Faint
Glimmers
of
Hope
in
Texas
6/9/00
Texas, the state best known in criminal justice and drug policy circles as the nation's leading executioner and one of its biggest prison builders, may be reaching the end of its rope when it comes to crime and punishment. The state's current "lock 'em up and throw away the key" approach to crime and drugs is now being challenged from some unlikely quarters. On the Mexican border, local district attorneys are refusing to prosecute small drug busts made by federal agents. In a longstanding arrangement, local DAs would prosecute cases deemed too insignificant for busy U.S. Attorneys. Recently, any federal border marijuana bust netting fewer than 50 pounds of marijuana has ended up in the laps of the local DAs. But as of July 1, four of the eight district attorneys along the border will no longer prosecute such cases. A fifth DA, in Laredo, opted out in 1997. The local prosecutors complain that the federal border crackdown is busting their budgets. "We wanted to do our share of fighting the war on drugs," Hidalgo County DA Rene Guerra told the Associated Press, "but now it's too much." "It surprises me that the federal government would think some of the poorest counties in the country would have the resources if they don't have the resources," added El Paso DA Jaime Esparza. Nate Blakeslee, Associate Editor and drug war correspondent for the Texas Observer, told DRCNet that such sentiments are common along the border. "I've talked to judges and county attorneys, and they're fed up," he said. Local prosecutors couldn't come up with exact figures, but Esparza told the Associated Press that his district, the busiest of the four, gets about 500 cases from the feds each year. With federal courts and prosecutors in south and west Texas already swamped -- the number of federal criminal cases there has nearly doubled since 1995 -- chances are that many of the smaller cases will simply be dropped. Meanwhile, some members of the notoriously reactionary Texas legislature are beginning to grumble about the price tag for the state's decade-long imprisonment jag. Despite having spent $1.7 billion to build 94,000 new prison beds during the 1990s, the Texas Department of Corrections is jammed. With a prison population that has increased from 39,000 in 1988 to 150,000 today, the state's 116 prisons and jails are at capacity. Much of that increase is attributable to the war on drugs. In a just released Human Rights Watch study of racial disparities in the drug war (available online at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/usa/), HRW associate counsel Jamie Fellner reports that as of 1996, the last year for which national data was available, 28.9 of new admissions to Texas prisons were drug offenders. 70% of those were African American. All told, 69% of Texas inmates were doing time for nonviolent crimes. But Texas officials didn't need Human Rights Watch to tell them that. In late May, even as prison officials and some lawmakers began to push for a new round of prison building, other legislators and the board of Pardons and Paroles began calling for a less harsh approach. Parole board Chairman Gerald Garrett told the Houston Chronicle that the board is looking for better ways to evaluate nonviolent offenders so that more actually make parole. At the same time, the board is under attack for sending parolees back to prison for minor parole and probation violations. State Senator John Whitmire (D-Houston), complaining about the practice, told the Chronicle, "We've got the toughest criminal justice policies in the nation. We've got the toughest penal code. We've got a huge penal system. What we are not doing is having a smart criminal justice system." The Democrats have no monopoly on such criticisms. State Rep. Pat Haggerty, an El Paso Republican who chairs the House Corrections Committee, told the Chronicle the parole board also needs to ease the criteria for achieving parole. Offering a frightening glimpse into Texas political reality, Haggerty explained, "If we had our druthers, everybody would be locked up forever and that would be that. But that's not feasible." There are other faint signals of change on the horizon. Alan Robison, Executive Director of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas, told DRCNet that there is an effort underway among Harris County (Houston) judges to turn one of their courts into a diversionary drug court. "The judges are asking for it because they're running out of money... it's partly sanity and rationality," said Robison, "but mainly money." Indeed, the calculus at work here is economic, not moral. As the Observer's Blakeslee points out, the talk of leniency in the parole system comes in the context of a new push for more prisons. "The legislature got tough five or six years ago," he noted, "and they are just now seeing the shockwave." But Blakeslee also reports rumblings from the open country of West Texas, where, he says, "There's a libertarian streak, the people object to the federalization of policing and to their tax dollars being spent on a failed policy." (The Texas Observer provides in-depth coverage of Texas politics and investigative reporting on issues of interest to DRCNet members. Go to http://www.texasobserver.org to take a look.) Despite these tiny fractures in the Texas imprisonment juggernaut, Blakeslee's optimism is decidedly guarded. The call for leniency and the border DA's refusal to prosecute are "the first two glimmers of hope that I've seen for a long time. Federally funded narcotics task forces are still up and running in all parts of the state."
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