The Political Dynamics of Justice Reform in The U.S.

As the TDC continued to fight aspects of Justice’s ruling on appeal through the 1980s
and 1990s, Ruiz v. Estelle provided penal hard-liners in Texas with an opportunity to
expand, bureaucratize, and professionalize the longstanding model of punishment
based on maximum control at minimum cost, with little outside oversight. These hardliners,
including top Republicans and Democrats, ultimately gutted many of the courtordered
reforms. As for Ruiz, the lead plaintiff in what became a class-action lawsuit, he
served out a life sentence for armed robbery, often in solitary confinement in a cramped,
dank, dungeon-like cell. Just months before he died in 2005, he was moved to a prison
hospital after being denied medical parole. As Robert Perkinson dryly notes in Texas
Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, his monumental history of crime and
punishment in Texas, Ruiz fought the law, but the law ultimately won.
As calls to end mass incarceration have escalated over the last decade, Texas is being
hailed once again as a model for criminal justice reform. Politicians from Barack Obama
to Donald Trump have lauded the Lone Star State for new “smart on crime” policies or
for embracing “Right on Crime,” the criminal justice movement associated with
prominent conservatives, including Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, and the Koch
brothers. Right on Crime promotes a view of mass incarceration as primarily a dollarsand-cents
problem for taxpayers that requires a pragmatic, bipartisan approach—
diverting attention from the racial, economic, and social inequities that built the carceral
state and sustain it today.
The origin story of the latter-day turnaround in Texas’s criminal justice system dates
back to 2007, when legislators decided against spending an estimated $2 billion on new
prison construction to accommodate projections that the state would need an additional
seventeen thousand prison beds by 2012. Instead, they enacted some modest changes
in probation and parole to redirect people to community supervision; they also restored
some funding for substance abuse and mental health treatment. The attempt to slow
down prison construction was, in fact, a big change from the post-Ruiz era, when the
state attempted to build its way out of the overcrowding problem. And yet, even though
Texas was required to face up to certain realities—first by the Ruiz case and later by
budget constraints—the Texas penal system, after all these years, has not really
changed its stripes.
The Texas Prison Complex
For all the hype, Texas remains “more or less the epicenter of mass incarceration on
the planet,” according to Scott Henson, author of Grits for Breakfast, the indispensable
blog on criminal justice and law enforcement in Texas. Other states have far surpassed
Texas in reducing the size of their incarcerated populations and in providing safer and
more humane lock-ups that are not such blatant affronts to the Eighth Amendment’s
ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Texas today incarcerates nearly one-quarter of a million people in its jails and prisons—
more than the total number of prisoners in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom
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