Crime and punishment obviously do not operate in a vacuum. They are affected by a host of political, judicial, social and other influences. This section examines some of these.

"Sociological factors affecting crime have not changed in Texas."

“Root Causes” of Crime. Sociological factors affecting crime have not changed in Texas, although the economy recently has strengthened and unemployment has dropped. Despite much rhetoric to the contrary, there is little evidence that such economic factors as poverty, a poor economy, low wages or low income growth and high unemployment cause crime. If anything, the reverse is true: crime causes poverty and economic stagnation. None of the unpleasant social or demographic facts about Texas have changed: births to unmarried women continue to grow, high school dropout rates remain at about 20 percent and the number of Texans living in poverty has increased about 20 percent in the 1990s, to more than 3.1 million. Texas’ per capita income remains 91 percent of the national per capita income, no higher than 45 years ago, and down from 102 percent during the oil boom of the early 1980s.39

Law Enforcement Personnel. As Table V shows, Texas had fewer police per capita than the national average during the 1970s. However, the number of full-time police employees in Texas has increased 53 percent since 1987, pushing Texas to 13 percent above the national average. Total employment in the courts and correctional system has grown apace. More police do deter crime.40

Federal Court Decisions. One key factor that had an impact throughout the 1970s and 1980s was the change in the criminal justice system caused by the U.S. Supreme Court. After the Supreme Court’s first landmark decision in 1961 (Mapp v. Ohio) expanding the rights of criminal defendants and making it more costly for police and prosecutors to obtain criminal convictions, a growing reluctance to prosecute and punish criminals emerged.

A series of related decisions followed: Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) required taxpayer-funded counsel for defendants who could not afford an attorney; Escobedo v. Illinois (1964) and Malloy v. Hogan (1964) expanded privileges against self-incrimination, impeding interrogation of suspects by police; and Miranda v. Arizona (1966) made confessions — even voluntary ones — inadmissible as evidence unless the suspect had first been advised of certain rights.

The enforcement system was transformed by these decisions. As Justice Benjamin Cardozo wrote in a 1926 case, “The criminal is to go free because the constable has blundered.”41 Justice Byron White, dissenting in the Miranda case, warned that the decision would have “a corrosive effect on the criminal law as an effective device to prevent crime.”42 It appears that what Judge Macklin Fleming called “the pursuit of perfect justice” has increased the time and effort required to apprehend, convict and punish the guilty.43

Texas Court Decisions. In Texas in 1980, Federal District Judge William Wayne Justice compounded the problem by declaring the Texas prison system unconstitutionally “cruel and unusual punishment.” The resulting court orders, federal monitoring and consent decrees in Ruiz v. McCotter prohibited the state from housing more than two prisoners in one cell, forbade assigning inmates to supervise the activities of other inmates, ordered staffing increased to one guard per six inmates (now one per four) and ordered the state to reduce its prisoner population to 95 percent of prison capacity. The state’s failure to expand prison space under these costly constraints was a major factor in the decline in length of prison sentences served in Texas during the 1980s.

Under terms of a settlement reached in December 1992, state officials recovered “control” of the state prisons. Yet Judge Justice still has the final word on such matters as size of the inmate population, staffing, medical care and the use of tents to house inmates. This situation could have been avoided if the state had sought termination of the Ruiz suit. The U.S. Justice Department had joined state officials in calling for an end to the suit, and recent decisions by the U.S. Court of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court suggested that the state’s chances of winning complete prison control were excellent.

"Recent court decisions suggested that the state's chances of winning complete control of its prisons were excellent."

The issue still is not settled. In the 1995 Texas legislative session, the House voted to challenge the Ruiz settlement but the measure did not pass the Senate, where the vote was straight down party lines, Democrats opposing the challenge. The battle continues, with State Representative John Culberson (R-Houston) vigorously pursuing the challenge, supported by U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and U.S. Representative Bill Archer of Houston.44

Through its Court of Criminal Appeals, Texas has given criminal defendants even more legal privileges than has the federal judiciary:

• In the federal courts, oral confessions can be admitted into evidence; in Texas, they cannot unless they are recorded.

• If police obtain evidence operating on good faith under a search warrant and the search warrant is later thrown out, the federal courts will admit the evidence under a “good faith” exception; the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will not.45

Other Social and Demographic Factors. The late 1960s and early 1970s were socially turbulent years — the Vietnam War, the rise of a counterculture, urban riots. Also during the 1960s, males between the ages of 15 and 24 — the most crime-prone group — increased from 6.6 percent to 8.5 percent of the U.S. population. The increase continued during the 1970s, with the young male population peaking at 8.9 percent in 1980. This demographic factor undoubtedly helped boost the crime rate nationwide.

Texas has a higher Hispanic population than the nation as a whole (25.5 percent versus 9 percent), but in most racial, ethnic and social dimensions the state resembles the national averages. There are some factors that arguably imply a somewhat higher-than-average crime rate for Texas because of a larger supply of crime-prone people: Texas has a younger population than the national average, and as a growth state with a warm-weather climate and border location, it has a relatively larger mobile and transient population.