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Texas Tough?: An Analysis of Incarceration and Crime Trends in The Lone Star State
Introduction
The United States holds the dubious distinction of having the largest incarcerated population in the world, with 2 million people behind bars as of year-end 1999.2 With only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. holds a quarter of the world's prisoners.3 In the 1990s alone, more persons were added to prisons and jails than in any other decade on record.4 While all states have increased their prison populations over the last two decades, the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) has conducted a series of studies analyzing the incarceration records of individual states to put the national numbers into context. Our reports have highlighted state-specific prison growth, the disproportionate impact incarceration policies have had on African American and Latino communities and youth, and have analyzed the role prison growth may have played on the changing crime rate. Some of JPI's recent findings include:
In the state of California, nearly four in ten African American men in their twenties are under some form of criminal justice control. While African Americans make up 7% of California's population, and constitute 20% of felony arrests, 31% of the prison population and 43% of third "strike" defendants sent to state prison.5
From 1992 to 1994, the Florida Department of Corrections received a $450 million increase in funding. That is more than the state's university system received in the previous ten years.6
Florida prosecutors are sending as many children into the adult prison and jail system as judges do in the entire rest of the United States.7
In New York State more than 90% of people doing time for a drug offense are African American or Latino. There are more blacks and Hispanics locked up in prisons than there are attending the state university system.8
The District of Columbia literally has more prison and jail inmates than D.C. residents enrolled in its one public university. D.C.'s correction system experienced a 312% increase in funding from 1977 to 1993, compared to an 82% increase in university funding during that 16 year period.9
While African Americans represent one out of every four (25%) Maryland residents, they represent over three out of four (77%) of the state's prisoners. Since 1990, 9 out of every 10 new inmates imprisoned in Maryland have been black.10
In a continued examination of those states that lead the national trend in increasing levels of incarceration, the Justice Policy Institute turns a focus on the state of Texas. The Lone Star State's criminal justice system is particularly worthy of scrutiny at this time, as the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported in August, 2000 that Texas, for the first time, leads the nation in imprisoning its citizens: Texas now has the nation's largest incarcerated population under the jurisdiction of its prison system. Since 1990, Texas has lead the nation's 50 states with an annual average growth rate of 11.8%, about twice the annual average growth rate of other state prison systems (6.1%). Even more important to the national context, since 1990, nearly one in five new prisoners added to the nation's prisons (18%) was in Texas.12
In this report, we examine to what extent the criminal justice population of Texas has grown in recent years, as well as what specific communities have been most impacted by this growth. This brief will also examine the effectiveness of such growth in decreasing the rate of victimization experienced by Texans by comparing changes in crime in Texas to other U.S. states.
Texas: The Toughest and the Biggest
As of August 2000, BJS reported that Texas pulled slightly ahead of California to earn the distinction of having the largest population of inmates under the jurisdiction of its prison system. But even before Texas became first in prisoners, the state held the questionable honor of having the largest criminal justice system in the United States, with an astonishing proportion of its population under criminal justice control.
As of year end 1999, there were 706,60013 Texans in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day. In a state with 14 million adults, this meant that 5% of adult Texans, or 1 out of every 20, are under some form of criminal justice supervision. The scale of what is happening in Texas is so huge, it is difficult to contrast the size of its criminal justice systems to the other states' systems it dwarfs:
There are more Texans under criminal justice control than the entire populations of some states, including Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska.
According to Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates, one quarter of the nation's parole and probationers are in Texas. California and Texas, together, comprise half the nation's parolees and probationers.14
The number of people incarcerated in Texas (in prison or jail) reached 207,526 in mid-year 1999. Only California, with 10 million more citizens, has more people in both prison and jail.
Texas has a rate of 1,035 people behind bars for every 100,000 in the population,15 the second highest incarceration rate in the nation (second only to Louisiana). If Texas was a nation separate from the United States, it would have the world's highest incarceration rate--significantly higher than the United States (682), and Russia (685) which has 1 million prisoners, the world's third biggest prison system. Texas' incarceration rate is also higher than China (115), which has the world's second largest prison population (1.4 million prisoners).16
If the US shared the incarceration rate of Texas, there would be nearly three million Americans behind bars (2,822,300)--instead of our current 2 million prisoners.
The Texas prison population tripled since 1990, and rose 61.5% in the last five years of this decade alone. In 1994, there were 92, 669 prisoners in Texas. This number had increased to 149,684 by mid-year 1999.17
The Texas correctional system has grown so large that in July 2000, corrections officials ran out of six digit numbers to assign inmates, and officially created prisoner number 1,000,000.18
Characteristics of Inmates
Contrary to the view that most of the people entering Texas prisons represent a threat to public safety, the majority of prisoners in the Lone Star State are serving sentences for non-violent offenses. When the composition of the prison population is examined, it appears that most are being incarcerated for low level crimes. |
