12.10: Critical Thinking Questions

Reforming the Texas Criminal Justice System

Question: What are some recommendations for reducing the state’s prison population? Which one is most likely to succeed and why?

Feedback: Texas is among the states with historically high prison populations after decades of extraordinary growth. This rapid growth has become a financial burden to the state’s taxpayers. Some suggest that the burgeoning prison population is due, in part, to low incomes and levels of education in socioeconomically challenged areas.

In recent years, many states --- including Texas --- have cut primary, secondary and higher education funding, in some cases by large amounts. It is recommended that states could start repairing the damage done by recession-era cuts and otherwise improve their education systems, especially in high-poverty neighborhoods most directly affected by high incarceration rates by implementing one or all of the following strategies:

• Expanding access to high-quality preschool the by increasing, rather than decreasing, “per child” funding
• Reducing class sizes in high-poverty schools, where there are generally more students per classroom.
• Revising state funding formulas to invest more in high-poverty neighborhoods, where property taxes raise substantially less income than is collected in wealthier area.
• Increasing college enrollment and graduation rates for students from low-income families, who are far less likely to enroll in college than students from wealthier households, less likely to graduate, and less likely to afford tuition and other costs associated with higher education.

Juvenile or Adult

Question: How should offenders under the age of 18 years of age be treated in Texas? Are they adults, or are they juveniles? Does their status depend upon the crime they commit? Consider these issues as you formulate an educated opinion about this issue and recommend a viable solution.

Feedback: In Texas, 17-year-olds who commit a crime are considered adults and enter the adult criminal justice system. Texas is one of only 7 remaining states that charge 17-year-olds as adults.

Proponents of reform assert that the impact of this policy is significant, as the overwhelming majority of those arrests are for nonviolent offenses, including drug possession and theft. They also contend that research indicates that young people who are kept in the juvenile justice system are 34% less likely to re-offend than young people who are transferred into the adult system.¹ Further, proponents of change claim that if Texas does not enact a new law in this area, incarceration of minors in the state would continue to risk being at odds with a federal law – the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which bars 17-year-old inmates from being within "sight or sound" of inmates 18 and older.

Critics counter that the practice could do more harm than good to children, who they say should not be locked up with adult offenders instead of being treated with 16-year-olds and younger people in the juvenile justice system. Several states automatically treat 17-year-olds as adults in criminal cases, while some do the same for 16-year-olds. The severity of the crime often determines which court, and at what level, an offender is tried. And, is often the case, the enormous costs associated with such a change (the construction of new facilities to accommodate a much larger number of newly defined juvenile offenders) acts as a disincentive to change the existing law.

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1. Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. Return Children Under the Age of 18 to the State’s Juvenile Justice System. (2020)