WE HAVE ENOUGH PRISONS; NOW LET'S CHANGE SYSTEM

Immediately after the opening gavel of the 2001 legislative session, Texas
lawmakers should demonstrate moral and political courage by giving the
state Department of Crimlnal Justice some new and unambiguous marching orders.

Here is what they should say:

The prison building boom of the 1990s is finished, and we have accomplished
our objective. The previously revolving doors of our prisons have been
slammed shut. We now have more than enough cells to confine the people we
fear. Violent and habitual offenders now are incarcerated for a major
portion of their sentences.

But in our rush to incarcerate, we have wasted millions of tax dollars on
cells for nonviolent and self-destructive individuals. The rate at which we
are incarcerating our citizens has become insidious and must be halted.
Therefore, effective this date, not one more dollar will be appropriated
for new or enlarged prison units.

Instead, we will redirect a significant portion of our available funds to
education, health and human services to prevent juveniles and adults from
beginning a life of crime. We also will substantially increase the funding
for two divisions of the Department of Criminal Justice in hopes of
reducing the number of probationers sent to prison and the number of
parolees returned to prison.

Knowing that some readers already have identified me as a soft-on-crime
"liberal weenie" who doesn't believe in the hard coinage of punishment for
criminals, I should point out that I am a career criminal justice
practitioner in Texas with more than 21 years of direct contact with
thousands of people placed on adult probation. I also am on the adjunct
faculty of the University of Houston at Clear Lake and, since 1988, have
taught university courses to hundreds of prison inmates.

So, the philosophical guts of my views on crime and punishment are born of
actual experience with the entire range of criminal offenders. I deliver
the same message to probationers and prison inmates. You made a deliberate
decision to commit a crime, and you should be held legally accountable.
Those of you who have committed acts of violence against other people or
are career criminals deserve to be incarcerated for many years; some should
be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

As much as anyone else, I want to reduce the incidence of crime in our
state and to preserve every citizen's right to live free from the fear of
crime. But in our zeal to accomplish that, we have more prison inmates than
any other state. As of August, we had 163,190 inmates. California, with 10
million more residents, had 163,067. We have incarcerated 1,035 people for
every 100,000 of our residents - second only to Louisiana. If the entire
country incarcerated people at the same rate that Texas has done, nearly 3
million would be behind bars instead of the present 2 million. Given the
massive size of our prison population, we should have the lowest crime rate
in the civilized world, but we do not!

I have an adopted daughter whose skin is black, and I am profoundly
disturbed by the impact of the state's criminal justice system on
African-Americans. African-Americans account for 12 percent of the Texas
population, but they constitute 44 percent of the prison and jail
population. More African-Americans in Texas are under the control of our
criminal justice system than are enrolled in our colleges and universities.

The Texas war on drugs accounts for the presence of thousands of
African-American males, ages 21 to 29, in prison or jail or on probation or
parole. The percentage of them who commit violent and serious crimes and
use drugs is no greater than whites of the same age group. But their lower
socioeconomic status makes it relatively easy to detect, arrest, prosecute
and incarcerate them. They are easy targets compared to whites who possess
the monetary resources to pay for legal counsel and drug treatment. The
color of a person's skin and the size of his wallet should have no
influence in the administration of justice.

The abuse of drugs in our society is like a fast-growing and rare form of
cancer that will disfigure or destroy the body it inhabits unless it
receives some creative and aggressive treatment. Our current war against
drug abuse has destroyed countless lives because the battle plan has been
under the exclusive control of law enforcement and criminal justice.

The Lone Star State should seize the opportunity to show the rest of the
nation what a rational and humane drug policy would look like. The governor
and the next Legislature should appoint a nonpartisan commission of
recognized experts in medicine, pharmacology, public health and criminology
to recommend a new set of drug laws to increase public safety and public
health.

The number of prisons in Texas is a barbaric obscenity. The frequently
cited claim that prisons are good for the economy because they create jobs
reflects the reality of a self-perpetuating prison industrial empire. While
an army of lobbyists, consultants and prisons-for-profit advocates have
been able to achieve a victory, our system of criminal justice has
abandoned the pursuit of justice.