Oh, You Mean Those Prisons
April 17th, 2007 at 5:43 am
One of the major showdowns expected as the House and Senate versions of the budget head to conference committee, as outlined below, is the Senate’s support for building three new prisons, spurred on by Lt. Gov. Dewhurst and finance chair Sen. Steve Ogden. But as House members and their staffers pored over the Senate version line-by-line, many reached the end of Article V’s appropriations for public safety and wondered, Where are the new prisons?
We’re talking about $233.4 million to build maximum security housing for 3,000 inmates. After the way Ogden and Dewhurst threw their weight around to get them funded, did they forget to write the prisons into the budget? Or was it a change of heart — a kinder, gentler Ogden, with a new-found faith in treatment options?
Not likely.
Down around the fine print, funding for the three new prisons appears on page 814 of 837, in Article IX of the Senate’s version of the budget. Far from the rest of the criminal justice appropriations, the prison-building allocations are tucked in as an afterthought right behind a $49.2 million allocation to renovate the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. It’s a paragraph that covers allocations from bond revenues, a limited pot of money specifically earmarked for construction and repairs. If the whole thing sounds a little confusing — especially for those intrepid readers who just clicked the link above and found the paragraph — that may be just the point.
“It’s like, where is the prison construction hiding?” says Ana Yañez-Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. “No one’s caught onto it, and why should they? It’s in Article IX, in the last paragraph.”
Far from just hiding behind the school renovation funding, though, Yañez-Correa says the prisons are actually siphoning $1 million away from the School for the Blind renovation money.
The Texas School for the Blind asked for $50.3 million of bond revenue to fix up its campus in Austin, but with the party-crashing new prisons needing $233.4 million, and only $282.6 million free, there wasn’t cash enough for the both of them. Close, but one million short. Decisions made inside the budget are all about lawmakers’ priorities, and when it came down to fixing up a school for blind children or building new prisons, guess who lost.
“You just don’t do that,” Yañez-Correa says. “To build these prisons, they’re taking money away from blind children.”
Perhaps the Senate’s case would be stronger in lowballing the school, if the prisons really only needed that last million to get up and running. But because they’ve failed to take into account secondary costs like prison guards, operating costs, or even roads to the prison, slashing the million dollars from the School for the Blind appears especially unnecessary.
Still, with the House version of the budget giving no funding at all to new prisons (nor any bond money to the School for the Blind’s renovations), everything in the bill is fair game for compromise. The makeup of the conference committee — specifically, whether it includes Rep. Sylvester Turner (D—Houston), champion of the anti-prison building cause — will have a lot to do with which way this one falls. As the mammoth budget is batted around between the House and the Senate, we hope, at least, it’s the convictions of the committee members that decides the outcome, not how well they’ve hidden their pet appropriations.
May 21st, 2007 at 5:13 pm
[…] the timing of the review could also have implications when it comes to contentious new prisons in Texas. Even if Lite Guv David Dewhurst and others who want more prisons get funding this […]