THIS IS NOT WORKING

THE PEOPLE of Texas should be gearing up to pitch a fit come
January.

They want us to pay for more prisons. MORE prisons. We just finished
the biggest prison-spending spree in history. Starting in 1991, we
spent billions to more than double the number of beds in the system.
They promised us that we wouldn't have to build another prison for at
least a generation. And now they want more.

And there's one other point. This. Is. Not. Working.

The U.S. Bureau of justice Statistics reports that Texas has more of
its people imprisoned than any other state - 163,190.That's more than
California, which has 13 million more people than Texas does.

The study, released last month by the Justice Policy Institute, not
only finds Texas with the highest incarceration rate in the country -
it also finds the incarceration rate among young African American men
63 percent higher than the national average. Nearly I out of 3 young
black men is under some form of criminal justice control in Texas.

But our crime rate has not dropped proportionately to crime in other
states that did not expand their prisons and that incarcerate far
fewer people.

We're spending more money, imposing far harsher punishment and getting
worse results. This. Is. Not. Working.

The Justice Policy Institute says Texas has led the nation since 1990
with all annual average prison growth rate of 11.8 percent at a time
when crimes in all categories are going down. Nearly I in 5 new
prisoners (18 percent) added to the nation's prisons were in Texas.

No one comes remotely close to our record on the death penalty - 227
dead so far since 1982 - more than the total of the next five
death-penalty states combined. If this were working, Texas would have
the lowest crime rate in the nation.

"As of the end of the year 1999, there were 706,600 Texans in prison,
jail, parole or on probation, 5 percent of all adult Texans, one out
of 20 are under some form of criminal justice supervision," says the
institute report, "The scale of what is happening in Texas is so huge,
it is difficult to contrast the size of its criminal justice system to
the other states it dwarfs. There are more Texans under criminal
justice control than the entire populations of some states, including
Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska."

The majority of Texas prisoners are serving sentences for nonviolent
offenses. They never hurt anyone. "Just by itself, Texas' nonviolent
prison population is the second-largest prison population in the
country, after California," according to the report called "Texas Tough."

Our prison population has tripled since 1990, rising more than 60
percent in the last five years. The Texas crime rate also had a
slightly lower percentage decline than the national average and was
again the lowest of the five largest states.

"Texas Tough" compares Texas to New York because the state's
populations are relatively well-matched. While Texas had the
fastest-growing prison system in the '90s, New York bad the third
slowest-growing prisoner population. Through the decade, Texas added
five times as many prisoners as New York - more than New York's entire
prison population. Since 1995, the percentage decline in overall crime
in New York was four times greater than the drop in Texas, and New
York's crime rate dropped twice as much as Texas'.

This is a question of where the state is going to put its resources.
We know what conditions produce crime. Texas has one of the nation's
highest high school dropout rates - we could put some money there.

Steve J. Martin, former general counsel for the Texas Department of
Criminal justice and probably our most respected prison expert
(author of Texas Prisons: 'rho Walls Came Tumbling Down"), uses even
more telling statistics. There are twice as many blacks in Texas
prisons as are enrolled in our public universities. In contrast, the
ratio for Anglos is five university students for every prisoner.

Columnist William Raspberry, writing about this same study, said:
"Too-quick reliance on incarceration not only turns out to be bad
criminal justice policy, but it also has a devastating impact on
minority communities, exacerbating the very problems ... that produce
a lot of the crime to begin with,"