A Citizen's Right to Know law has been ignored by Pretrial Service Offices in Texas. Some Legislators agree to aide in achieving compliance.

The American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC is a conservative political think tank similar to The Heritage Foundation and others whose members are comprised of both Republican and Democrat legislators who support the private sector, sound criminal justice policies and preserving constitutional freedoms.

Michael Hough is the Director of ALEC's Criminal Justice Task Force. Michael has been traveling around the country holding briefings with state legislators on A Citizen's Right to Know (CRTK ), an ALEC model bill containing reporting requirements for taxpayer funded pretrial release offices. CRTK, as previously reported here, requires all public funded pretrial release offices situated in a particular state to report its statistics on a weekly basis. The report must contain data that includes the number of defendants released through their program, crimes committed and the number of failures to appear. CRTK also requires pretrial release offices submit an annual report which would include, in part, its operating budget, number of personnel, total number of defendants released through the program and number of defendants who missed at least one required court appearance.

Michael Hough recently coordinated an ALEC briefing on CRTK for Texas legislators in Austin which I attended along with Jerry Watson and members of the PBT Legislative Committee, Scott Walstad, Wynn Dillard, Tillmin Welch and PBT President John McCluskey. The briefing, held in the Members Lounge, was well attended. Jerry Watson, a Past National Private-Sector National Chair for ALEC gave an excellent presentation on CRTK to the legislative attendees.

Texas is unique in that there has been a CRTK statute on the books in Texas for more than ten years. The problem is few if any of the pretrial release offices in Texas have been following the statute and those times when the data has been provided it has been in a format that is difficult to read or understand. So, the focus of this briefing was to make state legislators aware the pretrial release office in their district may not be complying with the statute. As a taxpayer funded operation they should be compelled to provided the required data which can be reviewed by the citizens of Texas to which they are beholden.

T he legislators had many questions about why Texas pretrial service offices were not complying with the statute. Several indicated their intent to make inquiries into their local pretrial service office to request the statutorily required report. I came away from the briefing believing the legislators we spoke with have a new appreciation of how offenders being released pretrial are being managed in terms of getting them back to court when required. That accountability on the part of the entity taking responsibility for monitoring the defendant is essential to the success of this key component of our criminal justice system.