Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 14, 1994 TAG: 9409140095
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: AUSTIN, TEXAS LENGTH: Long
``We are testing the case for more incarceration,'' said Tony Fabelo, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council. ``I'm not convinced either way; we'll just need to look at it.''
It is an expensive experiment, on a scale worthy of this wide-open, bigger-is-better land.
In 1992, after five years of stepped-up prison-building, Texas had beds for 52,000 inmates and an incarceration rate of 553 prisoners for every 100,000 residents.
That rate is expected to almost double by 2000, when the system will house 206,000.
The increase will mean that one of every nine black men in Texas will be behind bars, Fabelo's agency computed. One of every 21 adults - all races, both sexes - will be under the control of the state's penal system, the research shows.
Prison construction has become such a priority in Texas that twice this year legislators have approved taking $100-million chunks of funding away from other state programs to spend on corrections.
This is not a political risk. Last year, 56 percent of Texas voters rejected a referendum for borrowing $750 million to build schools. A few months later, 70 percent of Texas voters approved borrowing $1 billion to build prisons.
The prospect of all that debt doesn't seem to bother people whose state government has run up deficits for the past six years. Texas has one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the country, one of the largest populations without health insurance in the country and one of the lower nationwide rankings for social-services programs.
``What it means is, in Texas, at least for the foreseeable future, the people are willing to take money away from education and human services to pay for the criminal justice system,'' Fabelo said.
The trend began in the 1987 session of the state legislature, which meets every two years. By then, pressures brought on by a growing state population and the war on drugs had packed state prisons and county jails to the breaking point.
The legislature approved borrowing money to build prisons for 11,000 more inmates. Even with the addition, though, three of every four inmates coming up for parole were being released - at a rate of 150 prisoners a day - simply because there was no room to keep them locked up.
The public began to complain. What's more, counties began to complain, and counties had lawyers. They sued over the crushing backlog of prisoners left in jails because the state prisons couldn't take them.
Federal courts ordered the state to fix the problem. Feverish prison building began.
In 1989, 15,000 prison beds were approved, and when Gov. Ann Richards took office in 1991, another 25,000 beds won approval.
Even so, inmates continue to flow in faster than the cells go up. The state has had to set up temporary work camps, with prisoners sleeping in tents, until permanent facilities are available the first of next year.
It wasn't until last year that lawmakers began reforming sentencing policy to ensure that violent criminals would spend more time in all that still-expanding prison space.
``What we're basically doing is trying a new philosophy on crime, and trying to draw a line that separates the nonviolent criminal from the violent criminal ... [whom] people in the state of Texas are demanding be locked up and locked up for a longer period of time,'' said Andrew Hurd, an aide to state Sen. John Whitmire, who carried much of the reform legislation.
What Texas did was create a new type of crime and new system of ``state jails.'' Certain nonviolent felonies and misdemeanors have been reclassified as ``state jail crimes,'' carrying a sentence of no more than two years.
The state jails are cheaper to build than prisons, and putting nonviolent inmates there clears more room in maximum-security facilities for the hard-core felons.
In addition, the state looked at abolishing parole but opted instead for tightening it; today, only one of every four inmates gets parole when the opportunity rolls around. Violent felons are required to serve about 60 percent of their sentences; all inmates are serving 35 percent of their time. As recently as 1991, the average Texas inmate served only 13 percent of his or her sentence.
Fabelo, who has advised Virginia officials about prison reform, said it's too early to gauge whether the massive imprisonment program has made Texas a safer place.
Texas crime rates have fallen for the past few years, but Fabelo acknowledges that drop matches a nationwide trend attributable in part to an improving economy.
Regardless of its immediate impact on crime, Fabelo views prison reform as the essential first step in healing society of broader ills. Welfare, decaying inner cities, troubled schools, fractured families - all combine to create what Fabelo called a ``factory of criminals.''
``Ideally, you get at crime by trying to control those factors fueling the factory of criminals. And in order to do that ... it's essential that you have a criminal-justice system that gives people a sense that the system is functional ... All these neighborhood-improvement programs will not work if people are afraid to walk out of their front doors in the first place.''
Some Texas officials are skeptical that all the prison building is going to make a difference.
``I think what it'll do is, it'll show a temporary decrease in crime that will last probably a year, maybe two, then a radical increase in crime as the population increases and juvenile offenders graduate up,'' Austin District Attorney Ronnie Earle said.
Earle, a 17-year veteran prosecutor, wants to combine community anti-crime programs with incarceration. He has won approval from the legislature to make Austin's new state jail an experimental ``community justice program.'' It will be built downtown and feature extensive community outreach, drug treatment and work-release programs designed to force inmates to learn how to fit back into society.
``If the concept of community justice is a success, then the state prison establishment will lose power and influence because there will be less need for large, expensive prisons,'' Earle said.
He thinks the idea of Texas as a laboratory for testing whether more prisons means less crime is misguided.
``I think it's a lot like trying to deal with cancer by using Band-Aids,'' he said. ``Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, and that is what they're doing if they expect the prison-building program to solve the crime problem.
``Community justice is tougher, because prison doesn't require people to change. Change is the worst punishment of all.''
by CNB