Criminal Justice Articles

Editorial: Checking in on parole lawyers is a good step
(Austin American-Statesman © 06/12/2006)

Bryan Collier, the state's parole director, did right this week by announcing that his agency will start enforcing the law — not against parolees, but for attorneys who represent prisoners seeking parole. As the law has long required, those attorneys will now be required to file reports that disclose who they represent before the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and how much they charge.

Such reports are supposed to provide a check on lawyers who represent prisoners trying to make parole. Parole board members operate in a highly secretive process that makes it easy for an unscrupulous lawyer to charge a prisoner's family an enormous sum based on promises that he has backdoor access to that process.
In fact, because the state has not enforced the law, some prisoners might have been ripped off by people who were not even lawyers. In April, a former convict from Dallas was returned to prison after he was accused of cheating inmates and their families seeking help for parole. And state officials are investigating two firms suspected of cheating clients.

The disclosure law was enacted in 1947 after a scandal, and there have been scandals since involving paroles promised through supposed "connections" with parole board members and employees.

Parole officials previously said they had no power to enforce the law. But reporting on this sorry situation by the American-Statesman's Mike Ward forced a re-examination of that "we can do nothing" attitude.

And while we're on the subject of prisoners — let's bring back the Criminal Justice Policy Council, or something like it. It was abolished in 2003 in a short-sighted money-saving move by Gov. Rick Perry. The council provided state officials and the public with in-depth studies and projections of the prison population.

Such a group might not seem particularly necessary, but key legislators who have had to live without it want it back. State Rep. Jerry Madden, R-Richardson, chairman of the House Corrections Committee, said the state needs "a study group that will help us better project future growth."

Such projections are needed so the state can decide how to spend the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars it might need to build new prisons and hire more guards. The state's 110 prisons are full, with 152,000 inmates.
While the prisons are not yet overcrowded, they've been chronically understaffed. And as Ward revealed previously, 761 Texas Department of Criminal Justice employees were arrested on various charges last year, and the number this year is on pace to be even worse. There are other signs of a growing crisis: A prisoner was killed and three others injured just this month in a gang feud.

Texas spent much of the 1980s and early 1990s contending with a lawsuit challenging the its overcrowded prisons and many of its policies, such as using prisoners for guards. It took a huge, costly expansion of the prison system to resolve it.

Madden wrote the governor that the state needs a well-staffed unit — a separate agency, a contract with a private entity or perhaps a university — to gather and analyze criminal justice trends. The governor is non-committal, but Madden and Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, are right in calling for such a unit.

One way the state once relieved prison overcrowding was to start letting too many prisoners out too early on parole. The result was more crime victims. Let's not go there again.

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Tracking OrgID 19923




	The committee shall have seven members, with jurisdiction over all matters pertaining to: 1. the incarceration and rehabilitation of convicted felons; 2.the establishment and maintenance of programs that provide alternatives to incarceration; 3. the commitment and rehabilitation of youths; 4. the construction, operation, and management of correctional facilities of the state and facilities used for the commitment and rehabilitation of youths; and 5. the following state agencies: the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the Board of Pardons and Paroles, the Texas Youth Commission, the Council on Sex Offender Treatment, the Texas Correctional Office on Offenders with Medical or Mental Impairments, the Private Sector Prison Industries Oversight Authority, and the Criminal Justice Policy Council.