There was much celebration and popular acclaim when Defense Attorney Lisa Andrews almost single-handedly exposed the drug test breakdown in the Harris County Probation Dempartment last week and rightfully so. People were having their probations revoked and their lives thrown into choas because of faulty testing, no testing and sloppy chain of evidence record keeping.
So the top guys resigned and all now will be made right.
The question no one seems to want to ask is why this happened? Now comes the revelation that
Houston PD finds thousands more untested rape kits According to department officials and figures compiled for a grant awarded to HPD from the National Institute of Justice this year, more than 3,000 kits stored in air-conditioned sections of the property room may not have been tested in addition to the 4,220 untested kits in a property room freezer. The estimate of additional kits is based on a random sampling.
The backlog is slowly growing every year: "The HPD crime lab, which receives about 1,000 DNA requests for testing per year, is testing about 30 to 40 cases per month in its own facility. The lab also is sending 75 sexual assault kits for testing to three laboratories every 60 days, Rios said." Add it up, that means HPD isn't reducing its backlog but instead it's organically growing somewhere at the rate of 130 kits per year. And that was before somebody found 3,000 rape kits they didn't know existed.
Once is an aberration, a poor job by some incompetent, but twice the same kind of problem within law enforcement bureaucracy and you have to ask is there a larger issue??
The problem , as usual, is a committment on the part of state government to these programs, both in terms of attracting and keeping quality personell and providing the necessary resources. I know someone who works in Harris County probation and the director was actually focused in on the mission of supervision and reduction in recidivism. When resources are scarce, you have to prioritize time, talent and treasure. Something will get short shifted. I do not know what the director did or didnot do in this scandal, but I do strongly believe that he is not the worst offender. That would be the lege and our governor.
It is hard for me to get the specific figures for probation spending and cuts in the problem over the last serveral years. Even harder is figures for drug testing in particular. Here is what I do know:
Texas Criminal Justice Coalition : TX PRISON ISSUES/BUDGET-EXPENSES [This is a report on HB1 in 2008, the first round of "tax cuts"]
In addition to eliminating funding for misdemeanor probation supervision, H.B. 1 reduces the
felony basic probation formula funding per diem to $1.37, based on the LBB's June 2010
population projections.
Under H.B. 1, parole officer caseloads would also shoot up from 62 per officer to 87 on paper
(probably more in reality). Budgetary limits on caseload size are lifted under the bill.24 Like
other TDCJ staff, parole officers will similarly see a salary freeze, cuts in state retirement
contributions, and a suspension of raises associated with the career ladder.
Bottom line: The budget's section on parole fundamentally does not make sense. It is simply
not possible to let fewer people out of prison each year, presumably keep the same
number coming in, and cut the overall number of prison beds. Short of double-bunking
(as they do in California), something has got to give.
Re-Entry
Among states that have successfully reduced their prison populations while simultaneously
achieving reductions in crime, a focus on re-entry services has been a critical component.33 The
draft budget of H.B. 1, however, would devastate Texas¡¦ recent investments re-entry
programming.
As for pay and retention incentives, there is this:
Probation Officer Salary in Texas The average salary of probation officers is far below the nationwide average for the occupation, which was $49,520 in May 2008, according to the BLS. That is nearly $15,000 higher than the Texas average. When compared to the average salaries of probation officers in other individual states, Texas is also on the low end of the earnings spectrum. In fact, out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Texas has the 10th lowest average probation officer salary.
In 2011, Grits for Breakfast summarized the resource delimma :
Six Impossible Things': Do you believe in a conservative, rational, and smaller corrections budget? TDCJ has been asked to live within a budget more than $1 billion shy of its estimated need for the next biennium. If the agency closes the Central Unit as a lone, symbolic homage to frugality but cuts the rest from probation and parole, rest assured the agency will be back in two years with their largest budget request in history, telling legislators they "have no choice" because so many new prisoners are coming in the door. And by then it may be true - that is, if legislators continue to follow the agency's advice in the current round of budgetmaking. Today, though, right now, they still have a choice: Prioritize spending based on maximizing public safety per dollar spent, or ensure that corrections costs continue to spiral upward until some future Legislature finds the gumption to take up the challenge.
