The classic Daniel Patrick Moynihan quote that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” is an import maxim in public policy debates. This is doubly so in criminology, where billions of dollars, quality of life in communities, and — most importantly — the very safety of law-abiding citizens rest on policymakers getting it right.
But despite the facts, critics still maintain that Texas’ criminal-justice reforms have failed to reduce crime and recidivism. The reforms at issue began with a spate of legislation passed during the 80th Texas Legislature in 2007, including a sweeping reorganization of the state’s community correction system under HB 1678. Facing prison and jail capacity overruns with no space to house violent offenders, the legislature prioritized probation and parole for low-risk offenders. We’ve illustrated time and again that once these policies were in place, crime rates continued to fall in-tandem with these reforms, despite similar protests from critics of the day that the opposite would happen.
For instance, in a recent Real Clear Policy op-ed, Sean Kennedy argues that despite Texas’ reform efforts, the re-arrest rate for state prisons and state jails (a Texas-specific type of short-term state incarceration facility) has not changed significantly since 2004. Even assuming that re-arrest rates are a good measure of recidivism reduction, the problem with this argument is that the composition of the prison population before and after the reforms is importantly different. Why? The 2007 reforms focused only on nonviolent and low-level offenders.
