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

Newsweek and other publications have referred to Texas as the “prison rape capital of
the United States” because it leads the country in sexual abuse in prison. A 2016 report
by advocacy groups in Texas documented the state’s “Texas-sized failure” to comply
with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003.
And the number of suicides is at a twenty-year high in Texas state prisons despite the
dip in the total number of inmates. Suicides in county jails have declined, perhaps
thanks to reforms mandated by the 2017 Sandra Bland Act, named after the twentyeight-year-old
black woman who, in a contested series of events, allegedly committed
suicide in a county jail in 2015 after being arrested by a Texas state trooper during a
needlessly confrontational traffic stop.
Mass Incarceration on the Cheap
When faced with a budget shortfall in 2011, the Texas prison system eliminated lunch
for many inmates on weekends. State Senator John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat
who was a key architect of the 2007 penal reforms, quipped at the time, “If they don’t
like the menu, don’t come there in the first place.” Some TDCJ inmates still only receive
two meals a day on weekends today, even though the state budget is now flush. The
TDJC used to have a policy of denying inmates dentures; they were forced instead to
eat only soft food. This policy was only rescinded last year after it was reported in the
media.
Nearly two dozen Texas inmates have died since 1998 of heat-related causes; about
four out of five state prisoners are housed in units without air-conditioning, according to
lawsuits and other reports. Whitmire told reporters he was not alarmed by the heatrelated
deaths—in his view, outfitting Texas prisons with air-conditioning was
“unimaginable.” In 2017, a federal judge castigated the TDCJ, charging that it was
“deliberately indifferent” to the risks posed by the heat.
Evidence of inadequate health care was an important part of the Ruiz lawsuit, yet even
today Texas ranks toward the bottom in per capita spending on prison health care.
Michele Deitch, an expert on prison conditions at the University of Texas at Austin, told
the press earlier this year that the prison health care system in Texas has been
“teetering on the edge of unconstitutionality” for several years “because it is so
underfunded.”
Still, this cost-cutting doesn’t make much of a dent in prison spending overall. Most
years, the TDCJ’s operating budget continues to hover around $3.3 billion in constant
dollars, despite the modest drop in the state prison population over the last decade.
This is not surprising. Most prison costs are fixed and not easily cut. Serious savings will
only come by shutting down numerous penal facilities, laying off guards and other staff
(which typically comprise about two-thirds of prison budgets), and then avoiding the
escalating costs of an extensive monitoring regime, which can include home
confinement, elaborate risk-assessment tools, electronic and GPS monitoring,
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