But while no one claimed responsibility for the mailer, it mirrored the language that Garza’s opponents have long used to say his reforms ushered in a period of lawlessness, despite data showing crime is on the decline.

Sylestine claimed that Garza painted a “political bullseye” on police officers, and aired an ad accusing him of being “lenient” on child sexual assault. The local police union similarly accused Garza of “targeting” cops for “political gain,” or giving a “sweetheart deal to a child predator.” The head of the local GOP called for his criminal prosecution and said that Garza has “declared war” on the police. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused him of caring more about “the radical agenda of dangerous Antifa and BLM mobs than justice.” And they all routinely singled out the support he received in 2020 from a PAC associated with George Soros, the billionaire who has supported progressive causes and emerged as a leading foil for the right. 

On Tuesday, Garza easily beat back his opposition, prevailing over the well-funded Sylestine in the Democratic primary.

As of publication, Garza leads Sylestine 66 to 34 percent. Garza will be heavily favored in November against Republican Daniel Betts, in this staunchly blue county. 

Bob Libal, a Garza supporter and Austin-based reform advocate, said he was inundated toward the end of the campaign by “extreme fearmongering rhetoric,” text messages and images that falsely portrayed Austin as a “dystopic, crime-ridden place” with criminals “roaming the streets.” 

Libal told Bolts that Garza’s win “speaks to the broad popularity of progressive criminal legal reforms in Travis County, even up against an extremely well-funded campaign operating from the playbook of fear.” 

Over in Houston, Harris County DA Kim Ogg has employed a similar playbook during her tenure in office, long accusing proponents of criminal justice reform of filling the streets with violence.

On Tuesday, she lost overwhelmingly in the Democratic primary to challenger Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in her office. She trails 78 to 22 percent as of publication.

While Ogg won her first term in 2016 on promises of reform, she then became one of the leading antagonists of Harris County’s landmark bail reform, which expanded pretrial release for people accused of low-level offenses. “We see judges right now letting dangerous misdemeanor offenders out,” Ogg complained in 2019. After voters elected some progressive county officials in 2018, she frequently battled with them. Ogg painted the frightening picture of a “new battleground for public safety” that pitted her staff against local Democratic judges, whom she blamed for letting violent defendants walk. (The Harris County jail has remained overcrowded and in violation of minimum safety standards.) 

“When you have murderers running around on multiple bonds… it’s a scary time,” she said.

Again this year, Ogg went after her challenger, Teare, for being “Soros-funded”—ironically, since her first win in 2016 was fueled by more than half-a-million dollars in spending from a PAC with ties to the billionaire. While benefiting herself from heavy financial support from the bail industry, Ogg claimed that Soros backed Teare because she “did not toe the line on bail and did not agree to open the doors of the jail to violent offenders.” 

Teare told Bolts last month that Ogg spread a “culture of fear” in her office. He says the DA has caused line prosecutors to overcharge some cases, be too aggressive in plea offers, and resist pretrial detention, for fear of backlash over a specific case of recidivism. “That’s the way you don’t get in trouble,” he said. 

Teare has said he supports the misdemeanor bail reform and he pledged not to take campaign donations from the bail industry. His website features a study that showed the increase in pretrial releases did not increase crime.

In his victory speech on Tuesday, Teare thanked the Texas Organizing Project, a progressive organization that has backed local reforms, including an initiative to drive people out of jail, and that endorsed him this year. 

“When they put their mind to a race, they go all in,” Teare said. “Jumping in behind me is something that I’ll remember forever.”

Still, Teare has also carved out an overall moderate persona compared to Ogg’s unsuccessful challengers four years ago. For instance, he declined during the campaign to criticize Ogg over the death penalty, saying he agreed with an incumbent who has sought capital punishment many times. As a former prosecutor, Teare brought a different background to the race than Garza, a former public defender and labor lawyer, did in Austin. 

In the general election, Teare will face another former prosecutor, Republican Dan Simons. He will be favored in a county that leans Democratic, though not as heavily as Travis.

He benefited during the primary from the erosion of Ogg’s relationship with the Democratic Party. As Bolts wrote last month, nearly 200 local precinct chairs adopted a party resolution in December that said Ogg had “abused the power of her office to pursue personal vendettas against her political opponents, sided with Republicans to advance their extremist agenda, and stood in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system.”

Daniel Cohen, who heads the group Indivisible Houston, helped organize the resolution against Ogg. “This is a new model of accountability within the party, within the community,” he told Bolts. He said that most of the resolution’s proponents were motivated by reading coverage of how Ogg was “weaponizing” the power of her office against adversaries like County Judge Lina Hidalgo, former judge Franklin Bynum, whom Ogg petitioned to remove from the bench, and County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who repeatedly opposed budget increases that Ogg requested.

For Cohen, the throughline between the various Democrats whom Ogg has targeted is that they supported the county’s misdemeanor bail reform. “It’s a pretty clear pattern in terms of the people who she fights.” 

And Ogg kept attacking former allies during the primary campaign, for instance telling Texas Monthly that the Houston LGBTQ+ Political Caucus, which had endorsed her in the past and endorsed Teare this time, does not represent “truly gay people.”

In Austin, Garza maintained a far more harmonious relationship to his own party—benefiting for instance from the endorsements of the two Democrats who represent Travis County in Congress, Lloyd Doggett and Greg Casar. 

But he has a far more hostile relationship with Republicans—and while that’s unlikely to cost him his job in the general election, Garza’s critics are plotting to get him out through other means.

Garza has piloted a swath of reforms over his first term, including ramping up restorative justice and pretrial diversion programs to reduce the number of people with criminal convictions. In 2022, his pledge, alongside some other DAs to not prosecute abortion cases drew ire from Texas Republicans, who last year passed a law that authorized courts to remove prosecutors for declining to prosecute certain cases. Garza is now facing a legal petition to remove him under the new law.

Local police groups have also signaled support for such efforts after Garza filed charges against more than a dozen officers for using excessive force; Garza dropped the cases in December but told Bolts he still intends to continue pressing for “systemic change” in policing.

That threat of removal will loom large over the rest of the year, and Garza’s likely second term.

On Tuesday night, though, Garza started off by celebrating his victory. He told his cheering supporters, “Tonight, we scored a major victory for our progressive movement and for criminal justice reform.”

The post “Playbook of Fear” Fails to Sway Voters in Austin and Houston DA Races appeared first on Bolts.

In public forums and letters to the local newspaper, Uvalde County residents have called on Nolasco to resign and refrain from running for office. But Nolasco is pressing ahead, and he faces three opponents in the Republican primary on March 5; one of them, Otto Arnim, has highlighted the sheriff’s role in the failed response to the massacre. 

But Uvalde County DA Christina Mitchell is running unopposed in her own Republican primary on the same day, despite complaints that she has helped shield local cops from consequences for their failures during the shooting. She’ll also face no Democrat in the general election, as none filed to run against her by the December deadline. 

And so it goes across the state: Hundreds of local elections will shape the future of law enforcement this year, but whether they lead to any change or accountability of course depends on who actually is running. 

Sheriffs who run some of Texas’ largest lockups and have long faced scandals over deaths and abuses behind bars are now asking voters for another term, with some facing competitive races. But of the 14 counties whose jails are on notice with the state jail commission for violating minimum safety standards as of February 2024, seven are overseen by incumbent sheriffs who are running unopposed this year.

District attorney races may also shift the policy landscape in some of Texas’ largest cities, with disagreements over prosecution practices shaping contests in Harris County (Houston) and Travis County (Austin) in particular. But in large swaths of the state, these elections have already been decided: Only 28 percent of the state’s DA races this year drew multiple candidates by the December deadline, leaving dozens of incumbents like Mitchell virtually certain to secure another term.

This includes populous areas that have not seen a contested election in years. In Montgomery County, a county of nearly 650,000 north of Houston, Republican DA Brett Ligon is running with no primary or general election challenger for the third consecutive cycle.

Still, there’s plenty to watch in politics around criminal justice in Texas this year. With a recent state law granting local law enforcement new powers to arrest people whom they suspect are undocumented, sheriffs face mounting questions over how they’ll choose to cooperate with the state’s crackdown on immigrants; some are racing to bolster the law, while candidates in more Democratic counties like El Paso are promising to resist it.

Far-right officials and activists are also going after justices on the all-Republican Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in this year’s GOP primary—an intra-party grudge match that, as Bolts has reported, stems from the court’s 2021 ruling that limited Attorney General Ken Paxton’s authority over voter fraud prosecutions in the state. Meanwhile, organizers in the High Plains city of Lubbock are petitioning for a local ballot measure to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana, even as Paxton sues to block similar ordinances that voters recently passed in several other Texas cities. 

To kick off our coverage of elections that will shape policing and criminal punishment in Texas this year, below is Bolts’ guide to some important storylines to start watching in the run-up to the March 5 primaries.

Deadly jails, and sheriffs that run them 

Jail deaths have surged across the country in recent years, including in many of Texas’ largest counties. This year, with all of the state’s sheriff’s offices on the ballot, some are seeking re-election amid criticism over spiking deaths on their watch. 

In Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, jail deaths have risen dramatically under Sheriff Bill Waybourn, a Republican who first entered office in 2017 and is seeking re-election this year. At least 60 people have died in Tarrant County jail custody since Waybourn took over, compared to 25 in-custody deaths during the 8-year period that preceded him, according to state records and data compiled by nonprofit oversight group Texas Justice Initiative. 

Waybourn, who is unopposed in the Republican primary next month but will face a Democratic challenger in November, has become a sort of national right-wing celebrity for his anti-immigrant rhetoric and efforts to police elections in Tarrant County. But at home, criticism has mounted over the rise in deaths and other scandals on his watch—including allegations of a cover-up following one particularly questionable jail death; a pregnant woman with severe mental illness who delivered her baby alone inside her cell (the child later died); and a disabled woman who left the jail comatose and covered in bruises. Last year, a group of Tarrant County activists working with the civil rights clinic at Texas A&M University’s law school filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice seeking an investigation into the local jail. 

“The Tarrant County Jail has failed the community at every turn,” the letter stated. “It has failed to provide medical care, to protect incarcerated people from risks associated with poor mental health, to perform checks, and to protect individuals from harm from jail staff and others in the jail.”

Both of Waybourn’s Democratic challengers—Patrick Moses, a retired federal officer, and Indya Murray, a local police officer—have cited problems at the jail as a reason for running. Voters will choose which of them moves to November’s general election against Waybourn on March 5.

In a recent forum local officials organized to discuss problems at the jail, Waybourn defended his running of the facility and downplayed the scandals on his watch, blaming the deaths on drug addiction and other health problems that he said were outside the control of his staff—like “excited delirium,” a supposed condition that medical associations have long rejected but which cops still cite to explain in-custody deaths. 

Other sheriffs who oversee large scandal-plagued lockups in Texas are also on the ballot this year, including Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat first elected to the post in 2016, and Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar, another Democrat first elected that same year. As Bolts has reported, Harris County’s jail system, the largest in the state, has struggled with overcrowding and violence in recent years. The Bexar County jail has also seen a rise in deaths in recent years and a high suicide rate, a persistent problem at the jail for more than a decade. 

As of publication, Harris County is one of the 14 counties with jails currently flagged by state authorities as non-compliant with minimum safety standards. Besides Gonzalez, the other sheriffs who are facing competition in these counties are all Republicans in rural areas like Newton County, which like Harris County is shipping people out-of-state as a solution to its jail overcrowding.

Boss Ogg fights her own party 

When she won the Harris County DA race in 2016, Kim Ogg became the first Democrat to run Texas’ largest prosecutor’s shop in 40 years. She promised a vision of change that seemed to distance the office from its tough-on-crime heyday, focusing on reforms aimed at diverting people accused of low-level crimes, like marijuana possession, from jail. 

The county has kept morphing politically since her first win, including electing other reform-minded Democrats to key offices as part of a blue wave in 2018, and adopting bail reform for misdemeanor cases in the aftermath of a lawsuit and federal ruling striking down the county’s previous practice of routinely detaining people with petty charges who couldn’t afford to pay for their pretrial freedom. 

But during that time, Ogg has largely parted ways with this broader movement to reform Harris County’s criminal legal system, in part by fiercely resisting the efforts at bail reform. Now Ogg is running for a third term—this time with a much more sour relationship to many in her party. She first faces a challenge from a former staffer in the March 5 Democratic primary. 

In recent years, reform-minded local officials who have butted heads with Ogg have found themselves in the crosshairs of her powerful office. Under Ogg, the DA’s office filed complaints with the state in an attempt to unseat a Democratic criminal court judge who was vocally critical of the DA. Her office attempted to prosecute another Democratic judge who had publicly sparred with her over bail reforms. Ogg’s office is also currently prosecuting former aides of Democratic Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county executive who has repeatedly clashed with the DA over criminal justice policy, over alleged improprieties involving a county contract. 

Pushback from Ogg’s own party reached a boiling point late last year when Harris County Democrats officially admonished the DA. Local party precinct chairs voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution stating that Ogg has “abused the power of her office to pursue personal vendettas against her political opponents, sided with Republicans to advance their extremist agenda, and stood in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system.” 

Ogg has dismissed the intra-party fight as “political drama” and argues she helped steer the office through Hurricane Harvey and the COVID-19 pandemic, crises that wreaked havoc on the local criminal legal system. (Ogg’s office and campaign didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment for this story.) 

Ogg’s critics say her charging decisions have contributed to the deadly crisis at the local jail. Defense attorneys and former prosecutors have accused her of mismanagement and bungling some of the office’s core functions, such as screening charges filed by police. According to a recent investigation by the Houston Chronicle, cases prosecuted by the DA’s office that judges later tossed for lack of probable cause have skyrocketed under Ogg after she changed how the office reviews charges, resulting in more and more Houstonians jailed without a firm legal basis. 

Sean Teare, a former prosecutor who is challenging Ogg in the Democratic primary, told Bolts that problems with the DA’s intake division reflect a larger “culture of fear” that she has fostered in the office. He claims that prosecutors are reluctant to dismiss weak cases, or allow for pretrial release or plead down charges when appropriate, for fear that a case might later generate critical headlines. Teare argues that the environment has compounded the looming backlog in criminal cases facing the office. 

“You can make the recommendation for plea bargains at the highest level possible, just never move off of it, and the case will never plea,” he said. “It will pend for three and a half years and someone else will have to try it—even if we know we can’t make the case or that’s not the right recommendation, because that’s the way you don’t get in trouble.” 

While Democrats have come to dominate countywide elections in Harris County, the primary winner will face Dan Simons, a local Republican lawyer, in the general election.

Austin’s election unfolds under a removal threat

Just a month before a Minneapolis officer murdered George Floyd and sparked a national uprising, Austin cops had killed Mike Ramos, another unarmed Black man whose name, along with Floyd’s, eventually became a rallying cry during the seismic protests that hit Texas’ capital city that summer. Austin police only reinforced their reputation for violence during the 2020 protests, shooting crowd-control munitions like “bean bag” rounds at unarmed protesters, resulting in numerous severe injuries. 

José Garza, a former public defender and labor rights organizer, successfully ran for Travis County DA that year, vowing to hold police accountable. Within months, prosecutions against abusive cops started to rise. In early 2022, about a year after taking over, Garza announced charges against more than a dozen Austin officers accused of assault and deadly conduct during the 2020 protests. 

Garza’s first term has been a lesson in what kind of policy changes local reform-minded DAs can enact—from prosecuting police to improving the office’s historically harmful treatment of sex assault survivors and piloting a restorative justice program. Garza says the office has also dramatically expanded access to pretrial diversion programs, so that most people charged with non-violent offenses are now connected with some kind of service, whether job training or treatment, instead of being convicted. In an interview with Bolts, Garza pointed to a recent case, a single father charged with cocaine possession, as an example: diversion meant prosecutors sending the man to the local carpenters union for a training program and dismissing the charge when he completed it.

“The carpenters told us he was their best student, and so he ended his contact with our criminal legal system in Travis County, not as a convicted felon but as a carpenter’s apprentice,” Garza said. 

But as he stepped up police prosecutions and other reforms, Garza has drawn the hostility of law enforcement unions and their allies, a familiar pattern to other progressives in his office. And as he now seeks a second term, Garza first faces a March 5 Democratic primary against Jeremy Sylestine, a former prosecutor who has accused him of painting a “political bullseye” on APD officers.

Sylestine has also aired campaign ads accusing the DA of being too lenient on plea deals (Sylestine’s campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story). Daniel Betts, the only GOP candidate, has encouraged Republican voters to cross party lines to vote in the Democratic primary against Garza, which is allowed under Texas’ open primary system. 

In their efforts against Garza, police groups are also looking beyond elections. Last year, Republicans in the Texas legislature rewrote state law to allow for courts to remove local DAs who choose not to pursue certain types of crimes. Aimed at a handful of ”rogue prosecutors” who, like Garza, had promised not to prosecute people for abortion, the new law also threatens to undermine local attempts to decriminalize marijuana possession. 

Law enforcement groups launched a website to collect complaints against Garza the week the new prosecutor-removal law took effect last September. In December, the GOP candidate who lost to Garza in the 2020 general election helped file a petition to remove him from office, citing the new law. 

Garza in December ended up dismissing the criminal charges against most of the Austin police officers his office was prosecuting for excessive force during the 2020 protests. Garza says those cases were derailed late last year when APD sent his office an internal review showing that police officials knew ahead of the protests that the department’s crowd-control munitions were dangerous and could maim people. Garza also says police conveniently did not investigate or disclose those facts until the three-year statute of limitations had passed for any potential indictments against higher-ups. 

Garza insists that police prosecutions are among the most difficult cases his office handles but he says he’s using his perch to push for police oversight and accountability in ways that go beyond prosecuting cases. In December, even as he dropped the charges against officers who injured protesters in 2020, Garza says he asked Austin’s mayor to join him in calling for a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into APD’s use of force and crowd-control tactics during the 2020 protest.

“I’m really more convinced than ever that there really needs to be deep, systemic change in the Austin Police Department,” Garza said. 

The post The Texas Elections That Will Shape Policing and Punishment This Year appeared first on Bolts.

Activists in Austin have advocated for greater civilian oversight in response. A coalition of progressive organizers pushed the city council to amend the city’s contract with the Austin Police Association (APA) in order to reduce barriers to accountability and to create an Office of Police Oversight. But the police union fought back, attempting to leash the newly empowered watchdog by blocking it from conducting independent investigations into complaints of misconduct against officers. 

Their confrontation came to a head this weekend. Activists put an ordinance on the municipal ballot to bolster and codify the powers of civilian oversight in the city. The police union and its supporters retaliated with a petition drive of their own, which deceptively bore the same name as activists’ version, and succeeded in putting a competing ordinance in front of voters to weaken oversight.

Austin voters on Saturday decisively sided with police reformers. A resounding 70 percent approved Proposition A, the measure that would bolster oversight of police. They overwhelmingly rejected Proposition B, the version supported by the police union, which received support from only 20 percent of voters.

Kathy Mitchell, a longtime advocate for police accountability in Austin who helped organize the campaign for Prop A, says the results illustrate strong support in the city for robust civilian oversight of police, and voters’ frustration at police efforts to push back against their organizing of recent years. 

“We have literally tried everything, there was no other way to enforce the stronger standards for oversight other than going to the voters and saying, ‘Okay, you’re going to have to show that this is something you expect,’ Mitchell said. “And now they have.” 

Mitchell says she hopes that Prop A’s strong showing empowers city officials to begin changing police oversight as early as this week, including pushing for independent review of complaints against officers and cases involving police violence. 

The results in Austin were a stark contrast to the overwhelming defeat of a different police reform ballot measure 80 miles south in San Antonio, which also held its municipal elections on Saturday. As Bolts reported last month, San Antonio activists petitioned for a more sweeping ballot measure, also called Proposition A, that sought to decriminalize weed and abortion as well as reduce arrests and jail time for minor charges, but faced inflammatory rhetoric and well-funded opposition from the police union and much of the city’s political establishment. 

Only 28 percent of San Antonio voters supported Prop A on Saturday. The result was a decisive win for the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association, one of the most powerful and combative police unions in the country. “Tonight, the voices of our great city were heard and heard loudly,” Danny Diaz, the union’s president, said during a victory party Saturday night. “We will not become another statistic, we will not tolerate criminal leniency, and we will not allow our city to crumble.” 

Prop A’s organizers issued a statement after the election accusing the police union and its supporters of “spreading fear tactics and lies” in its campaign against the ballot measure. “We still have to do a lot of public education. We’ve been doing it for several years and we’re going to continue,” Ananda Tomas, executive director of the police reform group that led the effort, told reporters Saturday night, according to the San Antonio Current. “We know when we’re at the doors and we break all of these things down, that folks are with us.”

The police union in Austin was no less defiant than San Antonio’s despite its defeat. “The APA simply will not stand by while this city and anti-police activists operate with blatant disregard for state law and the rights and protections afforded to our hardworking men and women,” the Austin Police Association tweeted on Saturday night.

Mitchell says it’s telling that the union is talking about state law and seems to be appealing more to Texas’ Republican leaders at this point than to local voters.

The Austin Police Association is advocating for a bill drafted by Republicans in the legislature that would prohibit civilian oversight of police departments that has already passed the Texas Senate and is now pending in the House. The legislation, which would undermine Austin’s new oversight ordinance by blocking access to police information until the department finishes investigating itself, mirrors measures that Republicans have pushed through elsewhere in the country. 

State-level Republicans have stepped in to protect local police in other ways. Republican governor Greg Abbott has publicly decried the prosecution of Austin police who brutalized protesters, and even appointed one of the officers indicted for assaulting demonstrators in 2020 to a state law enforcement commission. 

“Increasingly, and this has been going on for a while, APA is turning to the GOP to save itself from its own community,” Mitchell said. “They have decided strategically to stop talking to Austin, and that is remarkable, because they are our employees.” 

The post Austin Voters Embrace Civilian Police Oversight in Saturday Election appeared first on Bolts.

Now Casar is likely heading to Congress, riding his local notoriety as well as endorsements by the country’s leading left-leaning politicians to overwhelmingly secure the Democratic nomination in a safely blue congressional district on Tuesday. 

Casar’s leading rival Eddie Rodriguez, a longtime Texas House member from Austin, made the election into a referendum on the policies Casar had championed in the city. Rodriguez attacked Casar for supporting lifting the local ban on camping in public, sending voters fliers echoing GOP talking points and calling Casar’s policies “disastrous” for the city. Primary voters apparently disagreed, with Casar trouncing Rodriguez and two other challengers with 62 percent as of publication. 

“Our campaign has built a movement of working people, from San Antonio to Austin, who are ready to fight because our futures depend on it,” Casar said in a press release on Tuesday night. “Progressive policies are popular. And we’re going to pass them for Texas working families.”

But Casar’s promotion to Washington, D.C., comes in the wake of the rollback of some of his signature policies back home—in part due to statewide Republicans who regularly target the local progressive policies championed by Casar. 

After the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Casar helped make Austin one of the only cities in the nation to steer significant levels of police funding away from cops and toward other city services. But the state GOP passed a law effectively strong-arming Austin into restoring police funding, which is now a record high $442 million, and preventing other Texas cities from ever reducing police spending. During Casar’s tenure on the council, Austin also required private employers to provide paid sick leave but the all-Republican state supreme court knocked down the ordinance.  

Casar told the Texas Observer last month, if he is elected to Congress, he will aim to turn the tables and “override the legislature” instead. 

The policing reforms championed by Casar and his allies have also been hotly contested in Austin. In May 2021, after the city council decriminalized homelessness with Casar’s push, a conservative group put an initiative on the ballot to walk back the move, and voters approved it, fueling talk of a backlash against the council’s policies. 

Other progressives lost their own bids further down-ballot in Travis County on Tuesday. Bob Libal, a longtime activist who ran for county commissioner opposing a multi-million dollar jail construction project, lost by a wide margin to an incumbent who supported new jail spending. Andrew Hairston, a candidate for the office of justice of the peace who vowed to fight evictions and was endorsed by the local DSA chapter, also lost to an incumbent.

Casar, Libal, and Hairston all  hoped to build on a string of major progressive wins in Travis County in recent years, including the 2020 district attorney’s race that ushered in José Garza, who like Casar is a former labor organizer and was endorsed by national progressive leaders. Last year, Libal and other local activists successfully pressured the county to pause its plan to build a new jail, and Austin voters overwhelmingly rejected a fearmongering campaign asking them to super-charge the city’s police budget. 

Two weeks ago, Garza announced indictments against 19 police officers accused of assaulting and injuring protesters during the 2020 Black Lives Matter marches, an unusually strong move by a prosecutor that local progressives celebrated. But one of those 19 indicted officers likely secured a runoff spot on Tuesday in a Republican primary for a state House district that encompasses parts of Austin and has been drawn by the GOP to be safely red. Governor Greg Abbott, who easily won his own Republican primary race on Tuesday, recently floated offering pardons to Austin cops convicted of brutalizing protesters, a reminder of the preemption hurdles local progressives could continue to face. 

Celebrating his win Tuesday night, Casar credited the larger organizing that he says helped usher him to victory. And he did not shy away from uplifting the local policies and movements that prompted Republican attacks for years and were demonized by some in his own party during the primary. 

“We built this movement, here in Austin down to San Antonio, up and down I-35, throughout this state we built this together,” he told supporters in Austin. “We built it striking at fast food restaurants fighting for $15, we built this fighting for survivors of sexual assault, we built it fighting for sick days, we built it fighting for our unhoused brothers and sisters. We built it marching in the streets for the movement for Black lives. We built this through wins and losses.”

The post Greg Casar Wins Congressional Primary, Defying Attacks on Criminal Justice Reforms He Championed in Austin  appeared first on Bolts.

Kurt Lockhart says the actions taken by Houston’s elections officials prompted him to run for the same job at home in Austin this year. Lockhart, one of two candidates in next month’s Democratic primary for Travis County Clerk, which oversees elections in the state’s left-leaning capital city, argues the office should have done more in 2020 to help voters. 

“I was really inspired to run because of what happened in Harris County and the innovative things they did, like 24-hour voting and drive-thru voting, that frankly we should have done here in Travis County,” Lockhart told Bolts. “I think we missed out on that opportunity to enfranchise more folks.” 

Local elections offices have become a hotly-disputed battleground in the longstanding fight over voting rights in Texas. After fighting to uphold restrictions on mail ballots and suing to block expanded voting options ahead of the 2020 election, last year Republicans passed Senate Bill 1, a sweeping new set of voting restrictions. Among other provisions, SB 1 bans local elections officials from implementing drive-thru or around-the-clock voting. It also threatens local officials and elections administrators with a felony if they encourage eligible voters to cast mail ballots, with a mandatory minimum punishment of six months imprisonment.

Republicans followed up their success with a special legislative session where they churned out new gerrymandered maps that safeguard their legislative majorities for years to come by continuing to dilute the political power of the state’s fast-growing Black, Hispanic and Asian communities. 

Advocates for voting rights say local elections officials in Texas still have a critical role to play in the face of new barriers to voting. 

“Because of gerrymandering, it’s going to be challenging to get to legislative majorities for visions we have on the progressive side about how we can run elections better—things like automatic voter registration, online voter registration, allowing student IDs for voter ID and mandatory campus polling locations,” said Alex Birnel, advocacy director with the progressive group MOVE Texas, which has pushed to boost voter participation in a state with historically low turnout. 

“The other option is to go local and explore where there is still room in the election code,” he added. 

Birnel points to the success of innovations spearheaded in 2020 by Harris County election officials. “These sorts of small policy tweaks are super consequential in diversifying the electorate,” Birnel told Bolts. He points to stories of “welders being able to vote without cutting into their work schedule, moms being able to vote without having to worry about wrangling their kids out of the back seat of the van.” Even though SB 1 narrowed options for election administrators, Birnel hopes that sympathetic local officials will keep innovating and working with voter outreach groups to help boost turnout.

Dyana Limon-Mercado, the other Democrat running for Travis County Clerk, says local elections officials in Texas must push back against state barriers while expanding access to the ballot. “Our local elected officials are having to fight against state officials to guarantee people’s constitutional right to vote in an easy and accessible way,” she told Bolts. “The fight for voting rights is as critical as ever at this moment.” 

Lockhart echoes her assessment. “Senate Bill 1 may ban great ideas like 24-hour voting, but there’s no law banning an elections information app to send folks updates about upcoming elections,” he said. “There’s no law banning us from adding additional languages to our election materials, there’s nothing banning us from increasing our social media presence for community outreach,” he said. “There’s still so much that can be done.” 

Both Limon-Mercado and Lockhart have vowed to expand voting options, including by extending polling to 10 p.m., the new legal limit set by SB 1. Whoever wins could also face pressure to address barriers to voting imposed by mass incarceration. As pretrial detention has ballooned, people who are eligible to vote but stuck in jail during an election period are often unable to cast a ballot. After facing years of organizing, Harris County officials were the first in the state to put a polling place in the local jail last year.

Lockhart commits to pushing for a similar polling place at Travis County jail if elected. “As County Clerk, my job will be to expand access to ensure that every eligible voter can exercise their right to vote simply, safely, and securely,” he told Bolts. “That means making sure the Travis County Jail has a polling location available for eligible voters in every election.” Asked about a voting location at the jail, Limon-Mercado replied, “I am definitely open to talking to our county sheriff to find a way for that to happen, I am definitely in support of it.” 

The winner of the March 1 primary between Limon-Mercado and Lockhart will be heavily favored in the general election, and will probably be responsible for administering the 2024 elections in Texas’ most Democratic county.

Like much of the rest of the country, elections in Texas are run by a dizzying patchwork of offices that take different forms across counties. In some counties, such as Travis, voters directly elect clerks who administer elections in addition to other responsibilities, such as overseeing misdemeanor court records, while an elected tax collector-assessor handles voter registration. Elsewhere in the state, county commissioners have created independent election administrators who are appointed by a board of local officials, rather than elected themselves. Last year, Harris County abandoned the clerk model in favor of setting up an appointed election administrator, who has since joined civil rights groups and the U.S. Justice Department in suing to stop parts of SB 1, including the provision that criminalizes officials who promote mail voting.

Harris County commissioners pointed to the racist roots of the old system to justify the change. Tax collectors were given control of voter registration during a time when poll taxes were used to suppress Black voters. 

Birnel says Texas counties should also shift toward unified and appointed election administrators, calling the old model “a residue of Jim Crow.” Elected clerks who directly oversee elections may be more vulnerable to the kind of polarizing political swings that have turned some election offices into bright red targets for conservative activists pushing Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen election. 

Travis County splits election administration between its county clerk and its tax assessor-collector, who oversees voter registration. The sitting tax assessor-collector, Bruce Elfant, is a Democrat last elected in 2020 who is appreciated by voting rights advocates for helping ease voter registration in Travis County, where nearly all eligible voters registered ahead of the 2020 election.

Lockhart says that, if elected, he’d lobby for Travis County officials to follow the same path as Harris County and create a unified and appointed office; Limon-Mercado hasn’t committed either way. 

Limon-Mercado frames the clerk’s office as part of a larger fight for political change in Texas. She recalls feeling so distraught by her first government job fresh out of college, a court clerk inside a detention center in downtown Austin, that she quit and turned to the state legislature, where she interned with a lawmaker who helped pass criminal justice reforms. She eventually went on to other jobs at the intersection of politics and policy—including working for a disability rights group and most recently as executive director for Planned Parenthood Texas Votes. 

She says election administration and voting rights are a cornerstone for all those issues she cares about. “We can’t change the policies unless we have the elected officials, and we can’t have the elected officials if we don’t have fair access to the ballot,” she told Bolts. 

The post Voting Rights Advocates Search for Openings to “Go Local” in Texas appeared first on Bolts.

With three weeks to go until the Texas primaries, Dominic Selvera is making a case that is still rare to hear from candidates for prosecutor: that the criminal legal system should be cut down. It’s not enough to resist incarceration—though that matters too, he insists—if you’re then chasing other ways of processing and supervising people.

“We’re looking to shrink the system and divert some of those resources to provide the help that people need,” he told me this week in a Q&A, available below. He would call for cuts to his own budget, and to the budget of the sheriff’s department, which runs the county jail. He wants those funds steered instead toward housing or treatment options run outside of the criminal legal system. “They’re choosing to invest in building cages to house humans in as opposed to housing the neediest neighbors who don’t have a roof over their heads,” he said of the plan to build a new jail.

Selvera, a defense lawyer, is running in the March 3 Democratic primary for county attorney in Travis County (home to Austin).

The position has jurisdiction over prosecuting only misdemeanors. That means prosecuting things like possession of marijuana and some other drugs, low-level theft, sex work, and DWIs. (Felony offenses are handled by the district attorney’s office, which is also on the March ballot.)

Misdemeanors are how most people encounter the criminal legal system here. In 2019 alone, the county attorney’s office opened about 38,000 cases, more than double that of the DA’s office. 

Misdemeanor arrests “have become an increasingly important element of local law enforcement” but they frequently “terminate in a disposition that involves no jail time, and quite often, not even a criminal conviction,” Issa Kohler-Hausmann, a professor at Yale Law School, writes in her book “Misdemeanorland.” Still, they remain greatly disruptive, she argues. It’s just that they’re getting processed under a “managerial model,” which cares less about convicting and incarcerating people, than “managing people through engagement with the criminal justice system over time.” That means court dates, court debt, and court-imposed programs people must attend under threat of renewed prosecution.

Such an approach may steer people away from incarceration, but Selvera argues that it is insufficient. We still think of too many issues as stuff to fix using the toolkit of criminalization and prosecution. He says for instance that “if we really want to address substance abuse issues” as a “public health issue,” we should do so “outside of the criminal justice system,” as Portugal has done. 

Selvera said his office would stop prosecuting marijuana and misdemeanor drug possession cases, as well as criminal trespass cases that stem from homelessness. He also said he would stop prosecuting sex work so as to not interfere with a person’s “right to earn a living and to put food on the table.”

That leaves many charges that Selvera says would still be handled in the criminal legal system, though. On those, he laid out how he wishes to steer people away from jail and toward alternative dispositions “where we actually help people so that we can reduce crime.”

There were 23,000 cases of people detained in jail in Travis County over a misdemeanor charge in 2019; the majority were being held pretrial. “If you haven’t been locked up in jail or if you haven’t had clients locked up in jail, you don’t realize how traumatic it is,” Selvera said. “It puts people in a worse condition when they get out because you’ve essentially disrupted someone’s life.” He added that cycling people through jail has no benefit for safety; studies show that incarceration can have criminogenic effects.

So how would that perspective concretely impact Selvera’s policies? He affirmed that, if he is elected, his office would not recommend jail time over any misdemeanor conviction. Instead, he would use probation terms and restorative justice opportunities.

He outlined one exception: cases where defendants themselves express a preference for jail time over a probation term. That very prospect raises separate questions about the harshness of the probation system, which Selvera said he would address by seeking shorter terms.

Selvera also talked of cutting pretrial detention. “You’re looking at a much higher conviction rate if you are stuck in jail, and you are negotiating from a place of weakness,” he said. He has said he would stop using cash bail. And he also said he would set a presumption of release for anyone arrested over a misdemeanor. He added, though, that he would favor some period of detention in some cases, for instance until a protective order is issued in cases of family violence victim. Also, in cases where a protective order is violated, he said a judge would need to consider whether to grant release.

Selvera, who is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is one of four Democrats running in the March 3 primary for county attorney, alongside former judge Mike Denton, assistant prosecutor Laurie Eiserloh, and Austin City Council member Delia Garza. If no one clears the 50-percent threshold, the top two vote-getters will move on to a May runoff.

The Q&A has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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Progressives who run for prosecutor have been talking of a broken system that doesn’t work as it should. You put it in a different way. You say on your website that “if you are poor or you are a person of color, it works as designed — it works against us.”  Why is your perspective that this is the way in which the system is designed?

This is something that any defense attorney or anyone who has represented indigent clients can tell you without equivocation, especially in Travis County where we’ve been operating under a cash bail system. Typically someone is kept in jail because they can’t afford the amount of bail that’s set in their case. They are put on a bond review docket where they’re given the option of pleading guilty to their offense,  getting out of jail, getting to go home back to their families, back to work, but they have to live with that conviction regardless of whether or not they committed any offense. Or else fighting your case, being put back in jail, and having to suffer because of your financial situation. 

People who can afford cash bail, or are given a [personal recognizance] bond, get significantly better outcomes. They are able to handle their case outside of jail. You’re looking at a much higher conviction rate if you are stuck in jail, and you are negotiating from a place of weakness.

So the system’s design helps the prosecution get convictions.

Absolutely. As long as the metrics prosecutors are measured by are wins or losses, convictions, this is the way it’s set up so that we can continue to grind people through this system regardless of what the results are for Black communities, brown communities, poor communities. This is the system that’s been purposefully designed and it is operating as it was meant to. 

When the people who have been in charge of it fail to see the devastation that it causes, it continues to happen because people haven’t had loved ones in jail, loved ones in prison, people that they care about go through these experiences. That’s something that differentiates me. I’ve got a cousin in federal prison right now because of a drug case, another cousin on felony probation in Texas because of drugs being the underlying reason. I’ve been in Travis County Jail, too poor to afford bail, when I was in college. To be directly impacted by the system shapes the way I see things. It is the reason I became a defense attorney representing indigent clients.

You were just talking about the harm of pretrial detention, and indeed the majority of people held in the county jail are there pretrial, many due to an inability to afford bail. You have said that you would end the use of cash bail. What about ending pretrial detention altogether: Do you see situations where a misdemeanor charge could justify detaining before a conviction?

I don’t think that there’s any initial misdemeanor charge where someone should be held pretrial. I believe that everyone who is accused of a misdemeanor should be allowed pretrial release. But there are some caveats. If someone is accused of a DWI, they need to be sober before they’re released for safety reasons; that should not take more than 24 hours. If someone is accused of domestic violence, assault, they should have the presumption of release but there needs to be a protective order in place; there needs to be contact with the victim to let them know what’s going on with the case. In the instance where we see a violation of a protective order, they need to have a hearing in front to determine whether they are a danger to the victim. 

Besides pretrial detention, what do you think is fueling the sheer size of the county jail—with about 23,000 cases of people held in jail in misdemeanor cases last year?

I think a lot of that is fueled by policing. We’ve evolved to where policing has become weaponized; you see the shift to the warrior mentality since law enforcement agencies have been able to get federal equipment, firearms, tactical equipment. It’s certainly more menacing if you’re in a Black or brown community. We’ve seen poor communities and communities of color really be devastated. We’ve seen the stats that show that policing is done differently in East Austin, which is predominantly Black and Spanish, versus West Austin, which is predominantly white. We see that if you’re pulled over in East Austin, you’re more likely to be searched, you’re more likely to be arrested. If you’re pulled over in West Austin, you’re more likely to be given a warning and you’re less likely to have your vehicle searched. We know that if you are found in possession of marijuana, you’re more likely to be arrested if you’re Black versus if you’re white. Policing has been used as a tool of oppression, versus really serving the public. I think that’s been fueling a lot of the incarceration here in Austin. 

The sort of policing you are describing has meant a very active docket for the county attorney’s office in Travis County; there were about 28,000 misdemeanor-level cases disposed of by the office in 2019. One big change you’ve promised in your campaign is to not prosecute certain behaviors, such as marijuana possession, misdemeanor drug possession, and sex work. Now, some prosecutors talk of alternatives to incarceration, diversion programs. But it seems that you’re also saying: Those behaviors should not be under the purview of the criminal system at all. Is that right? What is your thinking for taking that extra step?

We should not be handling any drug possession cases through the county attorney’s office, through the criminal justice system. Diversion programs are a positive tool that can be used for certain offenses. But I think we get into a problem, at least that’s what I’m seeing here on the campaign trail with some of my opponents just saying that diversion is the answer to all those charges. 

What I am proposing is to offer drug treatment services for people who may need it outside of the criminal justice system. If we really want to address substance abuse issues — because we know it’s a public health issue, not a criminal justice issue — we have to take a stand and say we are not going to prosecute these cases, and not rely on the term diversion because it’s politically safer to say. If I’m elected, we’re done prosecuting any drug cases that come through our office. 

There’s data that shows this type of method works. Portugal went to a full decriminalization of drugs back in the early 2000s, after they had one of the worst drug overdose problems in Europe. Substances were still illegal and law enforcement could confiscate those drugs. But instead of sending these cases to the criminal justice system, they would make a referral to a commission where their only job was to determine if the substance use was harmful or not. If the substance use was not being harmful, they would just be sent on their way; you go on living your life. If the substance abuse was deemed to be harmful, they would be given a true opportunity to get substance use treatment. They could go to rehab, get the help that they needed without the threat of incarceration, of having to go back in front of a judge to explain why they failed rehab. 

We know that each individual person who’s going through rehab has their own individual journey. Some are going to stumble, and I believe that those stumbles should not result in any carceral effect for them.

The good thing is, the data has shown that the Portugal system has worked. They have decreased overdose deaths by 80 percent. They have decreased new HIV cases as a result of drug use. And harmful drug use is down across the board. It’s really just getting over the mental hurdle of equating drug possession with having to incarcerate someone. 

Can you say more about what’s unhealthy about the very threat of prosecution?

That is the important part of it: It is run outside of the criminal justice system. If you take all those drug cases out of the criminal justice system, that’s a huge chunk of money that had to be spent on locking people up in jail. That should be spent on counselors, on drug treatment, on things that are shown to be effective. 

You’re discussing the importance of relying on a public health approach to treatment. But how much power would you have as county attorney given that this calls for a broader, more holistic approach? What would you need from other institutions and systems in Travis County?

You hit the nail on the head. This is an issue that requires buy-in from the commissioner’s court for funding. It requires buy-in from the community that’s going to play a big role in implementing harm reduction systems like needle exchanges, like actual substance abuse clinics. Part of my job as county attorney is not only to set these policies, but to advocate for funding: going to the commissioners court and saying, “You need to reduce the county attorney budget. My budget needs to be reduced so that we can invest in systems that offer help to people.” 

It’s going to be critical that I practice what I preach. And I’m not only going to ask for reductions in my budget, I’m going to ask for reductions in the sheriff’s department’s budget because they’re the ones that operate the county jail. They have by far the largest budget in Travis County, the last time I looked it was $198 million of a $1.2 billion budget. 

We’re looking to shrink the system and divert some of those resources to actually provide the care that we need, actually get the help that people need.

You’ve also committed to not prosecuting sex work.

Yes, sex work for both the buyer and the seller. There are a few reasons. One is that we’re not any safer when we prosecute and criminalize sex work. For a person who is in that industry, they are less likely to report crimes against them, whether it’s theft, assault, sexual assault, if they know that they’re going to be prosecuted for what they do for a living. They’re less likely to report sex trafficking. Secondly, I fully believe in women’s rights, and I understand that women are not the only people engaging in sex work, but for me it does not feel right telling a woman what she can do with her body consensually. Between that and a person’s right to earn a living and to put food on the table, to be able to do so without fear of prosecution is very important to me. 

If we’re looking to shrink the criminal justice system, to shrink people who constantly go through our county jails, this has to be a part of it. To clarify, I’m talking about sex work, I’m not talking about overlooking any type of indecent exposure where someone may be engaging in a lewd act in public, within view of people. 

I want to ask you about homelessness because one report showed that, when homeless people in Austin were issued ordinances, thousands still then got arrest warrants for failure to appear in court. There have been more debates since on homelessness in Travis County. You have said you would not prosecute criminal trespass charges, which are often used to charge behaviors linked to homelessess. So how would you end the de facto criminalization of homelessness, and again what does it mean to shift the issue onto other public authorities?

If our goal is to help people, putting people through the criminal justice system because they’re poor and they lack housing is problematic for me. I think it’s important to remember the distinction when I talk about not prosecuting criminal trespass. If it’s an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend stalking their former partner, those criminal trespass are still going to have to be handled. I don’t want that to get lost in the conversation. It’s still our duty to protect victims of violence and criminal trespass. When the underlying reason is poverty, homelessness, we are not going to prosecute those, to really focus on looking to get people temporary housing, with the hope that we can get to a long-term housing solution. 

We haven’t focused on a Housing First policy. I think that both the city of Austin and Travis County have the resources to end homelessness if it was as important as a priority as we hear it is. To give you an example, the commissioner’s court is committing $79 million to build a new women’s jail. I am absolutely opposed to building a new women’s jail. We know that about 70 percent of people in jail have not been convicted of a crime. They’re only there because they can’t afford cash bail. So spending $79 million is a huge waste of money. Now, when you think about what can happen with $79 million in our community, we could replicate community-first village for chronically homeless folks, to get permanent housing.

But unfortunately, they’re choosing to invest in building cages to house humans in as opposed to housing the neediest neighbors who don’t have a roof over their heads.

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We’ve talked about your proposals to shrink the system. Let’s talk about the offenses that you say you would prosecute. You have talked of moving away from incarceration, separately from moving away from prosecution. So what does it concretely look like to you to move away from incarceration in cases you would prosecute?

The offenses that we’re dealing with, misdemeanors, I don’t think that jail should be the answer. If we’re looking at reducing harm, which should be the ultimate goal, I don’t think putting someone in jail accomplishes that goal. It accomplishes nothing except to make a person suffer. 

We need to be looking at different ways to hold people accountable and get people, especially victims of violence, an opportunity to have their harm addressed, to have their voices heard. For me, that is through restorative justice. When we’re talking about domestic violence, assault, bodily injury, these are the types of cases where restorative justice could make a huge impact. We can’t make it mandatory for all the assault cases, but for victims of violence who want this as an option, we need to provide it for them and give them the opportunity to have their voices heard and have some true healing.

So what role, if any, does the option of incarceration retain in your thinking for the range of cases under your jurisdiction?

Legally, it would have to be considered, it’s part of the range of punishment. But as county attorney, I have to determine what justice means, and for me jail does not equal justice. We’re not going to recommend jail as a regular practice. There are some circumstances where a person may not think that they can be successful at probation for an extended period of time, so if they are requesting a jail recommendation, we would not be opposed to it. It would certainly be on the lighter end; I don’t see us making any max recommendations or even half recommendations. 

I mean, we’re talking about jail. You have to realize how traumatic jail is. If you haven’t been locked up in jail or if you haven’t had clients locked up in jail, you don’t realize how traumatic it is. That’s why it’s so easy for people to give these long sentences because they have no idea what it’s like in jail, and truly how harmful it is. Just to stick a person in a cage and not allow them to improve their lives to where they’re making better decisions, not harming other people and not harming themselves, it doesn’t address any of the issues that got that person to where they are. It puts people in a worse condition when they get out because you’ve essentially disrupted someone’s life. So for me the idea of jail for a misdemeanor is counterproductive, it’s cruel. 

Jail is going to be extremely rare. We’re not going to be making jail recommendations unless a person chooses that on their own. 

Part of our duty is to hold people accountable. And for me that accountability does not equate to jail time. There are other ways to hold people accountable, whether you’re talking about community service, anger management class, substance abuse classes or Alcoholics Anonymous classes for people who get a DWI first or DWI second. There are tools that we can use that don’t involve locking people in cages so that we can do our duty to hold people accountable and really make our community safer. I just don’t believe that locking people in cages makes us any safer because there’s no rehabilitation going on when you’re jail. You go to jail, you suffer, you get out, and you’re not in any better position to live a better life.

So, to repeat, you said the only circumstance where you believe you would recommend a jail sentence is if the person would prefer jail time over a probation?

The only time we would make a recommendation for a jail sentence is if the defense is requesting a jail sentence. That’s it.

And is that true during a plea offer and a trial, or would there be a difference there?

Yes, the days of the trial tax are going to be over. If we have a DWI case and we make a pretrial recommendation of nine-months probation, and the defense team declines it, if we go to trial and the state wins, we’re going to make that same recommendation. We’re not going to recommend jail time, we’re not going to recommend 18 months probation to punish them for going to trial. 

So how do you propose setting up the community and the parties involved to be stronger, especially in the range of cases you mentioned earlier like family violence, where there is a situation of harm against a person?

We have the tools at our disposal, things like protective orders, emergency protective orders when necessary, that don’t allow people who are accused of family violence to go within 200 yards of the victim. That would not stop, we would still be able to use those tools. But what we’re talking about is, how do we address the issue? How do we prevent family violence in the future? For me, it’s utilizing things like a batterer’s intervention program, it’s anger management classes, it’s community service. It’s a lot of things where we have the tools to hold people accountable, to let them know that this is not right. You have to actually address the issues that led to that person hurting someone else. 

For the people who think that jail is the answer, I would tell them: When they go sit in jail for three months, and they get back out, they’ve had zero counseling, they’ve had zero treatment for their anger issues. Do they think that that’s going to make the person who they get into a relationship next any safer, if they haven’t addressed what’s causing them to lose their temper and strike someone?

I believe that jail does not solve that one bit. Now, if you just purely want to punish someone for punitive reasons, well, I’m not the person to vote for. Because what I believe in is actually helping people get better, and not just punishing people for punishment’s sake. Someone who goes through jail and gets no treatment doesn’t come out better on the back end, they’re not less likely to commit crime if they haven’t addressed those underlying issues. And so jail just does not accomplish what the average person thinks it does. What I’m trying to do is offer a different a different path to where we actually help people so that we can reduce crime.

Let’s step back for a moment: You said the only circumstance you would recommend jail is if a person would prefer it over probation. It may seem counterintuitive to some that someone would choose jail over probation, since probation is often portrayed as the alternative to incarceration. What do you think it is about probation that could lead someone to make such a choice? Does that say something about probation itself and the conditions of probation?

Absolutely. The typical probation sentence for a misdemeanor may be 18 months, so that for 18 months if they mess up, if they commit a new offense or are accused of committing a new offense, or if they fail a drug test, or if they fail to take a class, they fail to do any of the recommendations that the probation department requires of them, they could be hauled back into court on a revocation hearing. If there’s an actual revocation, now they’re looking at being sentenced up to 12 months in jail. So what seems like a good deal on the front end, if there’s any issues or hiccups, now they’re looking at a very long jail sentence for any type of transgression that occurs afterwards. 

If someone doesn’t think either they can abide by those rules, or they can’t afford to make the probation payments, or they have transportation troubles to where it’s tough for them to go visit their probation officer on a monthly basis, then probation starts looking less appealing. So I’ve had a client in that situation before and he requested a jail recommendation. It’s absolutely tough to hear. But we discussed the pros and cons, he felt that in his situation it was best to take a short jail sentence, sit in jail, get out, and then he was completely free with his case, completely done, no reporting to probation. But you have to suffer in jail for X amount of time. As someone who wants to see no one in jail, that’s a tough pill to swallow. 

But absolutely, it concerns me that that’s the fate of probation that someone would rather sit in jail than endure 18 months of stress. . 

As you just said, probation violations are a major driver of incarceration, often over what are considered technical violations. So when you say that you will shift some jail recommendations to probation, how would you approach situations where someone violates onerous terms of probation? What does it mean to you for there to be accountability at that point, while not fueling incarceration over violations of probation conditions?

One of the ways we’re going to address it is that we’re not going to recommend those max sentences to where it’s a year in jail probated for 18 months. We’re going to give realistic recommendations. The ultimate goal is to reduce crime. And that’s got to be our focus. And so making those very long probation recommendations, making those underlying sentences a year long, that’s the whole part of the problem. 

If a person who’s running for this office is truly committed to ending mass incarceration, this has got to be a point of priority that you look at what’s causing people to go to our county jail. And then similarly at the felony level it’s the same issue that’s driving people to do state time. We want to focus people on being successful and focus on a true rehabilitative experience.

You said last month that, if elected, you would not join the Texas County and District Attorneys Association. What is your reasoning about why you would leave the group?

I think that we have different ideals on what justice is. Certainly you see the traditional method of believing in pretrial incarceration, believing in jail to be the answer for everything. So I just think fundamentally, my ideals don’t align with theirs. And I see no reason to remain a part of that group.

The post Austin Prosecutor Candidate Wants to Cut His Budget and Avoid Jailing Anyone appeared first on Bolts.

Read more coverage of the 2020 local elections.

The Texas criminal legal system is in upheaval. Confusion around a new law legalizing hemp has led to a drop in marijuana prosecutions, as some district attorneys look into extending that trend to other drugs. A court declared the bail system of the state’s largest jurisdiction (Harris County, home to Houston) to be an unconstitutional form of “wealth-based discrimination.” And the use of the death penalty has declined significantly this past decade.

Still, drug policy is very uneven across the state. Questions abound on how well Harris County will implement its new bail rules, and whether more lawsuits can force change in other counties. And Texas continues to lead the nation in the number of death sentences obtained by prosecutors.

These issues are shaping blockbuster DA races this year in some of Texas’s largest counties, namely El Paso, Harris (Houston), Nueces (Corpus Christi), and Travis (Austin) counties. 

In Harris and Travis, which combined have nearly 6 million residents, incumbent DAs face challenges from their left in the Democratic primaries, while in Nueces, a Democratic DA who ran on a reform platform in 2016 faces pushback from GOP opponents. In El Paso, a longtime prosecutor’s retirement has sparked a crowded open race. 

These races are already marked by significant policy conflicts over the shape of prosecution. DAs, after all, enjoy significant discretion over which cases to bring, and with what severity. “When you have different prosecution philosophies, they have different results,” Jon West, a Nueces County Republican, said in an interview this month. That was in the context of faulting the incumbent for not prosecuting some low-level cases such as marijuana possession. 

But other challengers say they are running instead to combat mass incarceration.

“I just could no longer sit and continue to be part of a system that targeted people of color, that targeted communities of drug addiction, that targeted low-income, the working class,” Audia Jones, who is running in Harris County, told The Appeal last year. José Garza, who is running on a decarceral platform as well in Travis County, made a similar case when he tweeted that he is “running for DA to build a system that lifts up working people and people of color.”

In most of the rest of Texas, though, incumbents are coasting to re-election with no opposition.

Seventy-six percent of the state’s 118 DA races drew only one contender by December’s filing deadline. The electoral landscape is barely more competitive in the most populous counties; of races occurring in counties with at least 100,000 residents, nearly 70 percent are uncontested. 

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of other elections relevant to Texas’s legal system drew just a single candidate, including 129 county attorney races (that’s 86 percent of the total) and 109 sheriff races (43 percent). County attorneys are prosecutors who exist separately from the DA in some counties; where they do, they typically deal with misdemeanor offenses.

Primaries are set for March 3, and if no candidate crosses 50 percent the top two will move to a May runoff. General elections will be held in November. Full lists of elections and candidates are available on the Political Report’s candidate resource. 

Below is a first preview of Texas’s major prosecutorial elections. You can jump to the preview of Harris County, Travis County, El Paso CountyNueces County, and the rest of the state.

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Harris County: The county’s legal system has changed drastically since Kim Ogg won her first term as DA in 2016; a court ruling overhauled its bail rules, sparking a legal settlement under which most people charged with misdemeanors should be released pretrial. But Ogg fought that change, raising safety concerns about pretrial release, only to be rebuked by a judge. 

Two of Ogg’s opponents in the Democratic primary, Jones and Carvana Cloud, told the Appeal in separate Q&As that they back this change. Jones said she supports expanding the reform to also end cash bail for felony-level offenses. 

Cloud and Jones, who each used to work as prosecutors in Ogg’s office, have criticized her for seeking to expand the criminal legal system’s imprint. Ogg requested funds to hire 102 new prosecutors last year, and local activists protested that her office was already filing too many charges and that more staff would only increase this. Cloud and Jones have echoed that view in different ways. “More prosecutors means more prosecution,” Cloud told The Appeal. She has proposed pretrial diversion programs through which she would not charge people for certain offenses such as pot possession and trespass if they fulfill certain conditions.

Jones, meanwhile, has outlined a range of behaviors that she would decline to prosecute, effectively decriminalizing them. She has committed to not prosecute drug possession (beyond marijuana) as well as “offenses that target poverty.” She told the Political Report that this category covers “criminal trespass not involving dwellings,” and “low-level theft that involve crimes of necessity.” She has also said she would decline to prosecute sex work, a policy Ogg’s office said the incumbent opposes.

Of her preference to outright decline rather than divert cases, Jones told The Appeal that, “When we do things like diversion or any type of probation, we are still criminalizing those individuals.” Jones is also the only candidate in the race to say she would not seek the death penalty.

Another former prosecutor, Todd Overstreet, is also seeking the Democratic nomination. The Democratic nominee will face one of three Republicans in the general election; the county swung toward Democrats in 2018. County Attorney Vince Ryan and Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, both Democrats, face contested re-election bids as well.

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Travis County: Margaret Moore, the incumbent DA, faces two challengers in the Democratic primary: Garza, a labor and immigrant rights attorney with the Workers Defense Project, and Erin Martinson, a former victims’ advocate at the Texas Legal Services Center. Garza was just endorsed by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren this week.

Both challengers are running on major progressive changes. 

One of Garza’s most striking promises is that, in an effort to take substance use issues out of the court system he would not prosecute the possession or the sale of under one gram of any drug. This is a distinctive proposal even by national standards of what progressive DAs have done so far; while some have rolled out blanket policies to not prosecute drug possession (even then, this is frequently focused on marijuana), it is still unusual for this approach to extend to low-level drug sales. Martinson has said she would not prosecute minor possession of drugs, beyond marijuana. 

Other differences emerge in the three candidates’ answers to questionnaires published online by the Justice Collaborative. (The Appeal and the Justice Collaborative are a fiscally sponsored project of Tides Advocacy.) Garza and Martinson each endorse altogether ending the use of cash bail, unlike Moore.

Both challengers, again unlike Moore, also commit to never seek the death penalty.

But what may be most illustrative of the candidates’ differing philosophies on criminal justice is their views on the purpose of diversion programs. When is it fair and proper to encourage more rehabilitative outcomes and to avoid incarceration? Moore says people must first plead guilty and “take responsibility.” “We do not allow defendants who maintain their innocence to enter diversion,” she writes. But Garza and Martinson say they would drop this requirement that people first plead guilty as a condition of entry. 

Requiring it defeats the point, Martinson says. “The purpose of diversion should be to give people a second chance and give them the tools and opportunity to break free from the criminal justice system,” she wrote. “Strapping folks with felony convictions does not set them up to succeed.”

As she runs for re-election, Moore is facing a lawsuit that alleges that she is mishandling sexual assault incidents by dismissing allegations brought by female victims.

Travis County also has an open race for county attorney, the office in charge of misdemeanors, between former judge Mike Denton, assistant prosecutor Laurie Eiserloh, Austin City Council member Delia Garza, and defense attorney Dominic Selvera, who is running on not prosecuting a range of behaviors, including misdemeanor drug possession and sex work, and on shrinking the criminal legal system. Selvera has also said he will not join Texas prosecutors’ statewide association, as has José Garza the DA candidate.

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Nueces County: Mark Gonzalez drew national headlines for his transition from defense attorney with a tattoo that reads “Not Guilty” to DA of Nueces County in 2016. A Democrat, Gonzalez promptly announced he would stop jailing people for pot possession, and he has since supported replacing some arrests with cite-and-release policies, and participated in nationwide calls for reform, including responding to U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

The scope of Gonzalez’s reforms has come under question, though. The Appeal has reported on failures to share exculpatory material and his decision to seek the death penalty.

Still, in his re-election bid this year, Gonzalez faces attacks over his reform politics. Opponent Jon West, a Republican prosecutor, has rejected even basic premises of criminal justice reform, for instance denying that the U.S. is too harsh toward low-level nonviolent cases. “Every single case matters, even low-level drug cases,” he said in an interview. “Just because somebody may have a low-level drug arrest does not mean they might not be a violent person.” In that interview, he also insisted that the criminal legal system does not discriminate “locally”, though “it may nationally.”

In the Republican primary, West faces James Gardner, who lost to Gonzalez four years ago.

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El Paso: All four candidates who filed to replace the retiring incumbent are Democrats, so an open Democratic primary will decide the next DA of the 34th judicial district, which includes El Paso County and smaller Culberson and Hudspeth counties. The Political Report contacted each of these candidates to ask whether they viewed reducing incarceration as a goal, and whether they favored a policy of not prosecuting certain offenses.

None of them endorsed the sort of wide-ranging measures put forth by some of the candidates in Austin and Houston, though differences emerged.

Yvonne Rosales, an attorney, mentioned initiatives to “reduce incarceration rates” for “nonviolent offenders,” such as steering people with mental-health issues toward treatment. But she qualified her answer by saying a DA must “balance” defendants’ rights and public safety; progressive DAs elsewhere have rejected the premise that those two poles are in tension. She also deemed improper a policy of not prosecuting any behavior that is illegal (including pot possession), and in any case rejected the view that “small amounts of marijuana” are “harmless.”

“I do not believe that El Paso County’s criminal justice system is excessively punitive,” said James Montoya, an assistant prosecutor, noting prison admissions are already low. (El Paso does have fewer prison admissions than other major Texas counties. But proponents of cutting incarceration tend to demand substantial reductions beyond national or state standards given that the country is a global outlier.) He added that he wants to set a pretrial diversion program for marijuana offenses.

Roger Montoya, an attorney, said he was interested in “ending mass incarceration”—the only candidate to use those terms—and specifically in ending the war on drugs; he mentioned steering people toward probation rather than incarceration over drug offenses. However, while he said he would decline to prosecute low-level of pot possession, he did not name another offense he saw fit for declination; that’s a far cry from Garza’s commitments in Austin. Montoya, who has himself been convicted of misdemeanors in the past, is campaigning on the argument that this experience helps him appreciate the importance of second chances; he told the El Paso Times it makes him “more of a humanitarian.” His opponent James Montoya went after him over his record in the Times.

Karen Dykes did not respond to a request for comment. She is a lawyer for Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT), and has support from local law enforcement groups. 

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Elsewhere: No other county of at least 200,000 residents holds a contested election this year. And only two other counties with at least 100,000 do. In Ellis and Midland counties, a GOP primary will decide the next DA.

Dozens of incumbent DAs—including in Montgomery and Williamson, both of which have more than half-a-million residents—are coasting to re-election unopposed. 

And if you have not seen your county’s name in this article, you may need to wait two years: Some DAs, including those in Dallas and Bexar counties, as well as Bastrop County’s Bryan Goertz (known for rejecting DNA testing requests in the death penalty case of Rodney Reed), were last elected in 2018 and are not up for re-election until 2022.

The article has been updated to include comments made by Harris County’s DA candidates at the Jan. 30 debate.

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