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02:18 PM CST on Thursday, January 11, 2007
By EMILY RAMSHAW / The Dallas Morning News
AUSTIN - Texas lawmakers on an influential state commission formally recommended an overhaul of the prison rehabilitation,
probation and parole systems Wednesday, hoping to reduce crowding without building new units.
State corrections officials, though, want hundreds of millions of dollars to build three new prisons, saying that's the
best way to prevent a projected shortfall of 11,000 beds by 2011.
The lawmakers on the Sunset Commission would prefer to:
Pour additional funds into in-prison and outpatient drug and alcohol treatment programs.
Change the probation and parole structure to emphasize early release for good behavior and low-risk offenders.
Give judges better authority to release state jail inmates with severe medical conditions early.
"We're at a crossroads with where we're going to go with the criminal justice system," said Sen. John Whitmire,
a Houston Democrat who serves on the Sunset Commission and chairs the Senate's Criminal Justice Committee. "I, for one,
will never allow us to come short on capacity. But we are not there yet."
Corrections officials agree they need a greater emphasis on rehabilitation and have asked for funding to bolster these
programs this session. But over the last two months they have continued to assert that they'll still need new prisons to meet
projected shortfalls. The current prison population is close to the system's capacity of 153,000 inmates.
And prosecutors have sprung to their defense, accusing lawmakers of going soft on crime and trying to solve the prison
space crisis by simply turning more offenders out onto the street.
On Wednesday, Brad Livingston, executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said he supports having
an "independent entity" crunch numbers and find out exactly how many inmates these rehabilitation and early release
programs would divert, so the corrections agency can proceed from there.
Mr. Whitmire supports that notion – though he and House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, R-Richardson,
say they've spent the last several weeks doing some of the math themselves.
The two lawmakers said last week that they intend to propose funding at least four times more therapeutic and community-based
beds than the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has requested, while denying the agency any new units that aren't rehab-related.
Their plan would cost the state an estimated $150 million over the next two years.
The prison system has 5,500 inmates convicted of repeat drunken driving, Mr. Whitmire said, "people who go in and
out ... without receiving treatment." He said they would be better served in community therapy program, which would free
up prison beds for violent offenders.
He said that as of Wednesday, there were nearly 1,500 inmates approved for parole on the condition that they complete
a six-month in-house drug treatment program. The waiting list for that program is a year long, Mr. Whitmire said.
The state sent 24,000 people to prison last year for probation violations, and half of those were for low-level technical
problems, Mr. Whitmire said.
E-mail eramshaw@dallasnews.com
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