Explaining Texas’ overnight prison boom

By drastically slowing releases from prisons, Texas policymakers ensured that the state’s prison population would more than double in only five years in the 1990s. Decades later, Texans are still dealing with the consequences.

by Rachel Gandy, August 7, 2015

In May 2014, the Prison Policy Initiative created incarceration profiles for each state, and the Texas statistics were shocking. They revealed a doubling of the Texas prison population in just a few years. As a native Texan, high imprisonment rates were no surprise, but the rapid rise in imprisonment seemed almost impossible, especially compared to the nation as a whole:

Throughout the 1980s, the Texas imprisonment rate closely matched the national imprisonment rate. But between 1993 and 1998, the Texas imprisonment rate almost doubled, causing Texas’ total custody population to quickly escalate.

The imprisonment rate in Texas has been generally equal to or higher than the national imprisonment rate. This fact was no surprise because Texas has been known for its tough-on-crime mentality. But what was so special about 1993 that caused the imprisonment rate in Texas to skyrocket?

The answer lies in the underlying mechanisms that drive prison admissions and releases. As Michele Deitch, a Soros Senior Justice Fellow and Texas criminal justice expert, describes, correctional facilities are like bathtubs: people are admitted to prisons like water from the faucet and released like water from the drain. If admissions and releases are not in balance, prisons, like bathtubs, will overflow.

To test that analogy and uncover the policy change that sent Texas’ imprisonment rate soaring, I collected annual data on admissions to and releases from Texas prisons and graphed them both against the total custody population:

Beginning in 1993, the number of releases from Texas prisons fell behind the number of admissions, allowing the state’s total custody population to rise sharply for the next five years. Once release counts rose again to match admission counts, Texas’ total custody population leveled off and remained stagnant. These patterns show that admissions to and releases from prisons serve as at least one driving force behind rapidly changing prison populations.

When Texas made the choice to reduce the rate of prison releases, the state prison population more than doubled in five years, just like a running bathtub would if a stopper were placed over the drain. More recently, other policy changes have allowed the number of releases to match the number of admissions, causing the total custody population to flatten out after its massive increase.

Before 1993, admission and release counts in Texas were roughly equal, so the total prison population grew only slightly. Driven by the War on Drugs, prison admission rates increased steadily in the 1980s, but they were closely matched by prison release rates. For example, incarcerated Texans in the early 1990s only served an average of 13% of their assessed sentences behind bars as a way to decrease rising prison overcrowding concerns.(*)

But the graph above shows that this pattern changed in 1993. Suddenly, the gap between the number of admissions to and releases from Texas prisons expanded.

Texas legislators created this imbalance by implementing two separate policy choices that joined together to catapult a seemingly overnight boom in the prison population. First, faced with lawsuits from county officials over jail overcrowding, Texas legislators approved the building of over 100,000 new prison beds within less than five years. Second, in response to public outrage over short prison stays, lawmakers passed legislation to ensure that incarcerated people served a greater proportion of their sentences behind bars. For example, some violent offenders were suddenly required to serve at least 50% of their sentences before they were parole eligible, which effectively doubled the length of prison time for many Texans.(**)

Legislators disregarded the need for balance between admissions to and releases from prison, and the bathtub overflowed. Over two decades later, Texans are still trying to clean up that mess. Sentencing and parole reforms have attempted to decrease the costs of the prison boom, but to truly make an impact on the size of the incarcerated population, policymakers need to understand one thing: prisons are like bathtubs. If you simultaneously open the faucet and cover the drain, you will create a flood.

Suggested reading:

• Michele Deitch, “Giving Guidelines the Boot: The Texas Experience with Sentencing Reform,” Federal Sentencing Reporter 6, no. 3 (1993): 138-143.
• To see reform efforts underway in Texas, see the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition’s website at http://www.texascjc.org.

Notes:

(*) Michele Deitch, “Giving Guidelines the Boot: The Texas Experience with Sentencing Reform,” Federal Sentencing Reporter 6, no. 3 (1993): 138-143.

(**) Michele Deitch, “Giving Guidelines the Boot,” see footnote (*).

New BJS report shows suicide in jails is a national crisis

New BJS report shows that suicide in jails has been leading cause of death from 2000-2013.

by Bernadette Rabuy, August 4, 2015

At this unique moment when the public is actually paying attention to local jails, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has released a new report based on its Death in Custody Reporting Program showing that the number of people who died while under custody of state prisons and local jails increased for a third consecutive year and, especially troubling, that suicide in jails is a national crisis:

Every year since 2000, suicide has consistently been the leading cause of death in local jails. Overall in the last year, deaths by natural causes declined while unnatural — and presumably preventable — deaths increased. In 2013, over a third of all deaths in jails were suicides:

At the same time as the nation is paying attention to the story of Sandra Bland whose death in a Texas jail may or may not have been a suicide, the BJS data shows that sadly, suicide after the first few days of incarceration is common. Forty percent of people who commit suicide in jail do so within 7 days of admission.

The report underscores that while typically off the public’s radar, local jails should never be ignored. Beyond the fact that almost 12 million people cycle through jails each year, jails house many people who are legally innocent but are too poor to afford bail and those in great need of mental health services. In fact, Cook County, Illinois recently made headlines for doing the unusual: appointing a psychologist to run the county jail, which is actually one of the nation’s largest de facto mental health institutions.

The data also raises the question of whether jails are doing enough to provide adequate medical and mental health care at those high-risk moments when it is needed most. Some states know this is a problem. As Brandon Wood, director of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, a state agency that has begun to track suicides in Texas jails, told the Houston Chronicle in its in-depth analysis of Texas jail suicides, “After reviewing deaths in custody over the last few years, we keep identifying lapses in observation and proper screening.”

The same BJS report also discusses the very different causes of death in state prisons. In 2013, more than half of deaths in prison were of incarcerated people age 55 or older. Suicide is much rarer, and illnesses are the major cause of death for the aging prison population:

While jails obviously need to address the alarming rate of suicides, the best solution to mortality in state prisons is sensible sentencing and parole reform.

The report can be found at http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mljsp0013st.pdf