Reform drug laws, release prisoners to boost economy
New proof of police misconduct, a collapse in tax revenues and an expanding outbreak of the novel coronavirus should have Texans thinking outside the box to address society’s problems and drive the economy.
Few ideas create as much controversy as releasing more people from prison. But conservative activists, criminal justice reformers and some correctional officers agree that releasing more people would solve a slew of problems, both societal and economic.
Two-thirds of people incarcerated in Texas prisons are African American or Hispanic. The Black Lives Matter movement has shined a light on abusive police practices that led to this disparity, but the challenge is releasing those who are not dangerous while also preventing bad law enforcement from ruining more lives and potential careers.
Every good executive knows that times like these call for a fundamental re
view of the business plan.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s mission is to lock up dangerous people. The agency’s budget for 2020 was $3.5 billion, with $2.9 billion spent on incarcerating 140,000 people at more than 100 facilities.
Workforce, though, is a challenge. Annual turnover among correctional officers is more than 30 percent, and 20 percent of positions are consistently vacant, even with hiring bonuses and higher wages.
Financing is a major problem because COVID-19 has taken a toll on Texas sales tax revenues. State leaders have instructed the Department of Criminal Justice to cut its lean budget by 5 percent.
Without enough staff or money, the time is ripe to ask whether locking up so many people is good for society, the workforce or the economy. The Texas prison count has grown at twice the speed as the population.
Just as police arresting people will not solve their drug addiction, neither will putting them in prison. People holding any amount of hard drugs, or 4 ounces of marijuana, end up with felony convictions that haunt them for the rest of their working lives and likely put them behind bars where they become a taxpayer burden.
Legalizing marijuana and treating drug addiction as a public health problem would dramatically reduce the number of prisons in Texas and prevent a medical condition from excluding hundreds of thousands from the workforce. But there are more immediate solutions, too.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Parole has already approved the release of 11,000 people. But the Texas Department of Criminal Justice requires parolees to complete courses ranging from life skills to anger management before they are released. Due to budget cuts and COVID-19, potential parolees are spending an extra six to nine months behind bars at taxpayer expense waiting for a class they should take online.
“If we would do the (courses) at the front-end, as soon as they have parole, they could leave,” said Scott Henson, policy director for the Innocence Project of Texas. “That would be another half-dozen prison units we can close.”
About half of the people in prison are there because they violated probation or parole. Half of those violations — about 12,000 a year — are for technical reasons, such as drinking alcohol, missing an appointment or testing positive for marijuana.
“That’s basically four or five prisons right there,” said Marc Levin, an analyst for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Changing the drug sentencing laws to redirect more people into drug courts and other alternatives is really important.”
Even a conservative like Levin, who runs the Right on Crime initiative, thinks we can release more people safely.
“We don’t want to have an automatic release of everybody, but I do think we should focus on certain cases, like geriatric cases and medically fragile, pregnant women,” Levin said. “The No. 1 factor is safety. Can we be assured that there is a low risk the person will commit a serious crime?”
Lance Lowry, vice president of the Correctional Officers Association of Texas, said reducing the prison population would improve everyone’s conditions.
About a third of people behind bars in Texas are released every year, but only 21 percent of those are back in prison within three years.
“Low-level offenses where the evidence shows there is little chance they will offend again is an opportunity for savings,” he said.
Every business leader knows the wisdom of rethinking assumptions, asking how to do things smarter, and wondering if they are really serving their customer. After the recent protests, the pandemic and an economic collapse, we need to reconsider everything, even who we lock in prison and why.