Yesterday Grits spent a couple of hours going through a recent, fact-laden report (pdf) from the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, pulling out interesting tidbits and money quotes to highlight. Then I asked the missus for an edit and the text was accidentally deleted, leaving nothing but the above title. I'm not doing it again but if you'd like a high-level overview of Texas prison, probation and parole systems, TCJC has it for you.
One bit that I will re-create: According to TCJC, as of Aug. 31, 2012 Texas had 152,303 prisoners locked up, and another 493,340 people were supervised on probation or parole. Combining those figures and dividing by Texas' estimated adult population in 2012 (source), we discover that 3.4% of Texas adults had their liberty constrained by state government in 2012 in some form or fashion via the justice system.
The report includes recommendations on how to reduce the government footprint through a variety of sentencing and probation reforms.
UPDATE (9/1): I suppose we should round out this number by adding in the 67,096 Texas county jail inmates. That gets you to 3.7% of the adult population in prison, jail, on probation or on parole.
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