Texas Takes California Title as State With the Most Behind Bars

Under Gov. George W. Bush, the Texas prison system has now surpassed California’s to become the nation’s largest, a milestone reached in large part through his administration’s denial of parole to the vast majority of eligible inmates.

This parole crackdown and the accompanying explosion of the prison population are causing a host of problems, but supporters and detractors alike agree that the policies of Bush’s handpicked parole board are popular--and smart politics.

Bush, of all people, knows what one parolee gone bad can do to a political career. His father bludgeoned rival presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis in 1988 with the infamous reference to Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who raped a Maryland woman and assaulted her boyfriend while on furlough from a prison in Massachusetts, where Dukakis was governor.

Clamping down on parole is a national trend, but, as with many criminal justice issues, Texas stands at the continuum’s furthest end. It has the nation’s busiest execution chamber and its prison sentences are among the nation’s longest. Its rate of incarceration is second only to that of Louisiana. And the odds of getting approved for parole are close to the country’s longest.

“The reason our prison system is so large is, first, our recidivism rate,” said Gerald Garrett, chairman of the Board of Pardons and Paroles. “But secondly, people in Texas like to lock up fellow Texans, and for a long time.”

But even the official who supervises Texas’ tightfisted parole system says the Bush-era crackdown has further strained the state’s corrections system. Texas now faces tough choices on building new lockups and better handling nonviolent offenders, Garrett said.

Because Bush was the first Texas governor to win back-to-back terms, he also is the first to have a parole board consisting wholly of his appointees. His 18-member board has rejected parole requests from more than three-fourths of eligible inmates.

Texas paroled an average of 22% of eligible inmates in the 1999 budget year. That number slowly has inched upward in recent months; about a quarter of parole applicants were approved last month. Most other states have a parole rate of between 40% and 60%, said Jim Austin, a George Washington University criminalist hired by the state to update its guidelines for returning inmates to society.

In 1998, two-thirds of inmates entering the Texas prison system had violated the terms of their parole or probation. But only about half of them had committed new crimes. The rest were imprisoned again for technical violations, such as missing meetings with parole officers, according to the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that advocates alternatives to prison.

At the same time, the Texas prison population has climbed to 163,190. California, which for years had the nation’s largest prison system, houses 163,067 inmates, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. California has nearly twice as many residents as Texas.

Guards’ Pay Among Nation’s Lowest

Though they agree that Texas’ get-tough parole system has been popular, critics call it a time bomb of restive inmates, big spending and chronic staff shortages. The state has found it increasingly difficult to recruit and keep guards because Texas now ranks 46th in what it pays its correctional officers.

The pressures have heightened since Bush, in one of his first acts as governor, signed a bill eliminating mandatory release laws. Those allowed automatic parole for inmates who had served a certain portion of their terms and had accumulated credit for good behavior. Since 1996, however, good behavior guarantees only a parole board review after a portion of a sentence is served.

Garrett said that change, along with tougher sentencing laws during Bush’s tenure, not only are helping fill the prisons but also are discouraging good behavior behind bars.

“You get people who know that it’s going to be 20 years before they’re even considered for parole--for 10 years, they’re going to be pretty surly,” he said.

Prison administrators also complain that cutting good behavior incentives has robbed them of a key management tool at a time when Texas prisons are desperately struggling to find more than 2,000 new guards. The overall crackdown has helped foment security problems, including several riots, increased assaults upon guards and at least two prison breakouts that have been linked to staffing problems, said Houston attorney Bill Habern, a specialist in parole and post-conviction issues. In 1999, there were 2,044 reported inmate attacks on correctional officers nationwide, compared with 153 a decade ago, according to state corrections officials.

Johnny Sutton, Bush’s criminal justice advisor, said overhauling mandatory release laws is one of the governor’s key crime-fighting achievements. Bush’s administration also touts legislation that now requires life sentences for two-time sex offenders and intensified supervision of paroled sex offenders.

“Texas has done a good job of shutting the revolving door,” Sutton said. “We built prisons to ensure that violent offenders and dangerous predators would be kept away from Texans.”

Building Prisons a Booming Business

But keeping that door shut is a costly prospect.

At its 1999 parole pace, the state would need $640 million for new prison beds by 2005, Tony Fabelo, director of the Criminal Justice Policy Council and Bush’s top criminal policy advisor, told state officials in August.

The prediction came on the heels of a 10-year, $1.5-billion prison building boom, prompted by a federal court order to curb crowding in the Texas system, which now includes 116 prisons, inmate transfer sites and contract prisons.

Fabelo, however, revised his projection last week, saying that the state’s gradually increasing parole rates, if they continue, may negate the need for a major prison buildup.

The prospect of building more prisons is so sobering that parole board officials say they have begun an overdue review of policies. The changes are likely to include more severe sanctions for crimes such as indecency with a child, while nonviolent crimes such as drug possession will be treated “more realistically,” Garrett said.

Previously, critics say, the Bush administration never put any brakes on the system’s tightening parole standards. “He just didn’t show any leadership on the issue at all--he went with the flow,” says Vincent Schiraldi of the Justice Policy Institute in Washington.

Until very recently, brakes weren’t obviously necessary, said attorney Steve Martin, a prison reform specialist and former counsel for Texas’ criminal justice system. “When Bush came in, the system had all that capacity so the parole rate could be reduced without any consequences,” he said. “He hasn’t had to make any tough decisions.”

This spring, as it became clear that the prison system would again need new beds, lawmakers on the state’s Senate Criminal Justice Committee accused the parole board of unnecessarily overburdening the system.

“When you get up to about 150,000 prison beds, that ought to be enough for public safety if you manage them correctly,” said state Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston).

Parole officials, he said, are wasting taxpayer money by locking up nonviolent parole violators and minor offenders, instead of sending them to treatment programs or county jails. Whitmire cited 3,600 Mexican citizens now eligible for parole in Texas. They remain behind bars even though they would be deported if released, he said.

Sutton, however, said the Bush administration has worked hard to divert nonviolent offenders to prison alternatives such as probation or treatment programs.

“If you look at some of these revocations, it’s not just one time somebody got a dirty urine [test]. It’s 20 times,” Sutton said. “Prison oftentimes is the only thing between them and the morgue.”

Amid the debate here, Texas’ crime rate has dropped--as crime has nationwide. Though the state led the nation in crime reduction in the early 1990s, crime here fell 5.1% from 1995 to 1998, compared with 10% nationwide, according to the Justice Policy Institute.

Lawmakers and voters across the country have supported parole reforms. For example, 14 states, have adopted truth-in-sentencing laws, which effectively abolish early release altogether.

In California, Gov. Gray Davis has opposed parole for nearly all inmates convicted of murder and kidnapping since he took office in 1999. But thousands of other California prisoners are released each year because they were convicted of crimes that do not require them to appear before the state’s parole board--or to obtain the governor’s approval to go home. In contrast, the Texas system requires that most inmates petition its board for parole.

“Ever since the Willie Horton affair, parole boards and correctional agencies have become politicized in the extreme--especially in states that are producing presidential candidates,” Martin said. “It’s not rocket science why parole rates have been low.”

Parole Rate Hits a Low on Bush’s Watch

In Texas, the plunging parole rates began under Democratic Gov. Ann Richards, a reaction to a system that in 1991 paroled 79% of eligible inmates to clear prison beds. But it was under Bush in 1998 that the parole board reached one of the lowest parole rates in Texas history, dipping to 16%.

Corrections systems vary from state to state, but in Texas parole refers to whatever part of an inmate’s sentence is served under supervision outside prison. Historically, prison administrators have used parole to ease prison crowding and as an incentive for good behavior. Parole also helps authorities monitor and control inmates when they first leave prison.

Despite the governor’s pride in rock-bottom parole rates, Garrett says he hopes Texas one day will grant paroles at a pace closer to the national average. Not that the parole board ever will veer far from conservatism, he said.

“We are tough. We will not recommend a person for parole until we are convinced that the interests of inmates and the public at large are served. In the people business, there are no guarantees.”