Our Achievements - Just Liberty

Starting on September 1, 2019 the State of Texas will waive $2.5 billion in unpaid fees under the now repealed Driver Responsibility Program (DRP.) Yes. Billion. And 650,000 Texas drivers whose only remaining issue was an unpaid DRP fee will get their drivers license back and finally be able to drive legally again. Some of these drivers have been waiting years for this moment.

We are very proud to have been part of a multi-session effort to not only repeal the program, but do so in a way designed to benefit all Texans. Repeal bills have been filed every session for the past decade or more, and in 2017 repeal came close to passage. But that bill threatened to replicate the same problems that were created by the DRP, so we opposed it and suggested another way. In 2019 the bill authors picked up key recommendations and the bill sailed through both chambers.

Police can arrest anyone for the most minor traffic violation. Arrests for minor charges like “failure to signal a lane change” allow a police officer to search a car and its driver without the usual 4th amendment protections, and when they find nothing, the driver goes to jail for a violation than should be addressed with a simply traffic ticket. Just Liberty has prioritized ending these costly, unnecessary arrests that violate our constitutional rights, and we’ve started to see local success. Against heavy opposition from police unions, the City of Austin has removed authorization for this behavior from its General Orders and passed an ordinance to eliminate the practice. The ordinance after six months has reduced unnecessary Class C arrests to just a handful, and after a period of further officer training we expect such arrests to be a thing of the past. We are now working to take this reform to Texas’ other big cities. Just Liberty has backed bills to end arrest for these minor traffic violations in each of the past three legislative sessions, and in 2021 the bill passed the Texas House but not the Senate. Time to remind Dan Patrick that this is a plank in the RPT platform!

After the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in far away Minnesota, and the local deaths of Javier Ambler and Mike Ramos, Texas lawmakers lead by the Legislative Black Caucus reopened the conversation about policing, race and force with the Texas George Floyd Act bill package. Filed by Chairwoman Senfronia Thompson in the fall of 2020, the Texas GFA would have limited deadly force to self-defense and defense of others, limited qualified immunity, and established a better system for administering discipline after misconduct. Three of its most important pieces — the disciplinary fairness matrix, limits on arrests at traffic stops for traffic violations, and requiring corroboration for police testimony in drug cases — all passed the House but failed in the Senate. Instead, the Texas Senate passed watered down versions of the duty to intervene and the duty to render aid, and a prohibition against chokeholds which were signed by the Governor in 2021. There is much left to do!

On March 31, 2020, Joe Bryan was finally paroled after being denied seven times. The 79 year old man was in poor health after serving 33 years in a Texas prison for a crime he likely didn’t commit. While a great deal can be gleaned from this case about the conviction of innocent people for serious crimes, Just Liberty focused on the system of parole that denied release repeatedly to an elderly man who presented no public safety risk. A review of the “math” used to weigh safety risk, rehabilitation and other factors showed that parole scores over-weight the original offense, and this weighting problem results in the continued expansion of expensive and unnecessary high-security “long term care” prison units. Rebalancing parole decisions to put more emphasis on the actual risk to the public from a parole release, and less on the seriousness of the original offence (should still be considered, but other factors should also get significant weight) will allow Texas to release the oldest and most medically fragile inmates into community and family care. This is just, smart and cost effective — the kind of reform that even the Texas Senate might approve in 2023!

In the spring of 2020, the pandemic lead county officials around the state to consider whether keeping jails packed with nonviolent misdemeanor offenders made sense. COVID could spread so quickly and so unpredictably to both staff and other inmates, and in those early days there was no vaccine. Just Liberty joined with other organizations to encourage DAs, County Commissioners and Sheriffs to immediately release nonviolent offenders, including those with felony drug possession cases (remember, Texas has felonized any possession of a drug other than marijuana.) In Austin and Houston, County officials indeed released many, and found that public safety did not suffer. These humane jail release parameters made sense and can even be continued as we learn to manage the pandemic. Texas must eventually reform its failed pre-trial incarceration system, but until then rules to prevent the spread of a deadly disease have eased jail overcrowding and opened up discussion about how to take the best of what we learned during COVID forward into the future.

Just Liberty (and our team members prior to the creation of Just Liberty) have been deeply involved in the slow passage of incremental reforms that have turned the tide. As of August 31, 2018, Texas’ prison population was at 145,018 – as as low as it’s been in two decades, and down seven percent from a high of 156,126 in 2008.

But Texas’ population has boomed over the intervening years, so the overall incarceration rate has declined significantly. In 1999, Texas had 149,684 prisoners. But the state’s population back then was 20.4 million. By 2018, the state population was up to 28.7 million. Texas’ incarceration rate per 100,000 people was 734; in 2018, it was 505. That’s a 31 percent decline. Texas got a LOT bigger while our prison population actually declined. Crime declined too.

But there’s more. Ten years ago more than 700,000 Texans were in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole. Texas had the nation’s highest overall rate of people under the control of the corrections system. Now. after huge population growth, the overall number is 684,000 and Texas ranks about average. The biggest drop? People under direct supervision of a probation officer for a property crime — thanks to reforms lead by the Texas Public Policy Foundation and worked hard by members of the Just Liberty team.

In September of 2019, new rules went into effect that improved protections for people who go to court to address unpaid fines. While we advocated unsuccessfully in 2019 for an end to arrests for nonpayment of fines and fees (particularly ending warrant roundups and arrests on warrants for unpaid traffic tickets,) lawmakers saw fit to grant protection from arrest for those who voluntarily go to court to try and address their nonpayment with a judge. The legislation also encouraged the judge to consider a person’s ability pay, in hopes of expanding use of fee waiver authority that had gone largely unused. By 2021, it was clear that most judges still were not evaluating ability to pay and almost never waived fines that a person had no hope of paying.

Texans routinely “choose” a jail stay as a form of payment for their tickets, a choice that is costly to both taxpayers and drivers. Meanwhile jurisdictions in other states that instead negotiate payments that people can afford actually collect more of the unpaid traffic ticket revenue than Texas Counties do relying heavily on warrant roundups and arrest. So we have a long way to go, but we’re happy to have taken a first step.