By Mike Ward
The Houston Chronicle
AUSTIN — Faced with making deep cuts to schools and human services programs, closing at least two prisons and slashing rehabilitation programs, legislative leaders are beginning to talk about what is usually unthinkable in tough-on-crime Texas: releasing more convicts to save money.
Not violent offenders, mind you, but nonviolent foreign citizens who are eligible for parole and old, infirm convicts, some of whom have been diagnosed as dying.
“We don’t have the resources to continue business as usual in Texas,” said Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston, whose committee oversees prison operations.
“Everything is on the table for discussion this year. Everything.”
Remember the late ‘80s
While some of his Senate and House colleagues echo those sentiments, others are not so sure.
Police, prosecutors and crime victims groups are urging caution in paroling any more convicts so that Texas does not face a tragic flashback to the late 1980s, when wholesale paroling of hundreds of convicts to ease prison crowding triggered a crime wave in Houston and other cities.
“If they want to get rid of the dopers, OK. The drunks, hot check artists, the thieves, OK,” said William “Rusty” Hubbarth, an Austin lawyer who is a vice president for Justice for All, a Houston-based crime victims group.
“But they should keep all the sex offenders and the 3G (violent) offenders right where they are. They don’t need to go anywhere.”
House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, R-Richardson, echoes that sentiment: “Whatever we decide to do should not compromise public safety in any way. No one’s in favor of that.”
Criminal justice advocates predict the issue will test whether Republicans’ resolve to cut the budget will outweigh a tough-on-crime mentality that has helped many lawmakers get elected.
“What this state is finally realizing is that we’ve got too many people locked up who may not need to be in prisons,” said Sheryl Lynn Washington, a crime victim advocate from Houston and self-proclaimed tea party activist who was at the Capitol urging more treatment and rehabilitation programs and less imprisonment.
“Use prison only for the worst, most violent offenders, not everyone who violates any little law.”
If there is one group that a growing number of lawmakers seem to agree should be gone from Texas, it’s the prisoners who are foreign nationals — a group that now numbers almost 12,000, most of them from Mexico.
About 3,000 were behind state bars as of December for nonviolent or drug offenses, according to statistics from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. All were listed as parole-eligible. All are targeted for deportation as soon as they are released.
‘The big fear’
By some calculations, sending them all home could save more than $54 million a year - enough to restore some of the deep cuts planned in prison, human services, public education and many other state programs.
“The big fear,” said Whitmire, “has been that the Mexican nationals would come back into Texas, but we could make it a condition of their parole that if they came back, they would go back to prison.
“My guess is we’d never see these people again. Prisons are no party in Texas. Why would anyone want to come back and risk going back in the joint for a longer sentence?”
Parole officials who approve early releases caution that most of the nonviolent offenders who might be targeted for parole have been reviewed - and turned down because they are not considered ready for release.
Their fear, one that police and prosecutors voice as well: Federal officials might deport them, only to have them come back to Texas and commit new crimes. Or, federal officials might not even be able to take that many people at once for deportation.
Convicts who are too old and infirm to commit new crimes, or who are diagnosed as dying, are being discussed.
A legislative study two years ago urged that additional medical paroles be considered, noting that about 30 of the 90 convicts recommended to be reviewed for early release during one period died in prison anyway.
Parole officials urge caution about what Rissie Owens, chairwoman of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, has called “miraculous recovery” — cases in which dying convicts have been paroled in the past, only to recover and commit new crimes.
The same arguments are made for not paroling more of the growing numbers of “geriatric” convicts, over age 55, who are driving up medical costs by the year. The number of inmates 55 or older has increased from 5,500 in 2000 to 9,000 in 2006, according to a 2007 report, and that number could be as high as 11,000 now.
Several hundred inmates who are considered terminal or completely incapacitated are among those being looked at for release, lawmakers said.
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