HOUSTON (CN) — With more inmates in custody than any other state, Texas is a bellwether for national criminal justice trends. Experts credit rehabilitation programs with reducing Texas' prison population by 10,000 in recent years, and reforms percolating at the local level are expected to divert even more from the system.
Texas has 109 state prisons that house around 147,000 inmates.
To comply with a 4 percent budget-reduction request from Gov. Greg Abbott for fiscal years 2018 and 2019, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice plans to end its contract with a 450-bed private jail in Houston for parole violators, close it and move the inmates to a state jail in Houston that will be "repurposed as an intermediate-sanction facility," according to TDCJ spokesman Jason Clark.
The Texas Legislature authorized intermediate-sanction facilities to reduce prison overcrowding. Offenders facing parole and probation revocations take classes and receive counseling at these jails that address the root causes of their crimes.
Clark said the prison system budget will be will be completed in May 2017 by the governor and Legislature, which meets from January to June in odd-numbered years, so state agency budgets are set for two-year periods.
U.S. states' spending on prisons varies widely.
New York ranked No. 1 for fiscal year 2010, Oct. 1, 2009 to Sept. 30, 2010, spending an average of $60,076 per inmate; California's average cost per inmate for the same time was $47,421, while Texas paid $21,390, according to a January 2012 report by the Vera Institute of Justice, the latest report on per-inmate spending by the organization.
By comparison, the National Education Association reported in March 2015 that Texas schools were spending an average of $9,559 per student for the 2014-2015 school year, which put Texas in 38th place among the states and District of Columbia.
The Texas prison system's proposed budget for fiscal years 2018 and 2019 is $6.5 billion. That complies with the governor's request, but every budget cycle the TDCJ sends a "Legislative Appropriation Request," asking for extra funding for expenses it believes cannot be cut.
"TDCJ will go through and cut items out of their budget so it comes in under that 4 percent. But then they'll come in and say, 'But these are exceptional items that we have to have in order to function, in addition to this budget we just submitted,'" according to Jennifer Erschabek, executive director of the Texas Inmate Families Association, an Austin nonprofit that meets with state officials and advocates for prisoner rights.
The biggest chunk of money in TDCJ's latest extra-funds request of $607 million is $247 million for "offender healthcare." About 1 in 5 Texas inmates, 24,500, receive mental health treatment, Clark said.
The funding wish list warns state lawmakers that without $607 million in extra money, the agency will have to lay off "nearly 2,000 TDCJ employees, primarily correctional officers, parole officers and unit-based staff."
For Lance Lowry, president of the Huntsville chapter of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the largest correctional officer union in the United States, such job cuts would increase understaffing that he blames for prisoners' recent murders of two Texas correctional officers.
"In Texas we have about 147,000 inmates locked up in TDCJ, with approximately 25,000 officers watching the 147,000 inmates, roughly giving us a staffing ratio of six inmates for every officer," Lowry said in an interview.