TEXAS TOUGH!

This is from the website of Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice
The Lone Star State's criminal justice system is particularly worthy of scrutiny at this time, as the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported in August, 2000 that Texas, for the first time, leads the nation in imprisoning its citizens: Texas now has the nation's largest incarcerated population under the jurisdiction of its prison system.11 Since 1990, Texas has lead the nation's 50 states with an annual average growth rate of 11.8%, about twice the annual average growth rate of other state prison systems (6.1%). Even more important to the national context, since 1990, nearly one in five new prisoners added to the nation's prisons (18%) was in Texas.12
In this report, we examine to what extent the criminal justice population of Texas has grown in recent years, as well as what specific communities have been most impacted by this growth. This brief will also examine the effectiveness of such growth in decreasing the rate of victimization experienced by Texans by comparing changes in crime in Texas to other U.S. states.
Texas: The Toughest and the BiggestAs of August 2000, BJS reported that Texas pulled slightly ahead of California to earn the distinction of having the largest population of inmates under the jurisdiction of its prison system. But even before Texas became first in prisoners, the state held the questionable honor of having the largest criminal justice system in the United States, with an astonishing proportion of its population under criminal justice control.
As of year end 1999, there were 706,60013 Texans in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day. In a state with 14 million adults, this meant that 5% of adult Texans, or 1 out of every 20, are under some form of criminal justice supervision. The scale of what is happening in Texas is so huge, it is difficult to contrast the size of its criminal justice systems to the other states' systems it dwarfs:
There are more Texans under criminal justice control than the entire populations of some states, including Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska.
According to Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates, one quarter of the nation's parole and probationers are in Texas. California and Texas, together, comprise half the nation's parolees and probationers.14
The number of people incarcerated in Texas (in prison or jail) reached 207,526 in mid-year 1999. Only California, with 10 million more citizens, has more people in both prison and jail.
Texas has a rate of 1,035 people behind bars for every 100,000 in the population,15 the second highest incarceration rate in the nation (second only to Louisiana). If Texas was a nation separate from the United States, it would have the world's highest incarceration rate--significantly higher than the United States (682), and Russia (685) which has 1 million prisoners, the world's third biggest prison system. Texas' incarceration rate is also higher than China (115), which has the world's second largest prison population (1.4 million prisoners).16
If the US shared the incarceration rate of Texas, there would be nearly three million Americans behind bars (2,822,300)--instead of our current 2 million prisoners.
The Texas prison population tripled since 1990, and rose 61.5% in the last five years of this decade alone. In 1994, there were 92, 669 prisoners in Texas. This number had increased to 149,684 by mid-year 1999.17
The Texas correctional system has grown so large that in July 2000, corrections officials ran out of six digit numbers to assign inmates, and officially created prisoner number 1,000,000.18