Announcement for 04/22/09
Texas Justice Reinvestment Policies Reduce Corrections Spending and Strengthen Supervision
The Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center released a new report, “Justice Reinvestment in Texas: Assessing the Impact of the 2007 Justice Reinvestment Initiative,” that finds the justice reinvestment policies enacted in 2007 by the Texas legislature are averting state prison population growth and increasing public safety.
Like many states across the nation, Texas faced an impending prison overcrowding crisis. In 2007, the state projected it needed to spend an additional $523 million for the construction and operation of new prisons over two years. Concerned that simply building more prison space wouldn’t have the greatest impact on recidivism and public safety, state policymakers worked across party lines to pursue a justice reinvestment strategy. They commissioned the CSG Justice Center to conduct a data-driven analysis to explain why the prison population was growing. The Justice Center staff found that failures related to community supervision and insufficient treatment capacity were key factors.
Texas State Representative Jerry Madden said, “Our prisons were increasingly filled with people sentenced for substance abuse problems, mental health issues, or technical violations. The result has been a huge burden on our state budget and fewer beds for serious, violent offenders. We needed to be smarter about how we spent taxpayers’ dollars on public safety while ensuring that we continued to be tough on those offenders who pose the greatest risk to our communities.”
Texas lawmakers enacted a comprehensive criminal justice package and instead of spending the $241 million on prison construction and operation, the state reinvested it to support the following:
- Expanding the capacity of substance abuse treatment programs
- Increasing available mental health community-based treatment and diversion programs
- Improving success rates for people on community supervision
- Enhancing the use of parole for low-risk offenders.
Because the costs associated with increasing the capacity of treatment and residential facilities were significantly less than an earlier budget request for additional prison capacity, the state immediately saved $210.5 million for the 2008–2009 fiscal biennium.
Reviews of the new policies and programs detailed in the CSG Justice Center report reveal that since their enactment, the state prison population stabilized and the number of revocations to prison declined.
Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Center on the States said, “The success of Texas’s efforts demonstrates to other states that there are sensible, data-driven policies that can lead to better investments in public safety than simply trying to build our way out of this problem.”
Highlights of the CSG Justice Center report include the following:
- From January 2007 to December 2008, the Texas prison population increased by only 529 individuals. If the justice reinvestment strategies were not implemented, the prison population faced a projected increase of 5,141 individuals for the same period.
- Before the justice reinvestment policies were enacted, the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Budget Board projected in 2007 that the prison population would grow by approximately 17,000 people over five years; it now projects relatively minimal growth.
- Between 2006 and 2008, probation revocations to prison declined by 4 percent and parole revocations to prison plummeted 25 percent. During that same period—due to the increase in capacity for treatment programs—the parole board’s rate of approvals for supervised releases rose from 26 percent to 31 percent.
At a recent U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, Madden said, “Ten years from now, I expect that we will look back and realize that these policies marked the most significant redirection in Texas’ criminal justice policy history and that we have been all the safer for them.”
The CSG Justice Center staff, with support from the Public Safety Performance Project of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Center on the States and the U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Assistance, worked intensively with Texas policymakers to develop the policy options outlined in the report and continues to support justice reinvestment in other states.
To download the Texas report or to get more information about the CSG Justice Center's justice reinvestment initiative, click here.