ABSTRACT
In 2007 Texas faced a corrections crisis. The nonpartisan Texas Legislative Budget Board projected significant growth in the state’s prisoner population. By 2012 the inmate population was projected to rise to 168,000, a number that would put the system 17,000 inmates above its operational capacity. One solution was to do what the state almost always did in the past: build more prisons. Between 1980 and 2004 Texas built a total of ninety-four (Perkinson 2010). The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) was prepared to build again. The agency submitted a $523 million budget request for new prison construction and an additional $184 million for “emergency” contracted capacity to rent space from county jails (Fabelo 2010b). All told, new prison construction costs were estimated to reach $2 billion by 2012.
