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: Grits for Breakfast

Corruption case shows jails becoming too full of pretrial detainees to punish offenders

By Gritsforbreakfast

At this point, the self-inflicted overcrowding crisis at Texas county jails has long ago passed over the threshold into absurdity, certainly in the bigger counties.Making that point, I was struck by coverage in the Austin Statesman of a corruption story ("Vision Village defendant will work off jail term after all," Jan. 12) featuring Preston Ervin, who was convicted in a scandal costing taxpayers millions of dollars for a project called "Vision Village" that never came to fruition. (Conflict alert: Ervin is a past aide to former Austin City Councilmember Eric Mitchell, and in the interest of full disclosure, I performed the opposition research in an extraordinarily bitter campaign that unseated his former boss.)Ervin's case shows how the purpose of local jails has become muddled...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on January 12, 2008 (boomark / email).