Maybe We Can Sell the Orange Jumpsuits on EBay?
March 30th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Last week, we heard from the Senate Finance Committee how inevitable… er, vital it will be to get started building prisons right away to house all the inmates who’ll be overflowing the system in the next few years, especially if criminals don’t take kindly to treatment. The felons will run rampant in our streets, apparently, the rivers will run red, and there will be much wringing of hands.
It’s funny, but in the House last night, things sure didn’t seem so urgent.
After speculation all week about who would be the one in the House to bring up a prison-funding amendment to match what was happening with the Senate budget, the answer turned out to be… nobody.
Absent the pressure to pad “tuff on crime” stats, and less concern for impressing constituents by building prisons in their home districts, members were conspicuously mum on new funding to expand Department of Criminal Justice operations.
Instead, the Whitmire-Madden push to fund treatment programs and overhaul probation was the clear favorite, with a release from the Texas Republican Caucus trumpeting a victory for common sense in the budget. “Recognizing that certain criminals need treatment, not incarceration, the budget includes $61.5 million to divert some inmates to treatment programs,” the release says. By contrast, the Senate budget proposal manages to fund new treatment options AND new prisons, and, subsequently, a vast tract of money trees in West Texas.
Ana Yáñez-Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, says the night of no new prisons is a sign of cooler heads in the House. “I think it was very clear by the leadership — from the speaker, from Rep. Chisum and the appropriations committeee — that they really thought about it, and they did not think prisons were the way to go.”
Rep. Sylvester Turner, chair of the appropriations subcommittee on criminal justice, kept a tight focus on treatment options while the budget was in committee, and his office said the House has really been following his lead when it comes to where to spend criminal justice money.
Within two weeks, the Senate is expected to pass their own version of the budget and they’ll go head to head with the House over differences like the prison funding. “The battle’s still not over,” says Yáñez-Correa. “It’s a battle between what some people think is the way to go, which is ‘lock them all up,’ and what will really increase public safety, like better probation, good parole guidelines and diversion programs.”
We’ll see how much pressure the prison-pushers in the Senate bring to the table, and just what kind of understanding they want to reach with the House.
April 1st, 2007 at 6:57 pm
You better build them, with all the kids they are letting out of TYC, all hell is going to break loose. The kids in TYC now have a sense of entitlement and have the control over the staff so now when they get into the community it’s “katie bar the door”. They want to downsize TYC, get ready then TDCJ, these kids aren’t the “troubled youth”, some are, but some sure as heck aren’t, like the one that beat a staff over the head with a trash can causing multiple stitches, or what about the ones who fractured staff’s eye bone, or fractured a female Caseworker’s cheek causing reconstructive surgery and screws just because she checked him to calm down.
It sure as hell has gotten worse with these kids in facilities now that they have the upper hand and staff have ABSOLUTELY NO SUPPORT FROM ANYONE.
April 9th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
[…] keep low-level offenders from taking up ever-more-scarce beds in lockdown facilities. Even the Texas Republican Caucus got in on the […]
April 16th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
[…] an indicator of how much sway Lite Guv Dewhurst still holds, since the prisons are his priority and the House seems to care for prisons about as much as vouchers at the […]