WRONGLY CONVICTED

FAIR CRITICISM'S FINE, BUT DON'T MISLEAD ON TEXAS JUSTICE

"Despite adding more than 100,000 prisoners this decade, Texas' crime rate
had declined much more slowly than other large states. From 1995 to 1998,
Texas' crime rate fell at half the national average, and the least of any of
the nation's five largest states."

That is the dramatic initial conclusion of a study by the Justice Policy
Institute, a public policy group that seeks alternatives to prison for
criminals. It is a think tank of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal
Justice. But that conclusion is wrong, and the organization has retracted
it. Unfortunately, the revision came after at least one news wire service,
one major Texas newspaper and a national radio program disseminated the
misinformation.

The institute goofed by comparing incarceration rates for 1990-1999 while
using crime rate statistics for 1995-98.

The real story is that Texas began bringing 100,000 new prison beds on line
in the early 1990s after the 1987 Legislature approved their funding to
relieve overcrowding. That enabled criminal justice officials to stem the
tide of prisoner early releases that was contributing to a wave of violent
and drug-related crimes in Texas. Thus, the state's biggest reduction of
crime occurred early in the decade, the crime reporting period the institute
ignored.

The institute correctly stated that Texas' crime rate reduction of 5.1
percent from 1995-1998 was lower than the national reduction of 10 percent.
But that's misleading because from 1990-1998 Texas had a 24.1 percent
reduction in crimes. That compares with a 13.8 percent reduction nationally
during the same period. Put another way, Texas reduced crime at a rate 75
percent better than the nation during most of the decade. From 1990-1995,
the state experienced a 19.9 percent reduction compared with a 4.2 percent
reduction nationally.

During a portion of that period, from 1992-1993, Houston led the nation's
cities in crime reduction (18 percent). During that year, the national
average was a 2 percent reduction.

Criminal justice experts in Texas point out that building more prisons
reduced recidivism, but other factors, too, accounted for the drop in crime,
including better policing, an aging of the population and neighborhood
anti-crime programs. Also, the crack cocaine epidemic seems to have run the
worst of its course. And the booming economy can be credited, for while
crime doesn't pay, plentiful jobs do.

Still, Texas has too few drug treatment programs for criminal addicts and,
arguably, too many people incarcerated for minor drug offenses. Furthermore,
Texas can never build enough beds to put every criminal behind bars, and the
cost of running more and more lockup facilities is becoming increasingly
burdensome to taxpayers.

Texans would do well to put greater emphasis on crime prevention, education
and rehabilitation to keep a lot of people out of the criminal justice
system in the first place. And it is fair to say that putting so many,
mostly young, people in prison during their most productive years hurts
communities and ruins lives that might have been turned around through early
intervention.

However, Texas is not the only state that has experienced a prison inmate
boom. The nation's prison population stands at a record 2 million. With the
information in the institute study corrected, it is harder to conclude that
locking up violent offenders plays no role in reducing crime.