is some cretinous bully, whether cop or administrator, hassling my kids over a project that's supposed to be fun for them. So risk aversion lessens their learning experience. I don't like that, but it's the practical effect that story had on our little program.

This thing about arresting kids over their electronics gear will likely continue to happen - especially for youth whose families hail from south or west Asia - because electronics have become so much more accessible to kids at a younger and younger age and fear appears to have outstripped reason.

School cops and administrators need a better grasp of what hobbyist electronics look like before assuming every brown-skinned kid with a wired up project is a villain from an episode of Homeland.

Students cited for terroristic threat in volume

From a story in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Oct. 1) about new federal reporting requirements for public schools regarding student discipline, Grits ran across this fact-bite: "Statewide, a total of 1,463 Texas students were cited for making a terrorist threat during the 2013-14 school year, according to Texas Education Agency PEIMS (Public Education Information Management System) data."

I hadn't seen that figure during all the "I stand with Ahmed" brouhaha, but that's a pretty big number.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/fort-worth/article37241166.html#storylink=cpy

TPPF, TX Appleseed: Texas should decriminalize truancy

Derek Cohen of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Deborah Fowler from Texas Appleseed had an op ed in the Dallas News this week (Oct. 23) making the case for decriminalizing truancy. Here's a notable excerpt:

Texas is one of only two states (the other is Wyoming) that employ the criminal justice system to punish truancy. The Texas Education Code — the body of law that regulates the activity of all educational institutions in the state — empowers school districts to file a criminal complaint against a child as young as 10 who has missed three days of school. After 10 missed days within a six-month period, however, the district’s discretion is removed and it is required to file against the child.

This is known as “Failure to Attend School,” or FTAS, a Class C misdemeanor that can carry up to $500 in fines and leave an indelible mark on the child’s criminal record. These fines are levied all too often on low-income families who don’t have the savings to pay them. If a child or parent is unable to pay the $500, or if the child misses one more day after adjudication, he or she can face jail time for the violation of a valid court order. In addition to the burden this places on families, the criminalization of truancy is a drain on limited court resources.

Adding to the frustration and confusion, the Texas Family Code already has a provision dealing with truancy. This is the Conduct Indicating a Need of Supervision section, which directly mirrors the language in the Education Code. However, this statute prosecutes students only through the juvenile court, eliminating the concern that this will lead to an adult record.

Further, FTAS misdemeanors saddle children with a criminal record that can keep them from future civil or military service. The sealing or expunction of these minor offenses stand to cost hundreds of dollars more in court costs and legal fees for individuals who, usually, are among those least able to afford it.

The Texas Legislature should move quickly to remove the criminalization of skipping school from the Education Code and allow school districts to find a truancy reduction method that works best for them.

Dallas and Fort Bend counties each have established a “truancy court,” a specialized docket that processes only kids who skip school. While the numbers seem to show the courts’ efficacy in reducing dropouts, credit belongs more to the specialized retention programs that judges are ordering truants to attend. The current process that forces children into these programs serves only to saddle these youngsters with a criminal record for minor misbehavior.

New laws aimed at reducing tickets in school worked: 83% fewer last year

New laws aimed at reducing tickets given to students for in-school misbehavior resulted in a whopping 83 percent year-to-year drop in the number of tickets written, according to data revealed at yesterday's joint hearing of  the Corrections and Public Education Committees. Here's how Chuck Lindell's coverage in the Austin Statesman (Oct. 8) opened:

Working as intended, two state laws passed in 2013 have fueled a larger-than-anticipated 83 percent decline in the number of Texas schoolchildren prosecuted in adult court for infractions such as disrupting a classroom, court figures show.

Including other misdemeanor school-based offenses, almost 90,000 juvenile cases were kept out of adult court by the new laws, which were written to encourage schools to handle most behavior problems internally instead of relying on police or the courts, two Texas House committees were told Wednesday.

“We were expecting a drop. I don’t think we were expecting that significant a drop in the first year,” said David Slayton, director of the state Office of Court Administration.

The sharp decline in the number of juvenile prosecutions, publicized for the first time at Wednesday’s joint hearing of the House Corrections and Public Education committees, offered early evidence that the laws were working to reduce the number of children saddled with criminal records for relatively minor school offenses, legislators and criminal justice advocates said.

See additional coverage from KWBU radio and written testimony presented to the committee from TCJC's Jennifer Carreon.

Juvenile crime, incarceration down; extra capacity at TDCJ?

Mistakenly thinking the Legislative Budget Board had finally released its much-anticipated long-term prison population projections, I clicked on this link on their site only to find myself staring at a routine Monthly Tracking Report for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) and the Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD). Ho hum. Glancing quickly through it, I did see a couple of interesting items I didn't know.

Extra capacity at TDCJ?
From the bottom of page 1:

• As of May 2014, the agency had 1,473 beds temporarily removed from capacity due to staffing shortages.
• Also in May, 849 Substance Abuse Felony Punishment (SAFP) beds were temporarily converted into Intermediate Sanctions Facilty (ISF) beds. 

The report doesn't say which units shut down capacity because of understaffing, but 1,473 is a significant number. That makes me think the agency has yet more capacity it could shed, perhaps starting with units that can't keep their staffing up. TDCJ's monthly population reduced slowly over the last year, from 150,931 to 150,461, so basically flat.

That's where the long-term projections I was looking for come in. Sometime in June, LBB is scheduled to come out with an important set of official prison population projections on which legislative appropriators must base their various funding schemes. At a recent House Appropriations Committee hearing, LBB staff implied that the new projections would not show long-term growth in prison populations to the same extent as their last projection, which is now 15 months old. But we won't know for sure until the document is released.

If the downward trend continues, the Lege should cut more prison capacity and use the savings for treatment, rehabilitation and reentry programs.

Juvenile crime plummeted after Texas de-incarcerated youth prisons
Another fascinating tidbit from the tracking report: Despite having reduced the population of Texas youth prisons by nearly 80 percent after the 2007 sex-assault scandals and closed most of them, the average daily population of juveniles on probation statewide declined by 30 percent in Texas over the last five years, from 35,645 in 2008 to 24,896 in 2013. Referrals to probation fell over the same period, from 97,584 in 2009 to 68,386 in 2013, according to the report. And in schools, the number of Mandatory Attendance Days at Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Programs (JJAEPs) also went down, from 110,189 in the '08-09 school year to 73,227 in 2012-13. And that's despite the Legislature mandating that school police write fewer Class C tickets to students who misbehave.

Since juvenile incarceration fell almost 80% from its height after the Legislature first reformed, then disbanded, the Texas Youth Commission, what caused juvenile referrals (read: new offenses) to decline so rapidly in the years that followed? Many people associate incarceration with crime reduction, assuming prison keeps us safe from predators who would harm us if they were out. So how does the tuff-on-crime crowd explain such a radical reduction in juvenile incarceration corresponding to a 30-percent drop in juvenile crime over the last several years period?

Grits finds the rapid but inexplicable drop in juvenile crime one of the most remarkable, yet little-remarked stories in Texas criminal justice. A tremendous achievement. Too bad nobody knows what caused it nor how if at all it related to government policies, so it can't be readily replicated.

Texas youth in detention less likely to receive high-school credit than nationwide

Via this Waco Tribune Herald article, I ran across this study published in April by the Southern Education Foundation: "Just Learning: The Imperative to Transform Juvenile Justice Systems into Effective Education Systems" (pdf). The Trib story expressed pride that, though the study:

found 9 percent of juvenile students nationwide — or fewer than one in 10 — enlisted in a detention facility for 90 days or longer earned their GEDs or high school diplomas.

McLennan County’s Juvenile Probation Department is slightly higher with 15 percent of long-term students earning their GEDs through an in-house program designed specifically for at-risk students.

Overall, Texas' juvenile systems came in slightly higher than the national average by that measure, with 11% of eligible students earning a GED or graduating high school. But Texas logged a far lower rate of eligible students in detention facilities receiving high school course credits - 30% compared to 46% nationwide, according to the report's appendices.

In McLennan County, the juvenile detention center twenty years ago "formed an in-house reading program, but it wasn’t until the probation department added staff and received judicial support in 2007 that the GED program started." Since then, "45 students have enrolled in the program and 38, or 80 percent, have passed the GED test," reported the Trib.

That said, the report lamented that inadequate data sets caution against drawing hard conclusions from state to state comparisons:

The education data that Southern states have reported to the US Department of Education for children and youth in juvenile justice systems often has been incomplete and inconsistent. The reporting forms are too generic and fail to capture the reality of juvenile justice schools. With in and across states, the annual data offers very limited information about what is actually achieved in the juvenile justice schools for students and appears entirely divorced from any consideration of how student assessments should primarily be used for improving instruction and learning.

The report calls for rethinking juvenile justice programs through a primarily educational lens, creating individualized education programs for youth detainees and judging performance of the justice system by measuring educational outcomes in addition to recidivism. It also endorsed "a national goal of diverting more youth from large state facilities to local, non-institutional settings in the juvenile justice systems," a trend that Texas has led by reducing the number of inmates in state institutions by 80% since the 2007 Texas Youth Commission sex scandal. Even so, because the Texas Juvenile Justice Department does not closely regulate local juvenile detention facilities, it's unclear if that de-institutionalization has led to better educational outcomes, and the low number of juvenile detention students earning high-school course credit suggests it has not. The report concluded:

This is not a call for state juvenile justice systems to re-brand themselves as educational institutions. It will require a great deal more than simply changing the image and language of juvenile justice – much more than calling juvenile facilities “schools” or “campuses” and referring to incarcerated youth as “students.” Those kinds of cosmetic changes would be fraudulent with out first enabling a fundamental transformation of the mission, methods, goals, and accountability of the juvenile justice systems. Calling the Florida School for Boys a “reform school” did not prevent the tragedies that took place there in the distant and more recent past.

By establishing an educational mission and by re-designing their processes and functions primarily to provide effective education, juvenile justice systems will need to design and provide good schooling inside their own systems and to help to redesign and recreate effective schooling for these students in the communities they re-enter.

Nothing less will assure that juvenile justice systems help young people to leave and never to return to the juvenile system or to adult prisons. Nothing less will produce just learning and just results. Nothing less will deliver in the coming years on a promise of justice for the children and youth in custody and for the communities they re-enter. And nothing less will provide the South and the nation with the effective governmental systems that succeed in providing the nation’s most under-educated, vulnerable youth with a future that is better than the past. 

McLennan Sheriff ignores data, research on ill-conceived DARE program

In McLennan County, where District Attorney Abel Reyna's hard-nosed approach to plea bargaining has resulted in a dramatic uptick in the number of cases taken to trial, the Sheriff and county commissioners are struggling with how to provide sufficient courthouse security for all the extra court proceedings. The Waco Tribune-Herald reports ("Commissioners struggle to fund courthouse security for uptick in trials," Nov. 29) that the commissioners court is considering eliminating the DARE program and reassigning the deputies to courthouse security. Grits thinks eliminating DARE is a good idea no matter what the deputies do instead. As the paper noted at the article's conclusion:

national statistics do not support the idea that the DARE program is successful.

The Alcohol Abuse Prevention website states that the U.S. Department of Education doesn’t allow school money to be used toward DARE because it has proved to be ineffective in convincing children not to choose drugs.

“Scientific evaluation studies consistently have shown that DARE is ineffective in reducing the use of alcohol and drugs and is sometimes even counterproductive — worse than doing nothing,” the website states.

Sheriff Parnell McNamara said he is sensitive to the security and budget issues the court faces, but added he disagrees with national data and is against the elimination of the drug awareness classes.

McNamara said his task forces are working hard to eliminate drug activity in the county and that he fully supports anything that would give the department an advantage.

McNamara said 90 percent of the people he arrests are associated with illegal drugs in some way. He said the standard excuse for any criminal activity is being mentally unsound on an illegal substance.

“As serious as the drug situation is in McLennan County, I wish the court would look long and hard before doing away with the DARE program,” he said.

Leave it to McLennan County law enforcement to insist on a program that data shows is not just "ineffective" but "counterproductive." DARE is not a law enforcement initiative, it's a propaganda campaign. And prioritizing it at the expense of courthouse security is just dumb as dirt.

New limits on Texas ISD cops giving tickets for breaking school rules

The Texas Tribune has a feature on one of the more significant juvenile justice reforms from the 83rd session: Eliminating most Class C tickets given to students for violations of school rules. The story by Jody Serrano ("School officers can no longer issue on-campus citations," Aug. 29) opens thusly:

Public school students in Texas who have chewed gum in class, talked back to teachers or disrupted class have often received citations from school police officers. Beginning in September, students who engage in such levels of misbehavior will face discipline in a different manner.  

While school administrators and teachers have traditionally handled student discipline, some school districts in Texas over the years have allowed school police officers to deal with certain types of misbehavior by charging students with Class C misdemeanors, a practice commonly referred to as student ticketing. Students charged must appear before a county or municipal judge and can face fines of up to $500 if found guilty by a judge.

Students who do not pay their fines could be arrested as soon as they turn 17 years old. Even if students pay the fines, the offenses could still appear on their criminal records.

The Legislature took steps this year toward decriminalizing such misbehavior at school with Senate Bill 393 by Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas. The measure prevents school police officers from issuing citations for misbehavior at school, excluding traffic violations. Officers can still submit complaints about students, but it will be up to a local prosecutor whether to charge the student with a Class C misdemeanor.

If students are charged, prosecutors can choose to make students get tutoring, do community service or undergo counseling before they get sent to court. According to the Texas Supreme Court, roughly 300,000 students each year are given citations for behavior considered a Class C misdemeanor, including disruption of class, disorderly language and in-school fighting.

Perfumed perpetrator wouldn't get ticket under new Texas statute

Don't know how I missed this 2011 Austin story, but if you did too, check out this TV news report about a girl given a Class C misdemeanor ticket in school for allegedly disrupting class by wearing too much perfume. (Somebody posted the dated item on Reddit yesterday.) The alleged perpetrator was being bullied and used the perfume in response to taunts that she "smelled."

Seeing that story makes me happier than ever that the Texas Legislature this year approved Sen. John Whtimire's SB 1114. That bill prohibits giving Class C tickets to kids under 12. So the girl in the above news story couldn't get a ticket at all under the statute that goes into effect September 1st. After that, police cannot ticket children under 12 in Texas schools. For students 12 and above, all Class C charges must include "an offense report, a statement by a witness, and a statement by a victim. This would apply to offenses that were alleged to have occurred on school property or on a vehicle owned or operated by a county or school district. Prosecutors could not proceed in a trial unless the law enforcement officer met these requirements," according to the official digest (pdf) from the House Research Organization. Moreover, "The Education Code offenses of disruption of class and disruption of transportation would no longer apply to primary and secondary grade students enrolled in the school where the offense occurred." That's a big change.

There are other amendments to the code that should significantly reduce the number of Class C tickets written in schools:

Children accused of any class C misdemeanor (maximum fine of $500), other than a traffic offense, could be referred to a first - offender program before a complaint was filed with a criminal court. The cases of children who successfully completed first - offender programs for class C misdemeanors could not be referred to the court if certain conditions in current law were met.

SB 1114 would prohibit arrest warrants for persons with class C misdemeanors under the Education Code for an offense committed when the person was younger than 17 years old. School district peace officers no longer would be authorized to perform administrative duties for a school district but would be limited to their current authority to perform law enforcement duties.

Also, "Courts would be required to dismiss complaints or referrals for truancy made by a school district if they were not accompanied by currently required statements about whether truancy prevention measures were applied in the case and whether the student was eligible for special education services."

With any luck, thanks to SB 1114, we won't hear more horror stories like that terrible tale of the perfumed perpetrator in the coming school year. Whitmire's legislation has been mostly unheralded - even to some extent on this blog, which should have lauded it in this retrospective post - mainly because it was met with only tepid opposition from law enforcement and received broad, full-throated support from nearly everyone else, regardless of party or station. The media are drawn to a fight but here there was (mostly) sweeping consensus. Be that as it may, SB 1114 was one of the major accomplishments of the 83rd Texas Legislature. Of all the criminal-justice bills passed this year, arguably SB 1114 is the item legislators can point to that will affect the largest number of average, everyday families. It'll be fascinating to parse the data down the line to find out the effect both on ticket writing and the use of traditional school disciplinary methods outside the criminal justice system, which one hopes will be enhanced with the passage of this new law.

Dallas County truancy courts doing vast volume, serve as cash cow, lawuit alleged

"Texas processes more truancy cases through its court systems than all other states combined," according to a complaint (pdf) filed last week with the US Justice Department alleging over- and misuse of Dallas County truancy courts. According to the lawsuit, "The very high volume of juvenile cases heard by municipal and justice courts in Texas has led some to refer to them as the 'shadow juvenile justice system.'" "The volume of juvenile cases filed in municipal and justice courts dwarfs that of the state's juvenile courts."

The numbers back that assertion up: In FY 2012, there were 113,369 total cases filed against Texas students for failure to attend school. Almost none (455 total) were handled through traditional juvenile courts: 76,878 were filed in municipal or justice courts - 15% of those through municipal courts and the rest through county justices of the peace. By contrast, 36,036 truancy cases were filed in four Dallas County truancy courts during the same year. That's an enormous number. Much larger Harris County saw just 12,723 truancy cases filed in FY 2012.

One element I hadn't understood is the extent to which truancy cases have been automated, at least in Big D. There are four school districts in Dallas County and in each of them, "Cases are 'e-filed' by schools with students' attendance records triggering a system that electronically 'pushes' cases to the courts once they have reached the designated filing date - leaving probable cause determination to a computer," the complaint alleges. What's more, alleged the complaint, "Children are routinely criminalized for behavior as innocuous as being tardy to class." And once a youngster has racked up a bunch of truancy tickets, "Youth may be jailed once they turn 17 if they have not paid their fines and costs in full."

Dallas County has full-time truancy courts funded entirely from fines and fees from defendants - in other words, they operate on an eat-what-you-kill basis that gives them an incentive to maximize truancy cases, or at least ensure their numbers don't decline so that revenues remain steady. That creates perverse incentives, alleged the lawsuit, and IMO it's hard to disagree.

For those interested in more details (and Grits found it a fascinating read), see the 59-page civil complaint (pdf) filed by Texas Appleseed , Disability Rights Texas and the National Center for Youth Law. This should be interesting litigation: Lots of important, long-neglected issues are being raised that one seldom sees publicly acknowledged, much less comprehensively vetted.

Via Think Progress.

Roundup: Private prisons, primary contests, tech law and privacy

Here are a few odds and ends that haven't made it into full Grits posts but deserve readers' attention:

Court of Criminal Appeals races in play in 2014 GOP primary
There has been much speculation in political and legal circles this spring that all three Texas Court of Criminal Appeals judges up for reelection in 2014 may retire, which would mean Texas would have open-seat races for every slot and likely a broad field of candidates to choose from in each one. W.C. "Bud" Kirkendall, who was District Attorney for the 25th Judicial District for 20 years before being elected judge out of Seguin, has announced his candidacy for the CCA and in the coming months likely many will join him. I thought it notable that Kirkendall included an homage to online privacy in his announcement statement: "the court plays a critical role in important constitutional issues such as the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment and Texas law, search and seizure matters, surveillance limitations and questions of online privacy," he declared. "I will apply my conservative judicial philosophy, experience and maturity to each ruling, adhering to the constitutions of the United States and Texas" The Republican primary is where all the action will be in these races. Whoever the GOP nominates will win the statewide races on the party's substantial coattails, so primary voters are the only ones who matter. Grits expects quite a few candidates and competitive (if likely underfunded) races.

Dallas DA primary promises hot contest
Troubled Dallas county commissioner John Wiley Price said Judge John Creuzot should run against District Attorney Craig Watkins in the 2014 primary. Grits agrees, but one imagines Creuzot would rather the South Dallas political kingpin keep his endorsement to himself, at least until the question in the headline of this Dallas Observer blog post can be answered. If JWP falls under federal indictment, a possibility that has loomed over the county for months, that won't look so great on his endorsement sheet. Be that as it may, assuming Watkins runs for reelection, this would be an exciting and potentially vicious primary race. Dallas Dems may fault Creuzot for at one time holding office as a Republican but they've plenty to fault Watkins for as well and Creuzot can only win by reminding them of it. That'd make it a hot one.

TX Private Prison News and Notes
For those interested in private prison topics, go visit the blog Texas Prison Bidness to read recent posts about a recent lawsuit over records against Corrections Corporation of America as well as happenings in McLennan and Montgomery counties, both of which bet on overbuilt local jails then couldn't find sufficient prisoners to fill them.

Jailer pay competing with Midland oilfields
Midland County Sheriff Gary Painter is asking his commissioners court for a pay raise for his jailers to resolve understaffing at the facility. When the oilfields are running full steam, that county jail job doesn't look nearly as attractive.

School PD fined $82.5K for misreported crime data
UT-Arlington's campus police department was fined $82,500 by the US Department of Education for misreporting crime data, most seriously an episode that should have been classified as "Forcible Fondling," which is not a term I'd heard before, and another where DOE thought a vicious fight between two female roommates was serious enough to qualify as "aggravated assault." Otherwise, relayed Unfair Park from a Chronicle of Higher Education report, "The bulk of the cases involved drug, weapons, and liquor violations that were classified as 'disciplinary actions' and excluded from crime statistics."

The case for officially ignoring 3-D printed guns
Grits tends to agree with the conclusion of this excellent if lengthy blog post related to the handgun made with a 3-D printer (and actually fired) by a UT-Austin law student working through a nonprofit called Defense Distributed. (See a good backgrounder from Forbes.) Andrew Sellars at the Digital Media Law Project would "urge the courts, the legislatures, and the public to ignore Defense Distributed's handgun altogether. It distracts from the actual issues surrounding America's profound problem with gun violence. In our dreams of a 3D-printed arsenal we soon forget that the 'Liberator' cannot be made using something as simple as a MakerBot in someone's basement. This requires a 3D printer costing thousands of dollars and over a hundred dollars in raw material in order to build a gun that will probably only fire once before melting. Meanwhile, This American Life reported a few weeks back that the black market rate for a real handgun in Chicago can be as low as $25. To put it bluntly, we will see far more handgun deaths due to black market firearms this week than we will see from 3D printed guns in our entire lifetime."

Why the FBI thinks it needs no search warrant to read your old email
From the International Business Times. HB 3164 by Stickland, which was attached to another piece of legislation recently approved by the Texas House, aims to close this same loophole for state and local law enforcement in Texas.

Mug-shot media, tickets in school, and yet more discovery debate: Previewing Senate Criminal Justice highlights

Having gone through highlights from the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee agenda on Tuesday, March 26, let's turn our attention to the Senate Criminal Justice Committee agenda on the same day. Regular readers know Grits will be paying special attention to SB 786 by Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa, the companion to HB1608 which would require law enforcement to secure a probable-cause based search warrant to obtain cell-phone location data. But here's a look at what else is on the list:

Regulating mug shot media
Sen. Tommy Williams has a bill up regulating media outlets that engage in the publication of mug shot and criminal history information, requiring them to publish accurate information and to correct errors or outdated information, giving them a "duty to disseminate complete and accurate criminal history information." Also, such entities could not charge a fee for removing someone from their website. Good bill.

Limiting Class C tickets for school discipline
Chairman John Whitmire's SB 1114 would create alternative, non-criminal sanctions for school misbehavior instead of writing Class C misdemeanor tickets, a topic the senate dean has been aiming to change for some time.

Gun bill trifecta
There are three minor gun bills including one by Sen. Hinojosa requiring Texas licensure for concealed carry permit holders from other states once they establish residency here, and another by Sen. Craig Estes clarifying the law on brandishing a firearm to require a proactive display of a weapon in a way calculated to cause alarm. A third, by Sen. Royce West, would expand the scope of the offense of "unlawful transfer" of a weapon.

Bailing out
A pair of bills related to easing requirements on bail bond companies made the list. SB 876 by Patrick would let surety bond companies get out from under old liabilities if a skip is not caught for five years after their last hearing, a requirement the bill analysis calls "improper government overreach." Another bill by the chairman would give defendants who don't show up for their hearing an extra 72 hours to show good cause before the bond company forfeits the money they put up.

Discovery reform, redux
As in the House, the debate over discovery reform may be among the most contentious of the day as the committee considers Rodney Ellis and Robert Duncan's SB 1611.  The defense bar has dug their heels in but these folks are arguing over tiny margins of trial turf for a profession that pleas out 97% of convicted criminal clients. Lots of folks will be scurrying back and forth between committees over this issue.

Senate Committee: End ticket writing for education code violations, relax 'zero tolerance' in school discipline

The Senate Criminal Justice Committee released its interim report (pdf) to the 83rd Texas Legislature earlier this month, and Grits was interested to see the following recommendations related to school discipline and ticketing practices by school district police:

1. The legislature should require training for teachers and campus law enforcement in behavior management techniques.
2. The legislature should allow for an age to identify what students may be issue citations, not a grade level.
3. The legislature should remove the option of issuing citations for education code violations. These disciplinary [cases] should be addressed through a graduated sanctions model.
4. The legislature should include more discretion in zero tolerance policy.
5. The legislature should amend current statutes to create a consequence for districts that have not complied with implementing truancy prevention programs.
6. The legislature should require complainants to use sworn statement procedures rather than relying on law enforcement officers to issue citations.
7. The legislature should require [campus] law enforcement to report to a superintendent rather than a designee.

More soon on some of the other recommendations from the report.

'School shootings, no matter how horrific, do not justify creating an Orwellian surveillance state in America'

Ron Paul, of all people, expressed views similar to my own "pox on both their houses" perspective on the recent policy debates in the aftermath of the Connecticut elementary school shootings: “Predictably," he declared, as reported by Politico, "the political left responded to the tragedy with emotional calls for increased gun control,” suggesting that, “This is understandable, but misguided. The impulse to have government ‘do something’ to protect us in the wake of national tragedies is reflexive and often well intentioned. … But this impulse ignores the self evident truth that criminals don’t obey laws.” Thank you!

OTOH, Paul blasted the NRA's proposal to place armed police in every school:

He said the federal government should not try to “pursue unobtainable safety” with state-sanctioned security and claimed Democratic and Republican lawmakers have “zero moral authority to legislate against violence.”

“This is the world of government provided ‘security,’ a world far too many Americans now seem to accept or even endorse,” Paul said in a statement on his website. “School shootings, no matter how horrific, do not justify creating an Orwellian surveillance state in America.”

He continued: “Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens’ lives. We shouldn’t settle for substituting one type of violence for another.”

The proliferation of legal guns in America over the last several decades makes their prohibition as fanciful as the prohibition of alcohol or pot. Yes, "we could try." But you'd fail, just as the drug war has failed, just as alcohol prohibition failed. This isn't Europe or Japan, where the populace was disarmed by totalitarian states, or else under martial law after a war, so that strict gun control could be imposed from scratch. In the US, and certainly Texas, it would be many decades before the black market exhausted its supply. The only upside would be for the private prison companies, who are always looking for new categories of citizens to criminalize and incarcerate.

By the same token, in an era when the Obama Administration considers civilian casualties acceptable collateral consequences of extra-judicial executions (read: drone strikes), I couldn't agree more that “Democratic and Republican lawmakers have 'zero moral authority to legislate against violence.'” And his comment about the NRA proposal "substituting one kind of violence for another" could have come straight from Gandhi or Dr. King. Paul's statement expanded on the theme: "Real change can happen only when we commit ourselves to rebuilding civil society in America, meaning a society based on family, religion, civic and social institutions, and peaceful cooperation through markets. We cannot reverse decades of moral and intellectual decline by snapping our fingers and passing laws." Amen, brother. Preach!

I always worry when government makes policy in reaction to some specific, rare event like the mass shooting of first graders. There's an old saying, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. The massacre in Connecticut was a zebra, one cannot reasonably ban everything with hooves in response.

Personally, I find US and Texas gun laws both over- and under-restrictive, in an almost schizophrenic kind of way. For example, it's no doubt too easy for folks diagnosed with a serious mental illness to acquire firearms, and the legal framework governing mental illness is conflicted and generally underdeveloped. We could do much better at getting those in need access to mental health services and supervising, whether in corrections facilities, hospitals, or in the community, people who pose a serious risk of violence when off their meds. Intermediate levels of supervision - perhaps including greater use of preemptive civil commitments - could support compliance with treatment protocols on the front end instead of punishing the mentally ill after something bad has happened. But all that would require a community mental health infrastructure that today doesn't exist. In most places, the county jail is now the area's largest mental health provider. OTOH, if you want to talk about "gun control" aimed narrowly at those with serious mental illness, you'd probably get a lot less pushback than for any kind of general ban.

At the same time, the universal ban on felons possessing firearms ends up sending a lot of folks to prison who've committed no other recent offense, and only a subset of those people (Texas releases more than 70,000 felons from prison every year) are so dangerous they merit a lifetime ban on firearm ownership, as federal law prescribes. Meanwhile there are some misdemeanors, including family violence, that probably merit elimination of gun rights but don't. (In Texas, a domestic violence conviction means you can't own a gun for five years.) Misdemeanors vs. felonies is an arbitrary line.

Certainly I believe the law can be changed in ways that would reduce the number of gun deaths. As our e-pal Dan Kahan recently opined, the most immediate and effective method of reducing the gun death total - though it has nothing to do with lone-gunman school shootings - would be to legalize, tax and regulate marijuana and cocaine. A large proportion of gun deaths - not the least of which are the 60,000 or so in northern Mexico over the last six years - relate to the black-market drug trade. You don't see the makers of Samuel Adams lager engaged in gun battles with Anheuser Busch.

However, there's no public safety benefit from criminalizing common activities and uses by everyday gun owners, especially because there are too many of them. (Long-time readers may recall Grits worked with the Texas State Rifle Association and even authored a public policy report in support of legislation to allow legal gun owners to carry a weapon, stowed securely, in their personal vehicles.) But neither are more guns inherently a good solution. Giving teachers guns to keep in classrooms full of mischievous kids, for example, as has been suggested in Arlington, is a recipe for disaster.

The all-or-nothing debate over guns has turned into another hackneyed, culture-war flashpoint, obscuring more moderate, selective policies aimed at mitigating specific, underlying causes of gun violence. Ron Paul, I fear, is the wrong messenger; the public is so used to ignoring him it's got to be second nature by now. And Grits thinks government should probably play a bigger role in this matter than the Congressman would countenance, along the lines described above. But I'm glad to hear somebody say in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy that more, harsher criminal laws aren't the only or even the best solution.

Reforming state jails, prosecution as grant management, and other stories

Just a few odds and ends that didn't make it into their own, individual posts:

Narcotics task force cops robbed drug dealers instead of arrest them
Reported the McAllen Monitor, "Two Mission narcotics investigators have been arrested alongside other local law enforcement officers in a federal corruption probe focusing on drug loads stolen from the criminals they had been tasked with taking down." The alleged perpetrators were part of "a joint drug task force made up of Hidalgo County and Mission officers." Long-time readers may recall that multi-county task forces were placed under jurisdiction of the Department of Public Safety back in 2005, with most of them going under within a year, either because they refused DPS supervision or, the rest of them, when Gov. Perry pulled the plug on their funding. But some multi-agency task forces soon formed among agencies all within the same county, as in this example, and clearly some of the same problems still arise. See more on the latest episode from Texas Watchdog.

Conservative plan for reforming state jails
The Texas Public Policy Foundation's Jeanette Moll argued in an Austin Statesman editorial that Texas hamstrung the state jail system "before the first state jail even opened its doors" by implementing direct sentencing instead of using them as a short-term probation sanction. She suggested that, "With hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year on state jails, and outcomes worse than prison, state jails are in dire need of reform." (See related Grits coverage on Ms. Moll's proposals.)

'Texas DPS marks 10,000th match in open cases'
So reported the Texas Tribune. The looming question: Will the Legislature spend money to expand DNA testing capacity at Texas crime labs, not to mention DWI blood testing and other areas where crime labs have backlogs.

Just say "No" to sobriety checkpoints
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram asks "Should Texas have sobriety checkpoints?" For reasons previously stated, Grits votes no.

Strong probation for meth-head driver who hit cyclist
A round of apology letters, an 18-month ban on coaching youth sports teams, and $8,000 in restitution are among "unique" probation conditions for a meth-using driver who struck a stopped motorcycllist from behind in Weatherford.

His only apology is for apologizing
The Waco Tribune interviewed former county tax assessor Buddy Skeen who's currently in jail for misuse of public funds and regrets agreeing to apologize for his actions in open court as a condition of his plea. "I wasn’t punished for my crime. I was punished for my political affiliation."

School discipline roundup

The Texas Education Report has updates on the controversy over RFID use in two San Antonio schools (see related Grits coverage), a report on the hundreds of millions spent by large school districts on disciplinary systems, and another report on a pilot program at Waco ISD aiming to reduce disciplinary referrals, a subject that's lately received national attention. See a related, recent report from the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition titled, "Community Solutions for Youth in Trouble."

Girls' experience in the juvenile justice system
See the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition's recent report.

Prosecution as grant management?
Is there seemingly no failure in public life which cannot be criminally prosecuted?

Peach state criminal justice reform?
Watch what Georgia does on scaling back criminal justice spending. If it can pass in the Peach State, it's got a chance in the Texas Lege.

Private Prison Exec a Grade A Creep
Thomas Weirdsma, the senior vice president of project development at private prison company GEO Group, in my book is a Grad A creep. He's been taking heat lately for a video deposition in which he said that giving false testimony to government agencies "happens all the time." But the real scandal comes from evicting his immigrant daughter in law and allegedly threatening to use his immigration agency connections to have her deported if she pressed charges against his son after she endured "multiple drunken beatings, a near drowning in a bathtub, and an attempted suffocation with a pillow," the Boulder Daily Camera reported earlier this year. Ick! Awarding the daughter-in-law a $1.2 million verdict, jurors found that the Weirdesmas, father and son, each engaged in "outrageous conduct" during the episode, which sounds to me like an understatement.

Huge fine for HSBC money laundering
Finally, a serious punishment for an international bank for money laundering. I'd come to think banks and businesses had been declared effectively exempt from money laundering enforcement, so this is a good sign. A $1.9 billion fine will serve as an actual deterrent for a big company, as opposed to the relatively penny ante "deferred prosecution" cases we've seen in the past. Some despair, though, that no executives are ever personally prosecuted in money laundering cases; particularly at banks like HSBC they're considered "too big to jail." MORE: From Paul Kennedy and Scott Greenfield.

Harsh CIA interrogations ineffective
So concluded the most extensive-ever analysis on the topic, though it's a conclusion I once thought professional interrogators had reached many decades ago following the Wickersham Commission.