Texas, Amidst Budget Crisis, May Not Renew Some Private Prison Contracts

By Matt Clarke

John Whitmire, D-Houston, the chairman of the state Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee wants to cut the cost of incarcerating Texas prisoners and "all options are on the table," including ending the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's leasing of 2,100 beds at the Mineral Wells Pre-Parole Transfer Facility and 2,200 beds at the Dawson State Jail in Dallas. Both prisons are operated by the Corrections Corporation of American and their use cost TDCJ $80 million a year. Whitmire asserts that, with 10,800 empty beds in TDCJ, it is foolish to rent private prison space.

"It would seem wise to get out of the private-lease beds as the contracts come up for renewal," said Whitmire.

Brad Livingston, TDCJ's executive director, disagrees with the number of open beds in the prison system. Testifying before the committee, he said that it was closer to 4,600 beds because TDCJ policy requires that four percent of the beds in the system be left vacant to allow prison managers flexibility to run the system properly.

"We have an operational capacity of 96 percent of our total capacity to provide the ability to separate and classify offenders for multiple criteria, including sentence type, facility type, gender, custody level, treatment needs, educational needs, medical and mental health status, gang affiliation and other individual characteristics," according to TDCJ spokesman John Hurt. "If we upped the level to 99 percent, we would be moving people out of units each time a new offender was coming in."

Whitmire is undeterred.

"Having 11,000 empty beds is not good policy," said Whitmire, noting that, even if the 4% policy remains in effect, there are too many vacant beds. "It's a problem. It's expensive. It's not a good operating model.

"We're short of guards, we have 12,000 inmates a week travelling back and forth across the state in prison buses, we're spending millions of dollars to remodel and repair old prisons that are inefficient and expensive, we are maintaining operating as if it were the 1990s. The conservative, tea party principles up here are to stop unnecessary government spending."

With a system capacity of 162,000, Texas spends about $3 billion each year to house 151,000 prisoners. Yet TDCJ and the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) are together seeking budget increases of about $400 million despite declines in the number of prisoners incarcerated at both agencies.

"We're spending millions of dollars to maintain bricks and mortar we don't need," said Whitmire. "We've got to quit, once and for all, running these facilities just because they're there for economic development purposes."

Whitmire was especially hard on the TJJD, noting that it had a mere 1,100 juveniles in custody and that was "about the size of a junior high school here in Austin." He suggest that, since none of TJJD's six lockups were operating at anywhere near capacity and some were at less than half of capacity, the agency should close some of its facilities and consolidate the juveniles at the remaining ones.

As for TDCJ's contracts with the private prisons, Senate budget writers told Livingston to stop leasing beds and shift the savings to more pressing needs such as repairing existing prisons, hiring parole officers and prisoner reintegration specialists, and purchasing buses, cars and computers—the justifications used for the budget increase request.

Source: Austin American-Statesman