Report

Like most states, Texas’ prison population has exploded in recent decades, growing more than fivefold between 1980 and 2016.

Unsurprisingly, Texas’ mass incarceration crisis has had an enormous impact on people of color, especially Black people. As of 2014, the per capita imprisonment rate for Black people in Texas was the 10th highest in the country and four times that of white people in the state. While Black people constituted only 12 percent of the total state population in 2016, they made up 34 percent of the Texas prison population. Ending mass incarceration is a critical — although insufficient — step towards addressing racial disparities in Texas’ criminal justice system as well as its broader society.

Texas can dramatically reduce its prison population by implementing just a few sensible reforms:

• Reforming mandatory minimum and severe sentencing enhancement laws.
• Promoting alternatives to incarceration like substance abuse treatment, mental health care, and other programs.
• Giving judges the ability to use options other than incarceration rather than being mandated by the legislature to send people to prison for certain crimes.
• Improving parole and release policies and practices to ensure that more eligible people are released earlier from prison.

If Texas were to follow these and other reforms in this Smart Justice 50-State Blueprint, 71,722 fewer people would be in prison in Texas by 2025, saving over $3 billion that could be invested in schools, services, and other resources that would strengthen communities.

A report with detailed breakdowns of Texas’ prison population and the reforms needed to reduce it is available for download below.

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Texas Blueprint for Smart Justice

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The right to free expression includes the freedom to read whatever we choose. We've fought censorship for nearly 100 years — because a government that polices what we read, polices our thought.

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A traffic ticket should sting. The fine should be enough to make you think twice before doing something like speeding again. But a traffic ticket shouldn’t derail your life—cost your job, make it impossible to pay your bills and feed your family, or deprive you of your freedom. Yet in Texas, for people too poor to write a check and move on with their lives, a simple traffic ticket leads to a cascade of unconstitutional and devastating consequences.

For people who can’t afford their traffic tickets, Texas’s criminal justice system is like a maze with dead ends at every turn. Unreasonable fees pile up and stop people from paying off their debt. Judges require payment for a hearing about inability to pay. Courts are incentivized to issue warrants for failure to pay. And many people who can’t afford their fines are unconstitutionally jailed for what are legally defined as “non-jailable” offenses. The result is a two-tiered system of justice, in which the well-off get what amounts to a slap on the wrist, and the impoverished are stuck in a system where the only exit is debtors’ prison.

This report discusses enforcement of Class C Misdemeanor fines and fees in Texas’s hundreds of Municipal and Justice of the Peace Courts. Practices vary, but our study of these local courts has uncovered a pattern of local courts criminalizing poverty, and perpetuating racial injustice, through unconstitutional enforcement of low-level offenses. It’s time for policymakers at every level of government to improve the fairness of sentencing for all Texans and put an end to these debtors’ prisons.

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No Exit, Texas

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