TX: After 15 Years Waitlist For Treatment Ends

NEWS - Journal

For the first time since the Texas prison system's substance-abuse treatment programs began nearly 15 years ago, amid controversy over their cost and effectiveness, programs have no waiting list, prison officials said Tuesday.

In years past, thousands of drug- and alcohol-addicted convicts had to wait for months — in some cases years — for space to open up in the treatment programs, filling prisons with felons who could have been paroled, and confounding a smooth transition of convicts from prisons to programs to parole.

But officials said that because the Legislature voted two years to ago greatly expand the treatment programs, the chronic backlog that had plagued them since their inception, at the behest of then-Gov. Ann Richards, is now gone. At the same time, the prison population has decreased slightly in recent months, part of a national trend.

"It shows all the parts of our criminal justice system are working together right now ... and that's the first time in 16 years that I've been able to say that," said Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, a Democrat from Houston who helped Richards push the treatment programs through the Legislature in the early 1990s.

"This will go down as a very important day in the history of our system," he said. "What it will mean for most Texans is it will enhance public safety. If inmates can get the treatment they need, when they need it, they will come out a better person than when they came in."

It was not clear how long the absence of a waiting list would last.

Michelle Lyons, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said the waiting lists had dwindled until Friday, when all major prison substance-abuse treatment programs caught up with demand — thanks in part to the recent opening of a 400-bed contract treatment center in Burnet.

Another treatment center with 550 bunks is slated to open soon in the East Texas city of Henderson, she said