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TDCJ budget cut discussions ignore savings from possible prison closures

The Texas House Appropriations Committee yesterday gave Department of Criminal Justice director Brad Livingston a pass on whether prison closures should be part of his agency's budget cutting strategies.He walked the committee through his list of suggested budget cuts (pdf), but legislators allowed these very politicized proposals to frame the terms of debate. To hear Livingston tell it, legislators face a choice between two options: a) doing nothing or b) slashing treatment and diversion programming that has kept Texas' prison population down. (See the video here. Livingston's testimony begins about the 1:40:00 mark.)Livingston told the committee TDCJ had proposed cuts to "every single function of the agency," but that's not actually true: The one option he didn't suggest - the enormous elephant in the room that nobody mentioned - is cutting into the 80% of TDCJ's budget which goes toward operating 112 prison units, some of them more than 100 years old and highly inefficient...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on March 09, 2010 (boomark / email).