JUST BUILD IT

Is TDCJ Addicted To Prison Construction?

When Ann Richards became governor in 1991, the state was facing a prison
crisis.

County jails were filled with inmates waiting to go to prisons that were
already over capacity; and the counties were suing the state for refusing
to take the inmates.

Faced with building 25,000 new beds just to get free of the lawsuit,
Richards, a recovering addict herself, resolved that a good portion of any
beds built on her watch would be drug treatment beds. The idea was to get
at the root of the problem: A 1989 study by the Texas Commission on Alcohol
and Drug Abuse had determined that roughly eight in ten inmates had
substance abuse problems or had committed a drug-related crime.

Aided by Senator Ted Lyon and others, Richards pushed through the
legislature one of the most ambitious inmate drug rehabilitation programs
in the country.

But Richards' New Texas was fleeting.

The number of drug treatment lieds has essentially remained flat since
1994, the year she left office. To date, not even half of the original
rehab beds allotted by the Legislature in 1991 have been fluded, much less
any additional beds. In the intervening decade, driven by stricter
sentencing and parole rules, Texas' incarceration rate has increased by 150
percent, making the Texas Department of Criminal Justice not only the
largest prison system in the country; but one of the largest in the world.

Meanwhile, TDCJ-funded community-based corrections programs, which divert
many potential inmates into drug treatment programs before they even enter
state custody, have not received a budget increase from TDCJ in years.

To judge from the criminal justice budget-which includes four new
prisons-now working its way through the appropriations process, criminal
justice in the Perry era will mean more of the same.

Dorothy Browne, who worked on criminal justice issues for Richards, recalls
the heady mood when Richards entered the governor's office. "We were
thinking big. We visited programs around the country;" says Browne, now
chief of staff for Austin Representative Elliott Naishtat. At the time,
TDCJ was doing virtually nothing for addicts, other than allowing
Alcoholics Anonymous groups to meet. "Incarceration is rehabilitation," was
the prevailing mentality at TDCJ headquarters in Huntsville. But what about
when the inmate went back into the streets? "The research showed that if
you did [drug treatment] right, and get the right people into the program,
then recidivism rates were very low "Browne says. The result was an
ambitious plan to build a 12,000-bed network of treatment centers, known as
Substance Abuse Felony Punishment Facilities (commonly called Safe-P), to
which judges could, at their discretion, send felons with drug problems for
an intensive treatment program, including up to nine months inside the
facility; followed by three months of treatment in a halfway house, and six
to nine months of outpatient treatment.

The 1991 Legislature also directed TDCJ to develop 2,000 additional
treatment beds for incarcerated inmates (known as the In-Prison Therapeutic
Community or ITPC), for 14,000 beds designated for drug treatment.

Control over treatment money was given to the Texas Commission on Alcohol
and Drug Abuse (TCADA), which forced Huntsville to get on board with the
new attitude in Austin. Suddenly, "people were coming to Texas to study our
program," Browne says.

But something went wrong.

To date, only 4,500 beds have been allocated for the Safe-P program, and
only 800 for ITPC.As soon as Bush took over, Browne says, the emphasis
reverted to incarceration, not rehabilitation. It didn't help matters that
TCADA became embroiled in a contracting scandal and budgetary control over
treatment was handed over to TDCJ. The agency began dragging its feet on
implementing the program, according to Browne. "Out of 150,000 inmates,
they can't find 2,000 to put in ITPC," she scoffs. "They didn't scrap the
program; it just didn't grow. There hasn't been anybody in a leadership role."

In addition to its own treatment programs, TDCJ also gives grants to local
authorities to develop community-based correction programs, which judges
can opt to use for felony offenders as an alternative to prison.

Roughly half of the 3,400 community correction beds provide drug treatment
for offenders.

The programs are popular with judges, who appreciate the discretion to
assign a punishment that fits the crime.

Yet despite a backlog of referrals, the number of beds available has
remained static.This year, TDCJ has proposed a modest increase of 500 beds,
yet the agency's funding levels for existing beds have not kept pace with
rising costs at the facilities already in place.

Lewis Rosenthal runs a TDCJ-funded restitution center in Elgin, which helps
residents find work in the community to pay off their court costs and to
compensate their victims. (Residents spend nights and weekends at the
facility) Rosenthal points out that many of his charges earn more than his
staff members, who start out at a salary of only $15,000. Turnover is high,
which affects the quality of care. Correctional officers are in line to
receive a raise this session, but community corrections staff likely will
not, unless Rosenthal and his colleagues can convince the legislature that
their facilities are cost-effective alternatives to incarceration.

Prison officials do not seem convinced.

Last summer, responding to predictions of yet another surge in the prison
population, the agency called for construction of three new maximum
security units at a cost of $544.3 million, plus another $299.5 million to
contract with counties and private facilities for more space.

As a fiscal compromise, TDCJ proposed meeting the remainder of the
projected demand through expanded use of "intermediate sanction
facilities," where parole violators (who otherwise would be revoked and
sent back to prison) can be punished for short periods.

These hastily procured facilities-think of a cage inside of a warehouse-are
a throwback to a less enlightened era in Texas penal history.

But they do free up prison space, and TDCJ suggested that counties pursue a
similar arrangement (with TDCJ funds) for probation violators.

The agency also suggested increased use of electronic monitoring equipment
for parolees. Conspicuously absent from their proposal was any significant
expansion of drug treatment, either through community-based corrections, or
through TDCJ's own programs.

Yet according to the state's own studies, Safe-P and ITPC are successfial,
cost-effective programs.

A Criminal justice Policy Council study found that offenders who complete
all three phases of the Safe-P program recidivate (that is, return to
prison) at a rate of only seven percent.

This compares to an overall TDCJ offender recidivism rate of 22 percent.

But the science of criminal justice is a political one, and treatment
proponents argue that TDCJ has a thumb on the scale.

When you factor in those who entered the program but did not continue to
participate until the end, Safe-P has a relatively high recidivism rate of
32 percent.

Counting these dropouts towards the recidivism rate for treatment programs,
as TDCJ does, is controversial. Relapse is considered a normal part of
rehab by most treatment professionals, and one criticism of Safe-P is that
it does not have an adequate mechanism to reintegrate dropouts; too many
are simply sent back to prison.

Still, even with the Policy Council's strict definition of recidivism, the
numbers show that Safe-P saves the state money, because it costs less to
house and treat offenders in Safe-P's minimum security environment. The
more Safe-P expands, presumably, the greater the savings to the state. With
150,000 inmates in TDCJ, and fewer than 10,000 receiving treatment each
year, there would seem to be ample latent demand for drug treatment and
considerable savings potential.

Likewise, with a large backlog for community corrections beds (Lewis
Rosenthal reports a waiting period of up to a year at his facility in
Elgin), the savings potential seems high there as well.

Still TDCJ is resistant.

How resistant?

As head of the Criminal Justice Policy Council, Tony Fabelo is charged with
forecasting how much capacity TDCJ will need. Since last summer, when
Fabelo predicted an extra 15,000 beds would be needed, there have been
rumblings from legislators, including Senate criminal justice veteran John
Whitmire, that the Parole Board was revoking too many people, particularly
for technical violations (e.g., failure to report) involving no new crime.
(A new set of parole guidelines will be finalized this spring.) In the
House, El Paso Republican Pat Haggerty, who chairs the Corrections
Committee, announced last fall that he would not support any new
construction; he was joined by Ken Armbrister in the Senate. In January,
Fabelo tested the winds again and released a new report, in which he
predicted that zero new capacity would be needed.

Yet, somehow Governor Perry's new budget still calls for four new prisons.

Call it the Pentagon effect. According to TDCJ spokesperson Glen
Castlebury, regardless of whether the agency has people to fill them, they
still need the new units, two of which will be maximum security, for
"safety and efficiency."

They got to Perry," one Austin consultant said of the TDCJ board. "Some of
'em [TDCJ administrators] will tell you flat out they're just not in the
rehab business," said the consultant, who has worked in the private drug
treatment and corrections business for years, often as a contractor for
TDCJ (and for that reason, asked not to have his name used). There is also
a territorial interest at work, according to another contractor in the
private treatment business.

Much of the drug treatment, particularly the residential and outpatient
services following release from a Safe-P or ITPC facility, are handled by
private contractors. The Kyle Unit near Austin, which hosts 800 ITPC beds,
is also run by Wackenhut, a private operator.

If the future of drug treatment means privatization, some insiders say,
then TDCJ isn't interested. Texas now has nineteen privately managed
corrections facilities, but the push for privatization has come not from
within TDCJ, but from without.

According to some in the private corrections business, the agency feels
threatened by competition and has stacked the deck against private
operators in Texas. Community corrections facilities, meanwhile, tend to be
administered by counties or judicial districts; TDCJ just provides the money.

Also working against treatment is the lingering momentum of the prison
construction boom, arguably the largest public works project ever
undertaken by the state of Texas. The boom made a lot of contractors rich
in the 1990s, and provided lucrative employment for several former
legislators and TDCJ officials, such as former board member Jerry Hodge,
who has done a tidy business selling medical supplies to the prison system.

Lowering the incarceration rate is not high on the list of priorities for
these parties. "The bottom line is, they don't want the money to go outside
of their jurisdiction," one contractor says. When resources are diverted
from incarceration to treatment, "there's still money being spent," he
says. "But it's a different set of people who are getting the contracts."