United States: when prison reform goes bad

What happened to the Legislature’s two-decade-old attempt to break the cycle of incarceration for low-level felons?

In the early 1990s, the Texas Legislature tried to build something surprisingly progressive amid the state’s tough-on-crime prison boom: an alternative to prison for low-level felons.

Lawmakers reclassified a host of third-degree felony charges, mostly for drug and property crimes, and reduced their maximum sentences from 10 to two years, creating a new category of offense called state jail felonies. Rather than lengthy prison terms, such offenders would serve shorter sentences in state jails built closer to major cities, where they’d ostensibly have access to more treatment and rehab programs. The idea was to relieve pressure on the overcrowded prison system while also breaking the cycle of incarceration for low-level felons.

Instead, more than two decades later, people leaving state jail have a greater chance of reoffending than any other group in the Texas criminal justice system. Nearly 63 percent of people released from state jails are rearrested, compared to 46 percent of inmates released from Texas prisons, according to Legislative Budget Board data.

What happened to such a promising idea? “You could wait weeks for treatment in the community, or you could relapse and get arrested tomorrow. Those are the only options a lot of people have right now.”

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