PRISON NOT ALWAYS ANSWER

As Texas grapples with a $9.9 billion budget shortfall, it is our job
to trim government costs and examine every state expenditure to ensure
that taxpayers' money is being wisely spent.

That is why we joined forces this year to support legislation that
would ensure that dangerous offenders are incarcerated but that also
would divert carefully selected nonviolent offenders into supervision
and treatment programs.

Texas lawmakers haven't been reluctant to punish criminals. We have
the second-highest incarceration rate in the nation. In fact, one in
every 21 adult Texans is under some form of criminal justice
supervision - more people (740,000) than live in Austin (657,000).
That includes one in every three young African-American males.

Prisons alone don't create the kind of comprehensive approach to crime
control that helps to keep Texans safe. Judges and juries routinely
sentence offenders to probation when the facts of a case warrant and
when public safety concerns are met. But what Texas doesn't do is
ensure that first-time, low-level drug offenders get mandatory drug
treatment to halt their slide into criminal behavior.

The bills we are supporting would divert carefully selected,
nonviolent drug users from the currently inevitable path to prison
into proven supervision and treatment programs:

- - House Bill 2668, which we authored, would mandate treatment instead
of prison for first-time, nonviolent drug offenders and would save the
state $115 million over five years. It also would free more than 5,000
prison beds for violent offenders who merit long sentences.

- - House Bill 2624, by Rep. Pat Haggerty, R-El Paso, would allow
nonviolent offenders early termination from probation if they remain
drug free and comply with all probation conditions through the first
third of their sentenced probation time. That would reduce caseloads
on probation officers, freeing them to better supervise other
offenders with more serious crimes. Passage of the bill would save an
additional $120 million over five years - tax dollars that should be
spent to ensure adequate prison capacity and the effective supervision
of violent offenders who pose a threat to families and
communities.

Effective treatment costs taxpayers roughly half as much as
incarceration. But those two new approaches to nonviolent offenders
not only are less costly than prison but, more important, more
effective. A recent report by the National Center on Addiction and
Substance Abuse found that nonviolent drug offenders sent to treatment
were less likely to be rearrested, less likely to be reconvicted and
less likely to return to prison than a comparable group of offenders
who simply were imprisoned without treatment.

Conversations with recovering drug addicts and alcoholics have
convinced us that good treatment programs are tough. An offender
forced to tackle and defeat an addiction often finds treatment to be
more difficult than enduring prison's "three hots and a cot" at
taxpayers' expense.

Texas already is a recognized leader for its drug treatment programs
inside prisons. Sadly, that treatment hasn't been available to
first-time, low-level drug offenders. House Bill 2668 would correct
that deficiency and, in the process, reduce crime and save taxpayer
dollars. The two legislative proposals offer Texans the best of both
worlds: They save money and yield better public safety. That is the
right criminal justice policy for Texas' future: tough, smart,
efficient and fiscally sustainable.