Getting tough & smart on Crime

What to Know: Writing in the San Antonio Express-News, Texas Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn explain how successful criminal justice reforms in Texas made it to Washington.

“In short: Texas didn’t stop being tough on crime, we just started being smart on crime, too, and the results could not be disputed,” they write. “Both incarceration and crime rates dropped by double digits. Not only did this prevent the state from having to build new prisons to house additional inmates, it allowed us to close eight prisons and led to more than $3 billion in taxpayer savings. Other states were quick to notice, and we began to see similar reforms moving through legislatures in Georgia, North Carolina and other states. Despite the positive impact in Texas and other states, efforts to replicate these changes at the federal level were slow-moving. After years of attempting to take the Texas model nationwide, we were proud to fight for the First Step Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last month. This law borrows from many of the changes implemented by Texas more than a decade ago and applies them to the roughly 180,000 federal prisoners.”

The TPPF Take: … this new law, … will result in huge benefits for taxpayers—and for former prisoners, their families and their communities.

“For years, our prison system grew in spending and declined in results. The notion of redemption was abandoned. Cost-effectiveness was discarded for the sake of punishment,” says TPPF’s Kevin Roberts. “But this bill applies conservative principles to our corrections system. Those principles will transform lives and restore families, things we can all agree are worthy goals.”

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