Second Chances for Texans

The Problem

Since 2018 alone, TDS has used storytelling to save 42 lives from execution or death sentence. Our work has shown that human stories can transform how our system punishes. But the death penalty is just one component of a cruel and racially biased system. Texas is a global center of mass incarceration. We incarcerate more people than any other State and wield incredible influence nationally when it comes to corrections and punishment. Texas provides almost no resources for public defense and has no statewide public defender system to advocate for those facing serious punishments. Texas runs a massive prosecution machine that puts people in prison for as long as possible. 

Excessive incarceration harms all Texans because it increases instability and violence in our communities. At least 95% of people who are incarcerated will be released one day. For a multitude of reasons, long prison sentences increase people’s chances of reoffending by destabilizing their lives, according to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Vera Institute of Justice. It is safer to bring people home when they are ready to come home, with the reentry support they need to be successful, rather than incarcerate them for years or decades beyond their parole-eligibility date and then send them home with no resources at all.

Incarceration especially hurts our State’s children: Four out of five men and women in Texas prisons are parents of at least one child under the age of eighteen. Half a million Texas children have experienced a parent behind bars. Parents’ incarceration causes severe and lasting damage for the children and families that they leave behind. A father’s incarceration increases a family’s chances of falling into poverty by 40 percent. Children of incarcerated parents are at a heightened risk of becoming justice-involved themselves, and are more likely to drop out of school, become unemployed, and have mental-health problems.

Incarceration in Texas has a particularly significant impact on communities of color. Black people are locked up in Texas at twice their population in the State. These disparities are driven not by drug sentencing but by sentencing for serious offenses like robbery and aggravated robbery. Black children are six times as likely as white children to have a parent behind bars.

Often, people serving long sentences aged out of crime long ago. They are ready to be released from prison to be reunited with their families and become breadwinners, taxpayers, and community leaders who inspire others to avoid crime. They are excellent candidates for release from prison, especially when they have the reentry support they need to succeed at home.

Given the painful impacts of incarceration, our State should prioritize reuniting people in prison with their families. But in Texas, our parole process does not prioritize either family reunification or second chances. The Texas parole board grants only roughly 35% of the parole applications it receives each year, including those labeled as nonviolent. This is because incarcerated people have no advocates to tell their stories and lack plans to reintegrate into society. 

The parole process is complex to navigate for many people who are incarcerated, two thirds of whom lack a high school degree and one third of whom are functionally illiterate. Obtaining parole requires sharing a narrative of the client’s life history and experience of remorse; assembling records; compiling a parole packet; and developing a meaningful reentry plan. We know that storytelling makes a difference: In Texas, parole representation has increased people’s chance of being granted parole from 35% to 80%. 

Even once people return to their communities, though, the instability they experienced through incarceration continues to impact them and their families. A person released from prison may have resources available in their city, but no idea how to access them. They do not know how to contact service providers to get mental-health medications or a health appointment to look at their heart condition. Even if they contact the service provider, they likely do not have the ability to fill out ten pages of paperwork, having never graduated from middle school. Even if they manage to submit an application, they will be told they need a state-issued ID—an ID that the prison never gave them and that they have no idea how to get. Although some employers in their city likely welcome returned citizens as applicants, they do not know who those employers are or how to connect with them. A key employer is trucking companies, which hire people with felony convictions, but they may not know this. Even if they do, they do not know where to go to get free training to qualify for a commercial driver’s license.

Our Project: Second Chances for Texas

Our project innovates by taking a model that has proven successful for the most serious punishment of all and using it as inspiration to launch a transformative new program that will uphold second chances for people who are incarcerated and their communities. The program would infuse the parole process with the storytelling work that has proved such an incredible success for reducing capital punishment in Texas. It would add the new ingredients of a vast pro bono network and wrap-around reentry support.

Our historic success has shown that storytelling makes a difference. But this storytelling work is just as essential in the parole process. For a parole board to make an holistic decision about whether a person deserves to go home, they need to know that person’s full story: what circumstances caused the underlying offense, what adversity the person has faced and overcome, how they have changed, who will support them when they go home, who lives at home who needs their support, and what they want to contribute to society. This storytelling is almost completely absent from the parole process now, and as a result, people seeking parole for even relatively low-level offenses fail to receive second chances all the time.

Our program would connect candidates with pro bono parole representation, generating massive cost savings for Texas taxpayers (over a ten-year period, taxpayers can anticipate spending $220,120 to incarcerate a single person). We will amplify our impact by conducting trainings in prison, and with the family members of the incarcerated, about how people can advocate for themselves before the parole board. Over time, we will have the option of scaling up the program to serve more clients if additional funds become available. We anticipate that we will ultimately represent 50 clients a year during the pilot phase of our program and 80% of our clients will be granted parole each year.

We will hire a successfully reintegrated, formerly incarcerated citizen to support our clients while they are still incarcerated and then connect them to reentry services once they are released. We will have a personal relationship with our clients, having assembled their parole packets, met them and their families, and shared their entire life story. This will give us the line of communication and the credibility to provide reentry support that is robust, meaningful, and individually tailored. When a returning citizen has help to find housing, jobs and medical care, their chance of returning to prison plummets. As we are able to show that our clients have a track-record of success, it will in turn make it easier for parole boards to release our future clients, creating a positive feedback loop. 

Our Impact

This program will have important systemic impacts for addressing trauma and violence in Texas communities. Our program will create a community of returning citizens that could, if they wish, eventually support vital local and statewide reforms for people who are incarcerated. There is now a nationwide movement for second chances reforms (reforms that would allow incarcerated people the opportunity to have their sentences reviewed after 10 or 15 years). In Texas, key conservative legislators have championed second chances reforms, but these reforms have not gained enough traction to pass into law. The reforms need humanized success stories and credible advocates. Beyond state legislation, Texas is also in dire need of local initiatives, like improved reentry services, that would serve returned citizens and reduce violence in our communities. To ensure these vital reforms take root, we need to transform how Texans perceive people who are incarcerated and we need to build up a network of formerly incarcerated advocates who can push for these measures. We are optimistic that as our clients go home, we can obtain funding from individual donors to support our clients to advocate for legislative measures, champion vital local reentry services, and give speeches in local communities. 

This program can also make a vital national impact. Texas is the most influential state for criminal justice reform in the United States. We all know the saying, “As goes Texas, so goes the nation.” We cannot develop innovative approaches to criminal justice by only focusing on Blue states. We need to innovate in the very place where the need is most profound and where reforms seem, at first glance, the most challenging: Texas and other Deep South states.

The reality is that despite its tough-on-crime stereotype, we know from experience that transformative change is possible in Texas. When criminal-justice reforms happen here, they sweep the nation. For example, Texas Defender Service championed a new science statute that was eventually passed into law by the state legislature. This statute, the first of its kind in the United States, allowed the innocent to revisit their wrongful convictions. Once launched in Texas, this innovation swept across the United States, inspiring similar legislation in other states. The innocence statute is just one example; Texas’s Right on Crime coalition propelled a nationwide, bipartisan movement for criminal-justice reform in the early 2000’s.