When It Comes to People Behind Bars, Texas Is Way Ahead

The Texas frontier was a lawless place, so the early waves of white settlers dealt with suspected wrongdoers the way the Old Testament told them to. Even as other states found alternatives to the lash, Texas—whose prison system had its roots in the East Texas cotton fields and the convict-leasing apparatus that replaced slavery—didn’t back down from “an eye for an eye.” For years our elected officials—sheriffs, district attorneys, judges, and governors—have won office by promising to be tough on crime. The most infamous metric for this is that we’re the number one state in executions. Since 1976, when the Supreme Court declared the death penalty was once again constitutional, we’ve killed nearly five times more convicts than Oklahoma, our nearest competitor. (Our northern neighbor,…

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[source: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-leads-in-incarcerations-and-executions/]