Pubdate: Fri, 18 Aug 2000
Source: Austin American-Statesman (TX)
Copyright: 2000 Austin American-Statesman
Contact:  P. O. Box 670 Austin, Texas 78767
Fax: 512-445-3679
Website: http://www.austin360.com/statesman/editions/today/

A PRISON BOOM THAT WON'T STOP

The state's prison cells are filling up faster than taxpayers can build 
them. We lead the nation in state lock-ups and are planning more. That's 
the wrong way to spend the public's money.

Texas just surpassed California as the state holding the most state 
prisoners. An annual review by the U.S. Department of Justice found that in 
late 1999, Texas had incarcerated 163,190 of its 20 million people. 
California prisons held 163,067 inmates, out of 32 million people.

During the 1990s, when crime was declining, the Texas prison population 
grew 173 percent. The Texas system grew faster than that of any other 
state. The extraordinary growth was fueled by a $1.7 billion 
prison-building boom. Declining parole rates helped keep the new prisons full.

That's done, and now state prisons officials say the state must start 
building anew. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice board recently 
announced plans for three new maximum-security prisons, which prison 
officials say would meet just a portion of the projected need for new beds.

At some point, the state needs to take a hard look at its criminal justice 
system and figure out how to slow down the assembly-line production of ex-cons.

Texas is out of line with the nation, and even the national incarceration 
rate exceeds that of most other developed countries. The U.S. incarceration 
rate is six times that of Canada and Australia, according to The Sentencing 
Project, a research and advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. The U.S. 
rate is five times that of any European Union nation.

The overdeveloped Texas prison system drains resources away from schools, 
social services and other areas the public cares deeply about. And the 
frenzy to incarcerate has not seemed to markedly increase the sense of 
security among the free.

New York just became the first state to require that most drug addicts 
convicted of nonviolent crimes get addiction treatment instead of 
incarceration. Other states are trying the same approach on a trial basis.

Texas should consider a similar plan. At the very least, it should increase 
the scale of rehabilitation programs in its prisons, where a majority of 
the prisoners are addicted. The state needs more halfway houses to 
reintegrate freed prisoners back into society. It should increase the 
parole rate for nonviolent offenders, which may require new expenditures 
for monitoring and rehabilitation.

The continuing rapid growth of the state criminal justice system puts the 
state outside the norms even of an eager-to-incarcerate nation. It's not a 
healthy situation. The state needs to do more crime prevention, which means 
increasing services to children so that they don't grow up damaged, angry 
and prone to crime and substance abuse.

Otherwise, we will keep attempting the impossible: locking up all our problems.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart