It's Time for Texas to Close Some Prisons

Texas has turned a few heads in recent years by becoming a leader in community corrections and alternatives to incarceration. The time has come to double down on these gains, however, and state prison officials are hesitating.

Texas saw its prison population drop by 1,257 from 2008 to 2009. Judges now have sentencing alternatives in their arsenal, and they're using them. The state legislature expanded community treatment and diversion programs in 2007, and the strategy has paid off. There's still a long way to go, of course, and like most criminal justice policies, the progress could evaporate in a second with a few bad moves or one heinous high-profile crime.

Once reforms succeed in keeping people in their community rather than prison and in offering alternative paths to productive lives, the next step is to shrink the prison behemoth that we've built over the last three decades. Fewer prisons means less money spent locking people up. That frees up money for schools (which are the best diversion from prison), for drug treatment, for parole officers and for pre-release education.

But there are signs that Texas prison officials (and legislators facing a grim budget picture) might not be willing to take the next logical step. Scott Henson pointed on Sunday at Grits for Breakfast to an unwise blanket declaration from Texas Board of Criminal Justice chairman Oliver Bell that the state won't be closing any prisons to deal with budget shortfalls. So Bell and friends plan to lay off corrections officers, freeze pay for others, cut prison programs and stall badly needed repairs but they won't close a single prison? They're leading the state back in the wrong direction.

Join me in calling on Texas Department of Criminal Justice Director Brad Livingston to consider closing prisons before he resorts to layoffs and program cuts. As the state makes great strides in preventing needless incarceration, it should also be willing to cut unnecessary facilities.

Once they're built and opened, prisons become sacred cows. They represent jobs and lucrative contracts (which usually send money out of the community and sometimes out of the state, but that's another story). Bureaucrats and politicans are loathe to eliminate prisons because it means lost jobs. But it doesn't have to be that way. With the millions saved from closing a prison, Texas could build new in-patient drug treatment facilties, alternative schools or job training programs -- keeping (better) jobs in the community while focusing efforts on an outcome more positive than a locked cell door.

It's time for Texas to reap the budgetary benefits of the positive progress the state has made, rather than watch progress fade back into a bureaucracy-fueled cycle of crime, recidivism, prison spending and reactionary long-sentence laws. It's time to close prisons. Let 'em know.

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Photo Credit: Joeanneah