O’Rourke gauges criminal justice reform
As he makes his way across the state, Beto O’Rourke wants to know: How much does it cost to spend a night in jail? In small towns and big cities, he poses the question, grappling with the price tag of mass incarceration and finetuning his hopes for criminal justice reform.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate candidate hoping to unseat incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, brought that question to the Harris County Jail. There, he learned from Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, it costs $87 a day to incarcerate an inmate — or sometimes more than four times that for prisoners requiring expensive psychiatric medication.
Facts like that, picked up in his countless stops in the state’s 254 counties, drive the energetic congressman from El Paso as he shapes his focus on bail reform, marijuana decriminalization, better mental health care and ending private prisons.
“Things have actually been getting worse over time; that prison population has been getting bigger; it has been getting more black,” he said at a roundtable after his jailhouse visit. “It is consigning more generations to engagement with the criminal justice system.”
On his whirlwind pass through the Bayou City, the 45-year-old spent more time listening to stakeholders and speaking in generalities than he did delving into the specifics of criminal justice policy proposals. But, on the heels of two jail suicides in less than a month, his interest in the intersection of mental health and criminal justice might have seemed particularly timely in Harris County.
“One-quarter of the inmates in this county jail system are prescribed at least one psychotropic medication,” he said while driving between Houston stops. “Not only is this related to criminal justice, this is related to health care in a state that is last in the country in connecting people with the doctor, the prescription, the therapy, the surgery they need to survive.”
The solutions, he said, are better access to outpatient care and expanding Medicaid and Medicare in the hope of driving down premiums.
After his stop at the jail — something his opponent Cruz has not done under the current administration — O'Rourke told local advocates, lawyers and criminal justice experts about his own quick brush with the criminal justice system 23 years ago, when he spent the night in jail on a trespassing charge. Though his access to resources allowed him to make bail the next day and go on to thrive, largely unaffected by his arrest, the impact could be different for those without the means to make bail, he said.
“That life not led, those children not raised, that job not worked, that potential not realized — all of that connected to the fact that today we have the largest prison population in the world, a prison population that is disproportionately comprised of people of color,” he said. “One-third of that prison population there for non-violent drug crimes.”
Reducing that prison population would, in part, come from O’Rourke's hopes for marijuana decriminalization, though he didn’t lay out what other policies could achieve that. In interviews and during his visits, O’Rourke also spoke about his support for bail reform, the need to close private prisons, the problem of veteran suicides, his opposition to the death penalty, and his concerns about the “school to prison pipeline.”
“Whether the imperative is one of justice or morality or whether it’s just our own self-interest to make sure that this economy’s really humming because (unless) everyone has a chance to work, everyone has a chance to participate, everyone can work, everyone can be their best self,” he said, “we have absolutely failed as a country.”
In the past, Cruz has framed O’Rourke as an anti-law enforcement candidate, though the campaign did not offer a comment Wednesday on O’Rourke's criminal justice tour of Houston.