Texas’ criminal justice dollars generally flow through the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) or the Governor’s Criminal Justice Division (CJD). State tax dollars are spent on TDCJ, and the Governor's CJD generally handles federal grant money.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) spends billions of our state tax dollars each year, but spends less and less of its funds on proven treatment and diversion programs.

TDCJ gets about $5 billion from the Texas Legislature every two years. TDCJ spends 90% of those funds on prison beds or "hard incarceration" and only 10% on community based programming like substance abuse treatment and other probation programs. Over the past ten years, TDCJ funding of programs outside of the prison walls has actually decreased.

The Governor’s Criminal Justice Division (CJD) distributes federal criminal justice dollars that come to Texas including the federal Byrne grant program. Each year, $20-30 million comes to Texas from the federal government in Byrne grant funds. The CJD can choose to spend the Byrne funds on substance abuse treatment, drug courts, prison diversion programs, and/or other programs that work to reduce crime.

Instead, the CJD gives almost all of the money to multijurisdictional Drug Task Forces – failed law enforcement programs whose goals are simply to put more and more people in prison for petty drug offenses each year. Even after the well reported corruption and scandals that surround this flawed law enforcement program, the CJD has failed to divert the $30 million per year in federal dollars to "what works" treatment programs that would break the cycle of crime in Texas.

There is a serious need in Texas for special programs that are not being funded. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, over 1.3 million Texans need but do not receive treatment for alcohol abuse, and over 400,000 Texans need but do not receive treatment for illicit drug use.

Meanwhile, Texas pays the price for not having these needed programs in place. More people placed on probation are failing and being sent to prison. From 1994 to 2000, technical revocations (people who were sent to prison for failing probation with no new offense alleged, just failure to follow rules) increased 58%, and revocations for committing a new offense increased 9.6%.

People sent to prison for technical revocations in 2000 will cost state taxpayers $220 million to incarcerate. If these probationers could successfully complete their probation and not go to prison, these hundreds of millions of tax dollars could be invested in programs that work instead of prison beds.

The cost of failing to provide Texans with the help they need extend far beyond the criminal justice system. The direct economic cost to American society of drug abuse in 2000, including health care costs attributable to drug abuse and other costs which include the cost of goods and services lost to crime and social welfare costs, was over $50 billion. The indirect economic cost to American society in 2000, including productivity losses due to incarceration, institutionalization, hospitalization, premature death, drug abuse related illness, productivity loss of victims of crime, and crime careers, was over $110 billion. That’s in addition to direct costs of arrest, prosecution, probation, incarceration and parole.

The cost of our criminal justice strategies falls on families, communities, and taxpayers.

In Texas, the total economic cost associated with alcohol and drug abuse in 2000 was estimated at $25.9 billion.

Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, Annual Report, 2003.