As the UK looks to Texas for solutions to its prison woes, I worry that the Texas reforms are not being portrayed accurately and that the picture being presented of Texas is overly rosy.
I say this not only as a long-time observer of the Texas prison system, but as the former policy director of Texas’s sentencing commission in the early 1990s and as a criminal justice policy advisor to Texas legislators in the decades since.
First, some context: Texas has the largest state prison system in the US, with about 130,000 people in prison. That doesn’t count people in local jails (equivalent of remand facilities) - about 70,000 more. Our incarceration rate is 751/100,000, way higher than the UK. No question - Texas overly relies on incarceration and is very punitive. We have not solved our prison issues.
The 2007 prison reforms
Texas did make some important reforms that reduced its prison population from about 152,000 in 2007, and that allowed the state to close several prisons. Until that time, Texas prison growth was a runaway train. Those reforms are worth looking at as the UK deals with its current prison crisis.
In 2007, state leaders recognised that Texas could not build its way out of its prison population pressures. Texas had already tripled the size of its prison system in the 1990s, but once again was facing a projected need for 17,000 more beds. But prison construction and operations were incredibly expensive, and that approach wasn’t working to address public safety concerns, as high recidivism rates showed. Legislators came to realise that unfettered prison construction made us poorer, not safer. So they looked for other strategies.
The reforms Texas implemented primarily consisted of 3 approaches:
- Invest much more money in local community-based treatment programs and services and more effective community supervision, to keep people out of prison in the first place;
- Reduce use of revocations (recalls) to prison for ‘technical’ violations of probation and parole conditions (these revocations were a huge driver of the prison population), and
- Invest more money in programs and services and in re-entry initiatives within prisons, with the goal of reducing recidivism.
The limits of the ‘good time’ scheme
Much of the UK media’s reporting about Texas reforms has focused on the use of ‘good time’ to reduce sentences. To be clear, Texas has had ‘good time’ in place for a very long time, as do most US states. This was not part of the 2007 reforms. ‘Good time’ is a ‘carrot and stick’ tool to incentivise participation in programs and to disincentivise misconduct.
As I said to The Times:
the good time scheme [is] necessary but not sufficient by itself.
You need the rehabilitative programs and other strategies to decrease the population. There are two - and only two - things that affect the size of the prison population: how many people are coming in the front door and how long they stay there. If you want to reduce the size of the population, you have to address both of those things.
‘Good time’ doesn’t have anything to do with how many people come into prison, and, in Texas, it is no guarantee that someone will be released early from prison. It makes someone eligible earlier for discretionary parole consideration, but that doesn’t mean they will get out.
‘Good time’ is also not an indication that a person has been rehabilitated. It is primarily a tool to help manage the behaviour of people in prison, because if they get into trouble or don’t go to work or participate in programs, it takes longer to be considered by the Parole Board. So ‘good time’ will not solve the UK’s prison over-population problems. It is helpful, because it might reduce length of stay, but that can’t be the main approach to depopulation.
The need for rehabilitation
Contrary to some of what is being reported, Texas did not shift to a discernibly rehabilitative approach inside prisons. While there are the usual treatment programs/ education/ vocational training (and even some pockets of innovation), many incarcerated people can’t access those programs because of waiting lists or eligibility requirements, or because they are in restricted housing. Additionally, programs are typically offered only at the tail end of a sentence. Recidivism rates in Texas are still very high, mostly because nothing is being done to address the root causes of criminal behaviour or addiction. Also, recidivism rates remain high because prison conditions are still very punitive and traumatising.
If the UK wants to see prisons that have truly shifted their culture to be more rehabilitative and that get better recidivism results, it should look to Norway and other Scandinavian countries. There are some promising examples in the US, too, such as the Restoring Promise units (Connecticut, South Carolina, Colorado, North Dakota, and Massachusetts); Little Scandinavia (Pennsylvania); and Amend (Washington, Oregon, California, and North Dakota).
While Texas's prison population went down significantly in the years following the 2007 reforms, the numbers did not continue to fall (except during COVID, for unrelated reasons). The population has risen again and is unlikely to fall again without new measures. Indeed, a new report from a Texas legislative agency just found that the prisons will run out of space within a year and are projected to have 7000 more incarcerated people than operating capacity. Thus, Texas appears headed towards a potential prison population crisis once again.
The way forward
So, what has Texas not done that it should do, in addition to the 2007 reforms, if it really wants to reduce its prison population? (And what should the UK consider doing, too?). First, it needs to shorten length of stay, beyond use of ‘good time’. How?
- Reduce the length of sentences (Texas is extreme on this front);
- Expand use of compassionate release, especially for older people who are past their crime-prone years and for people with medical needs;
- Design thoughtful and safe early release measures that consider a person’s current risk rather than the original offense, and provide a ‘second look’ for people with extreme sentences to see if continued incarceration is necessary;
- For people within a short period of release, consider providing additional ‘good time’ to get them out of prison a few weeks or months early. It won’t affect public safety, but it will save beds and money; and
- Mandate that when the time a person serves plus the good time they earn equals the length of their sentence, they must be released (right now, that release decision is still discretionary with the parole board, which makes good time less meaningful than it could be).
Next, we need to reduce the incarceration of women, who present a lower risk to the community and who are mostly in prison for untreated trauma. Prison is not addressing their needs. We also need to significantly reduce use of pre-trial detention (called ‘remand’ in UK). None of Texas's 2007 reforms focused on our local jails, which are overflowing.
In short: Texas has done some good things to bring down its prison population, and those approaches deserve attention by UK leaders. But we have not done nearly enough, and there are some misunderstandings about the reforms that were made to get to this point.
Texas is a complex place, and its criminal justice system reflects a mixture of troubling conditions and policies and some positive innovations. If the UK plans to look to Texas as a model, it needs to be clear which are the policies worth emulating, and which are examples of what not to do. And it needs to take off the rose-coloured glasses that are showing Texas in a light that makes it unrecognizable to those of us who live in the state.
