Cutting Crime ... and Budgets
By Courtney OBrien
Texas Insider Report: WASHINGTON D.C. Governing Magazine named him one of their 2010 Public Officials of the Year for his reforms & bipartisan strategy. State Rep. Jerry Madden graduate of West Point with an engineering degree & Texas state legislator since 1993 is no amateur when it comes to applying the practical knowledge of systems and structures to political & policy discourse.
Rep. Madden gladly welcomed an interview to discuss these efforts in the hope of providing other legislators an insider view of how Texas achieved its goals. His background and experience led him to introduce sweeping criminal justice reform in Texas that now stands as a model to emulate in other states.
Q: Governing Magazine named you one of their 2010 Public Officials of the Year largely due to the criminal justice reforms you helped pass in Texas. What led to the reforms you introduced?
The Speaker of the House came to me and said Dont build new prisons they cost too much." So we started looking at our current corrections costs the number of prisoners and where they were coming from.
The first thing we discovered was that many of our prisoners were
not coming from direct sentencing by our judges and juries but from technical violations of probation/parole.
For example not showing up to meet with their officers at designated times drug violations etc. Approximately 13000 people a year were returning to prison due to these technical violations. I had only so much space in our prisons and could not build new ones I had to either slow down the number of people coming back into the prison system or I had to open the doors to let them out.
We werent going to just open the doors so we looked at our probation system.
Q: Which solutions did you propose?
In 2007 we increased funding for specialized courts introduced progressive sanctions for probation/parole officers and modified the caseloads of probation officers (see ALECs model legislation
Swift and Certain Sanctions Act). After probation we looked at parole and how we could identify high-risk offenders earlier (see ALECs model legislation
Recidivism Reduction Act).
We found out quickly that it costs less to intervene early when dealing with offenders who have mental health or drug addiction problems. To treat drug and alcohol addiction you have to go to the root of the problem.
We diverted some of our funding to community mental health groups and drug treatment and substance abuse programs in the prison and probation communities programs that already existed but were not being utilized. We did not want to slow down the number of dangerous offenders coming back into the system but did want to slow down those who were low-risk and could be treated.
We tipped the scales and prevented rapid prison growth by allocating resources to the right programs.
Q: Who did you partner with to achieve reform?
I went to Texas State Senator John Whitmire the Chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee. We formed a bipartisan partnership. We also got the support of the Speaker and the Appropriations Committee.
We also worked with our state think tanks that do research and develop reports in Texas on the Criminal Justice system.
These reports helped convince the public and our legislature that solutions did exist to address the problem.
To achieve this reform in other states it is important to know how many prison beds/resources you would need and what the cost would be to continue accepting the number of offenders you are projected to have. Compare this cost with the costs of bulking up mental health and substance abuse programs that will help to produce the reduced recidivism rates.
The winning argument for Texas was that the cost of reducing our low-risk prison populations by investing in community programs was much less expensive than building new prisons. We were not decreasing public safety but were diverting offenders that the public would generally agree should be treated to programs rather than wasting their taxpayer dollars.
We are called the Department of Corrections we should be correcting behavior.
Q: You are also the Public Sector Chair of ALECs Corrections and Reentry Working Group. Is the Working Group working on similar policy?
ALEC is a leader on producing policy that works to effectively reduce prison populations while maintaining public safety.
Our Working Group began by asking what can we do to make a difference and reduce costs for states?" Part of our solution has been to produce policy that performs a risk analysis of each offender provides for progressive sanctions in parole programs and rewards various departments that produce results.
I recommend looking at
ALECs Cutting Crime & Budgets" initiative on their web site.
For more information on the Texas Reform or to learn about the ALEC solutions contact Courtney OBrien at cobrien@alec.org.
