TPPF COMMENTARY: A New Day for Texas Juvenile Justice

By Marc Levin

While some Texans may think the Sunset Advisory Commission regulates the time of day, it is actually a unique state entity that conducts wholesale reviews of state agencies to determine if they should set with the sun or continue on a different trajectory.

In the case of the Texas Youth Commission (TYC) and Texas Juvenile Probation Commission (TJPC), Sunset has recommended merging the two agencies into a “Texas Juvenile Justice Department.”

Consolidating the two agencies would save taxpayer money on administrative expenses. But the key to limiting incarceration costs is a strong local probation system, and it is far from certain whether an agency whose budget is primarily based on incarceration can also be an advocate for probation.

The state’s adult prison population has increased 300 percent and the state’s corrections budget has quadrupled since adult probation was consolidated from a separate agency into the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in 1989.

Although the consolidation recommendation has attracted the most attention, Sunset’s proposed pilot program represents the most fundamental and welcome shift in juvenile justice policy.

The recommended pilot program would allow county probation departments to keep some of the funds that now go to incarcerate that county’s youths at TYC. In Ohio and Illinois, this approach has proven to save money and reduce recidivism. Youths benefit from being closer to their families and communities, while taxpayers save because local solutions cost less than TYC.

In this scenario, TYC would compete on recidivism and cost with local lockups called post-adjudication facilities run by counties and private operators, as well as non-residential alternatives such as day reporting centers. It would also eliminate the fiscal incentive to unnecessarily refer youths to TYC in order to preserve county funds.

In Ohio, this remittal of funding to counties reduced commitments to state lockups by 36 percent and cut recidivism from 54 to 22 percent. (TYC’s recidivism rate is 52 percent.) Under Ohio’s Reasoned and Equitable Community and Local Alternative to Incarceration of Minors (RECLAIM) funding system, juvenile judges may use the same pool of funds allocated to committing non-violent youth to state lockups for community-based options.

The RECLAIM model does not cover youth convicted of the most serious violent offenses. These are actually the youths with whom TYC is best equipped and most effective to deal through its Capital Offenders Program.

Ohio’s success with pooling funds is not unique. A similar pilot program in Illinois called REDEPLOY reduced youths sent to state lockups by 44 percent and saved $11 million over two years.

The savings in Texas from this pilot program could be much greater. The Sunset Commission identified three TYC facilities that should be closed, each of which holds fewer than 100 youths. Shutting these units down would save taxpayers $25.4 million per year.

Texas already has 32 post-adjudication facilities at the county level, costing $90 a day per youth compared to TYC’s $153 per youth. In the major urban counties that account for 80 percent of TYC commitments, post-adjudication facilities could compete with TYC to attract placements.

Transparency and performance measures are critical to effective competition. Armed with information including recidivism benchmarks on each TYC and local facility, judges would be empowered to choose the best option based on outcome data for similarly situated youths.

With this pilot program, counties will be incentivized to carefully evaluate youths currently being sent to post-adjudication facilities to identify those that would be appropriate for day reporting centers. Over time, high-performing local facilities may expand to meet demand if TYC continues to produce poor results.

Competition can make any system better, and the juvenile justice system is no exception. Whatever the agency running state lockups is called, what is most important is that it competes with local and private providers. The market will then deliver the verdict on how many youths should be in state custody.

Marc A. Levin, Esq., is Director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin.

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Texas PolicyCast: Measuring performance in the juvenile justice system

The Texas Youth Commission and the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission are among the state agencies currently going through the Sunset Advisory Commission review process. This week, Marc Levin, Director of the Foundation's Center for Effective Justice, published a Policy Perspective that recommends that these agencies' performance measures be enhanced to focus more on results than volume. Marc discusses his report with us this week.

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TPPF commentary: Correct competition in corrections

Privately managed correctional facilities have come under heightened scrutiny as a result of the severe problems uncovered at a Texas Youth Commission contract detention center operated by the GEO Group. However, the problem with privatized corrections is not the result of privatization per se, but rather in the sole focus on cost-cutting in such contracts. In this week's commentary, Marc A. Levin, Director of the Foundation's Center for Effective Justice, argues that private correctional facilities can provide substantial benefits to the state if they are used as laboratories of innovation to develop and test new programs to increase educational and employment outcomes and reduce recidivism of offenders.

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Correct Competition in Corrections

by Marc A. Levin

Albert Einstein’s observation that “in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity” could easily apply to the Texas Youth Commission.

Following a series of abuse scandals, the closure of a TYC contract detention center operated by the GEO Group prompted a Texas Senate hearing last week on the role of private operators in juvenile and adult corrections. Texas should not abandon the use of competition in corrections, but this is a promising opportunity to boldly restructure such outsourcing.

While the conditions at the GEO lockup were unsanitary, the sexual abuse cases at the core of this spring’s TYC scandal occurred almost entirely in government-operated facilities. Moreover, TYC spends $62,000 per year per youth on its own facilities, but its contract with GEO Group for this facility was $24,000 less. Of course, there’s no virtue in saving money if kids are being neglected, but the conditions could and should have been remedied for a cost far lower than that difference.

At the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, private adult prisons save taxpayers 10 to 15 percent and are contractually required to provide exactly the same product as TDCJ facilities – right down to the cell locks. However, that's not necessarily a good thing, as one-third of TDCJ offenders are re-incarcerated within three years of release. Similarly, the GEO Group provided the same re-socialization programming as TYC’s own facilities, and most likely had a recidivism rate equal to TYC's dreadful 52 percent.

The true promise of competition in corrections lies not in saving money while providing the same product as state-run prisons, but in harnessing the innovation of the private sector to develop programming that will reduce recidivism, since 99 percent of inmates are ultimately released.

The average Texas inmate has a sixth grade education and lacks vocational skills, both of which are highly correlated with returning to a life of crime. Future requests for proposal should not simply seek the lowest bidder, but combine a per diem with performance incentives based on the recidivism rate, the number of GEDs earned by inmates, demonstrated educational progress by inmates , and the amount of restitution and child support paid by inmates through earnings from on-site private industry work programs. Private operators would thus compete to come up with innovative programs that measurably reform offenders, reducing the crime rate and the future burden of incarceration on taxpayers.

Oversight of private facilities must also be restructured. TYC-employed monitors, seven of whom have since been fired, evidently failed for months to report the squalor at the GEO facility. Ordinarily, a corrections agency has an incentive to whitewash problems at all facilities because they reflect poorly on an agency’s oversight. However, the situation reverses when, as in the case of TYC, capacity is being reduced and the agency might want to safeguard its own budget, employees, and turf.

To avoid this kind of Jekyll and Hyde oversight, legislators should assign to the Texas Commission on Jail Standards the authority to monitor conditions at private lockups. The Commission effectively performs this function for county jails and would not face the conflicts inherent in simultaneously contracting and competing with the private operator.

Besides offering innovation and cost control if contracts are properly structured, privately operated facilities have several other advantages. First, they can be used as a stopgap measure for overflow while new prison diversion initiatives reduce the need for new prisons. State-run lockups are virtually impossible to close due to the jobs they create in those rural communities.

Private prisons also buffer against overly powerful prison guard unions. The state corrections employees union in California has made more than $10 million in political donations and sank Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's December 2006 plan for prison alternatives. As a result, California taxpayers will pay $7.4 billion for new prisons, while some guards make more than $100,000 a year.

Competition can work in corrections, but policymakers must think outside of the cell rather than trying to wring the last dollar of savings from replicating the state's cookie cutter corrections programs.

Marc A. Levin, Esq. is Director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (www.texaspolicy.com), a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin. He can be reached at mlevin@texaspolicy.com.

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