Has anyone noticed SB 838, which would prohibit the parole board from revoking parole, unless the parolee commits a new felony?

This bill passed the Senate 32-0, and is now going to the House Corrections Committee.

I realize that parole is already largley a joke, but a statute mandating that they can never revoke a parolee unless he commits a felony is terrible policy. It will set in stone a policy that seems to already exist. But because it is a statue, parolees will know that the worst that can happen to them if they blow off parole is they'll spend some time in an intermediate sanctions facility.

The ISF's will then fill up with the hard-core parolee violators, and the rest will be free to do as they please.

So what if they beat someone up every week? So what if they don't report, and have absconded? So what if they hang out with their gang buds, violate curfews, and do drugs? So what if they don't get a job, and pay restitution to their victims? What can the parole officer do about it--nothing.

This bill is part of a raft of bills to de-fang law enforcement, in order to save the state from having to expend more than 1.8 per cent of the budget on incarcerating hard core felons.

If you think this is a bad idea, you better tell your state rep. And it wouldn't hurt if you told the Gov.'s Office as well.

Hey man, have some grits for breakfast.

http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/

Ha! Ha! Ha!--he likes to quote me, but he left out one quote. State govt. only spends 1.8 per cent of its operating budget on TDCJ, and only 79% of that is spent incarcerating felons. So my solution of bldg. more prisons after a 10 year lapse is hardly a budget breaker or a foolish idea.

A proven way to lower crime is to incarcerate criminals. This is proven by Texas' own recent history. Texas suffered under an unrelenting crime wave between 1964 and 1988, when the crime rate per 100,000 people rose nearly every year, going from about 2,200 index crimes in 1964 to 8,018 index crimes in 1988. Since 1988, the crime rate has decline almost every year, and is now at about 4000+--nearly a 40% decline. The decline in crime rate coincides with the great prison building boom of 1987--1997. Every year since 1997 capacity has been added in the margins.

It was the TDC expansion that broke the back of the crime epidemic that Texas suffered under. The effect of locking up criminals and getting a lower crime rate has been replicated many places, and is documented at an interesting British think-tank's website, civitas.org.uk.Civitas

[This message was edited by Terry Breen on 05-04-07 at .]

But Terry, your theory does not match a liberal agenda of putting as many criminals on the street as possible. Perhaps that is why your last comment was omitted.

Perhaps if Mr. Grits had ever been in the position of telling crime victims why their loved one was murdered or injured by a parolee, he might have a different position. As you know, I lost a very good friend and fellow prosecutor to a parolee who had been "reformed" before he killed my friend during an aggravated robbery.

You won't read that quote on grist for breakfast either, because it does not fit the agenda of the author.

According to Mr. Grits, the reason we prosecutors want more prisons is because it makes our job easier.

Which it does, in the larger sense, since it means less crime. But that is not what he means. He seems to think that it will make our jobs less demanding, and that is our reason for wanting more prison beds. Our motives for opposing the disarming of Texas justice is the same as our motives for wanting more vacation time or higher pay.

Since he's never talked to me, I don't know how he figured that out. Without knowing me, he even called me a "smart ass."

Which I guess is better than being a "dumb ass."

Cheers.

What really needs to happen is an elimination of the Parole Board's function. If a judge or jury sees fit to give a tough sentence, then the sentence should be carried out in full. As a nation we largely have lost our political backbone. If sailors working and fighting on American warships can sleep stacked five high against a bulkhead with little privacy or headroom, it should be good enough for convicts.

At the risk of sounding like a namby-pamb, I have to disagree with you Bob.

If you talk to prison wardens, you'd find that the biggest tool they have in maintaining order in prison is good time, and the threat of loss of good time. As a prisoner accumalates good time, he has more and more at stake in keeping a lid on things.

The State Jail system is run with no good time. Everyone there--be they model prisoner or be they the most difficult gang member--serves their time day for day. There is almost no incentive for prisoners to obey the rules.

The result is that State Jails are amongst the most dangerous places to do time in the Texas system.

We need parole, but parole needs real teeth. When you get on on parole, you should understand that you still have one foot in prison, and you are only let out on "good behavior." If you can't behave, you go back. And SB 838 takes that away.

Well, mostly agree with Terry. But one thing the Feds HAVE done right is they way they apportion good time. They actually call it something else, but it is given in much more minimal amounts. For example, and this is really an uninformed estimate, 180 days off of a sentence of 5 year fed sentence. In the state system, in a non-3G offense, they will do only 2 or 3 years max.

A clearcut schedule of good time would work. Say on a 1/5th basis, best case scenario. Tell the inmates going in that they will do 10 years day for day if they misbehave. They will get 2 years off of their sentence if there are no rule or law violations and they work their program(s) such as AA, NA, sex offender therapy, occupational training, etc. Have a graduated scale of loss of that 2 years of possible good time based upon how many and how severe the violations are.

And yes, this system would be cumbersome and complex but it would be better than the current system, which seems to be sortof random at times. I know most of you, like me, often see a new case come in and see a parolee committing the offense and after checking his CCH, you wonder how this guy got paroled so fast?

This would also reduce the workload of the parole board, since their function would be to monitor those paroled for the remaining 1/5th of their sentence.

The numbers that juries give offenders or that they plead to really mean nothing absent a 3G offense. It is a fiction. A jury should know how much time an offender will serve to the day (or at least in a best case scenario) when they sentence them.

How about a parolee punishment enhancement as an addendum to SB 838 to even it out? If the offender was on parole at the time of the commission of a felony offense, other than a simple under one gram possession case, then their offense is enhanced to the habitual level. Bam!

[This message was edited by GG on 05-04-07 at .]