The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

³Part of the problem is that state prisoners are serving their time quicker
- getting more good time´ credit - but those are mostly non-violent people with crimes against property,² Mull surmised.

Mull, who is starting his ninth year as sheriff, was a deputy for nine years before that and also spent 18 months working for the prison system east of Plainview.

Prison administrators had known they were nearing this point. But a Legislative Budget Board report released last week projects that the prisons will reach the maximum capacity at which they can safely operate months earlier than expected.

The crowded prisons also have more to do with harsher sentences than growing crime rates, and the answer may be changing the way offenders are sentenced, the report said.

The crowding could trigger a request from the Legislature for an emergency appropriation to address the looming crisis because there is no money to lease facilities, officials at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said.

³We believe, just based on current trends, that we will possibly -- and I stress possibly -- need additional space by March,² TDCJ spokesman Mike Viesca said.

The local jail has a capacity of 192 prisoners -- 88 in the original building and 104 in an addition built in 1991.

Mull said he has seen the jail overcrowded only once.

³Back in 1993-94, just before the state began to build more prisons, we had 235-240 at one time. Some had to sleep on the floor,² he said.

The current population is 120 with about 130 being average, Mull said.

Hale County asks $42 a day to house out-of-county prisoners because ³it costs us $33 a day whether we have 130 or 180.²

After an analysis of the jail, the State Jail Standards Commission recently mandated hiring 15 additional jailers. Mull said part of the problem is the design of the two buildings isn´t as conducive to fewer personnel being able to keep an eye on the prisoners.

³We´re trying to work deals with other counties to house their prisoners and make some money,² said Mull.

As far as moving prisoners to the state system, Mull says, ³The TDCJ (Texas Department of Criminal Justice) requires us to have a ticket to get someone in. In the past, when you got the paperwork done at the courthouse, you could pretty well take them on down to Huntsville. In the old days, they´d take about 30 a month; now it´s about 16.²

Viesca said Friday that the state facilities house 150,886 inmates, which is 97.5 percent of the maximum capacity of 154,702. But administrators dislike exceeding 97.5 percent due to safety reasons, such as inmates who need to be kept separated.

The Formby-Wheeler units have a capacity of about 1,600 prisoners together and generally remain near capacity.

Viesca said the Clements unit in Amarillo has 3,599 prisoners -- 115 shy of capacity -- while the Neal unit there has 1,678 prisoners, just 12 shy of capacity.

Viesca said the state´s cost of housing a defender is $44.01 a day but it does not dictate how much it will pay an individual county if it houses prisoners there.

Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the state Senate´s Criminal Justice, wants to focus on making better use of probation. He said the state revoked probation for about 25,000 people last year, and many of those were for technical violations and not a new offense. That sent a significant number of people into the state´s prison system.

Whitmire also wants to look into ³community corrections facilities,² which confine offenders only for part of the day for a period of several months.

³You have a real opportunity to turn people´s lives around, and also save the state millions of dollars,² Whitmire said. ³Prison ought to be used for violent offenders: people who are a threat to society, not individuals who often just mess up.²

Changes like those would take time, and some would require legislative approval.

Texas spent nearly $2.5 billion on a massive prison construction program that stretched from 1988 through the 1990s.

When the most recent fiscal year ended Aug. 31, the state´s adult prison population stood at 150,709, up more than 18 percent since 1995.

Under the new projection, the state would need to find room for 165,324 inmates by the end of fiscal 2010.

(Sheila Hotchkin of the San Antonio Express-News contributed to this story.)
Posted to MyPlainview: JANUARY 23, 2005
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