Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  The Hickman poll, wrote Dowd, indicated that likely voters believed the governor had done well in providing strong leadership, passing her programs through the legislature, appointing competent people, dealing with the lottery question, and fighting for average people: “Voters see Richards as a strong and decisive leader who has ideas to improve government. They believe she stands out in front on important issues, presents a good image of Texas to the rest of the country, and is active and aggressive. The areas of concern are: a slight majority believe Richards is ‘just another politician’ and no more honest than other politicians.”

  On the issue she believed in most of all, a whopping 59 percent of the sampled voters supported a woman’s right to choose, while 30 percent opposed it. But there was an element of distrust, or perhaps just of misreading her, as well. Forty-three percent of the sampled voters believed she supported a state income tax, while 39 percent said she opposed it.

  In the preceding twelve years, neither Bill Clements nor Mark White had come close to matching her popularity. “Basically you are in great shape,” Mary Beth Rogers started a cover letter with Dowd’s report, “held in affection and respect by a majority of Texas voters.” The reversal of her positive-negative poll numbers, she exclaimed, was a “remarkable achievement! . . . But the poll also shows that voters are waiting for you to produce results. To date, they have not seen their insurance rates go down, or new jobs come to Texas, or the early release of criminals stopped, or the cutting of waste in government. While we know that it is too early to produce these results, the voters do not yet measure you as effective in these areas. And in truth, although we have set in motion efforts to solve some of these problems, we don’t know if we will actually be able to succeed.”

  Rogers continued:

  January, 1992 to January, 1993 is a critical time for your administration. It is the true “governing” period, where results have to be the goal. But the year is also the time for some essential base building for the 1994 election. This includes raising $8 million (to reach our goal of $10 million in the bank) by the fundraising cut-off in December 1992 . . .

  You are experiencing extraordinary demands from important people for your time and energy. Legislators, lobbyists, business leaders, friends and staff—all want you to operate on an agenda that is important to them. You could spend all of your time responding to these requests (as we are doing in October, November, and December), and make some key people happy, perhaps even achieve a few good things. Following this path, however, will drain your energy and leave an unclear and uncertain legacy for your administration . . .

  Instead of having 14 or 15 goals (insurance, education, crime, jobs, energy policy, higher education, expanding the power of the governor, reorganization, environment, etc.), we should have two or three, with a major emphasis on only one. The most important question is: What do you want to be remembered for? [Rogers’s emphasis]

  . . . This background leads us to a checkpoint for you to reaffirm or reconsider the most important decision you made last January: do you want to run for reelection?

  If you do, we must follow a course in 1992 that focuses on producing some very specific results and we must carefully “market” the results to the target audiences you need to win reelection.

  A reelection decision will involve staying closer to home, with a significant amount of in-state travel and carefully orchestrated events, such as town meetings, built around the issues identified in our poll and the limited goals you want to achieve. It will also involve paying very close attention to the budget and tax situation, including developing a revenue strategy that will head off a major tax bill in the 1993 session . . .

  The reelection campaign begins immediately after the 1993 legislative session. As you look at the attached calendar for 1992, you can see that the available time for base-building and fundraising activities is limited. . . . I would suggest only one major foreign trip in 1992. Also, a high-profile national Democratic presidential campaign role—both at the convention and during the general election—could be risky for you in Texas, particularly if George Bush wins decisively in November. That, plus a difficult legislative session in 1993, could create a hard reelection campaign.

  If you decide you don’t want to run for reelection (a decision only Jack, Jane, Kirk [Adams, her son-in-law and trusted adviser] and I need to know about), you have a wider range of options for both politics and pleasure next year.

  You could concentrate on becoming a national political player, including taking a shot at the 1992 vice-presidential nomination—which quite possibly could be yours if you want it.

  Or, you could choose to simply enjoy the remainder of your term, doing what you consider to be important, without undue concern about the political consequences. Unfortunately, this is the only option that allows much time for a personal life.

  There the choices lay for Ann, her options outlined with great frankness. She could win the reelection her polls seemed to indicate or strike out for national office—the vice presidency or even, in time and with great luck, the presidency—or have a personal life. (One of her show business fans, Bill Cosby, inscribed a photo of them together with the line that Ann was going to be president whenever “she’s damn well ready.”) On the March 1992 calendar, she had trade meetings lined up in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In September, there were trade talks in Spain, Germany, France, and Britain, and then in November, talks in Canada. To run and win, said her most trusted adviser on both politics and policy, Ann needed to give up all or most of that, and by that time in her life she was a dedicated world traveler.

  Mary Beth urged her to keep a low profile at the Democratic National Convention, this one scheduled in glorious New York City. But Ann’s answer was like the one she gave to the question of what had prompted her to run for the office in the first place: too many people were counting on her—she felt she had to be there. Plus, the spotlight she first discovered in Atlanta in 1988 was terribly hard to give up. As her political advisers in the 1990 campaign found, she was quite taken with being a celebrity. In the end, she tried to be a successful regional politician and a superstar in the national Democratic Party and the celebrity mills of New York, Washington, and Los Angeles. And also nourish a midlife (which really means later-in-life) love affair.

  One of the most urgent policy issues she had to address was near chaos in the prison system. She had not been ignoring it. Since 1972, the Texas prison system had been embroiled in litigation brought by an inmate named David Ruiz. The outcome of the federal lawsuit Ruiz v. Estelle determined that Texas had violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of inmates—namely, the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment and the rights to both due process and equal protection under the law—through overcrowding, poor medical care, and institutionalized savagery by prison guards and the trusties called building tenders. The Carter Justice Department intervened on behalf of the plaintiffs, and since 1980, a particularly demanding federal judge, William Wayne Justice, had held a tight rein on the Texas prison system through a court-appointed master, Steve Martin, a Pampa native who had gone from being a collegiate prison guard to an assistant attorney general and an international authority on penal policy. But state district courts did not have to heed the demands of Justice and Martin; the sentences imposed by juries and reelection-minded judges grew ever longer. The prisons were so packed that in order to comply with Ruiz standards, Bill Clements, certainly no friend of criminals, had been forced to quietly order the Board of Pardons and Paroles to release about 750 inmates a week, and many of the convicts sprung early were vile people. The state contributed to the crisis, too, by leaving convicted criminals in county jails instead of transferring them immediately to state prisons. Harris County was leading a multicounty suit against the state over its costly failure to assume its legal responsibility for convicts and move them to penitentiaries.

  At the very start of Ann’s term, when members
of the transition team were formulating prison policy, Jane Hickie had interrupted my wife in a meeting and said, “Dorothy, all we’re going to talk about is treatment.” That declaration on her part was vastly oversimplified. Goaded by the lawsuits, Ann and the legislature launched the largest correctional construction project in the country. By 1996, more than 70,000 additional correctional beds had been added to the system. The state’s capacity for inmates that year, about 128,000, more than doubled the prison capacity, 55,000, at the start of Ann’s governorship. Parole policy was toughened so that the most violent offenders had to serve at least 50 percent of their sentences, and capital murderers sentenced to life had to serve forty years before they could come up for parole. In 2000, Texas was projected to have the largest prison population of any Western democracy—one out of every twenty-one adults, compared to one out of fifty-eight in 1982.

  Ann Richards’s election and term happened to coincide with a horrific rampage and manhunt that sent shock waves through the state. After growing up a dropout and thug and serving time for fourteen counts of burglary, a man named Kenneth McDuff and a friend decided one night they would torture and kill two Fort Worth boys and a girlfriend in the Fort Worth–area town of Everman in 1966. They raped the girl with a broken broomstick, and then McDuff slowly strangled her with it. Though sentenced to the electric chair, McDuff twice received last-minute stays from the courts. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1972 moratorium on capital punishment resulted in his death sentence being commuted to life imprisonment. He offered a member of the parole board $10,000 to arrange his early release. Then in 1989, when Bill Clements was governor, McDuff somehow qualified as one of the 750 “low risk” convicts paroled each week.

  He was out three days before he murdered a prostitute. He was once more free to be a drunk, and he added an addiction to crack cocaine. Another prostitute died at his hands in 1991. Later that year, he and a low-life friend abducted a young accountant named Colleen Reed from an Austin car wash. They tortured and raped her as she begged for mercy, and when McDuff parted company with his friend, he said he was going to “do her.” And he did. The killing of Reed, a pretty and popular woman from Louisiana, raced through the state’s news media. McDuff’s accomplice was arrested, and he talked. But the brutal psychopath killed another prostitute and a Waco convenience store clerk before an America’s Most Wanted item on television led to his arrest in Kansas City in 1992. Gary Cartwright wrote a Texas Monthly cover story with a mug shot of McDuff and the caption “monster.” McDuff sneered through the Reed murder trial; he was finally executed by lethal injection in 1998.

  No one on earth was going to reform or find mercy in the soul of Kenneth McDuff. He was the poster boy for Texas serial killers and the symbol of all that was wrong with a prison system that the public expected to impose punishment on violent criminals. When Ann was treasurer and running for governor, she remarked to my wife, “Dorothy, I just told the board of the Texas Observer that I support capital punishment. And you know what? I’m all right with that.”

  On the other hand, she was a recovering alcoholic, and she was aware of credible evidence that 80 percent to 85 percent of Texas prison inmates had convictions that were drug or alcohol related. And they managed to get high and drunk while locked up by the state. If they were addicts going into prison and addicts coming out, what were the odds of their going straight while seeking the sort of jobs that they could obtain with criminal records?

  Ann’s senior aide Pat Cole and others on her staff worked closely with Senator Ted Lyon, a former Dallas-area policeman, and Mount Pleasant’s Sam Russell, the House sponsor, in crafting Senate Bill 828 and guiding it to Ann’s signature in June 1991. Lyon chaired the Criminal Justice Committee until his defeat in the 1992 elections. His successor as chairman, John Whitmire, of Houston, and Lieutenant Governor Bullock played important roles in putting the legislation on a fast track to passage and implementation. The bill created two series of initiatives, including those that developed into the In-Prison Therapeutic Communities and the Substance Abuse Felony Punishment (SAFP) program. The first program set up prison units segregated from the general population. After being screened by professionals at the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, the convicts entered prison units removed from the general population as a condition for their parole, and for up to nine months underwent highly structured work, education, and treatment schedules supervised by licensed chemical-dependency counselors, physicians, or psychologists. Many of these convicts had already spent years in lockup. Most were volunteers; some were ordered into the program. If they completed the program, they would remain apart from the general population until they were discharged or released on parole, and then they had to participate in mandated aftercare. The second program provided six or nine months of intensive substance-abuse treatment in specially designed SAFP facilities to individuals on probation or parole.

  Ann promised, “We will have created a model for other states . . . and generated proof that we can use this kind of program to reduce addiction and crime . . . that we can break the cycle . . . that we can take back the night and awake from a long nightmare of violence and fear.”

  The legislation for the in-prison therapeutic communities required the Department of Corrections to provide at the outset at least 800 beds for the new program. The hope in the governor’s office was that the capacity would increase to 2,000 by the end of Ann’s term, in 1994. Private organizations bid for the contracts to work inside the prisons. No legislative accomplishment was a source of more pride to Ann than this one. And in a breathtaking development in our household, the governor charged my wife with the task of getting the program up and running. It would be the most challenging and rewarding period of her career in government.

  All this created a scramble among small towns that wanted the prisons for the jobs—advocates of Beeville showed up at a hearing in bee costumes—and among companies that wanted to see the prisons privatized. Also in the 1991 session, Ann signed legislation designed by Senator Whitmire to address overcrowding in county jails by creating “state jails” for nonviolent offenders. But a condition for passage of the bill was acceptance of a settlement in the lawsuit by the counties, and Ann almost had to beg Harris County to go along with it: “I am hoping the commissioners’ court of Harris County will not single-handedly act to defeat this legislation. It is important to remember that taxpayers served by the state and its counties are the same Texas citizens.”

  In March 1992, Selden Hale, my Amarillo friend whom Ann had appointed chair of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, sent her a letter full of news that might be a blessing and might be a curse. Selden wrote that negotiations with the plaintiffs’ lawyers in Ruiz had produced a compromise and a settlement offer. If the state would immediately raise the system’s inmate capacity by 2,300–3,000 new beds, the convicts’ lawyers and the Justice Department would terminate the lawsuit. Among the reasons Selden cited for accepting the offer was a staff estimate that it would save the state $100 million over the next eighteen months.

  He warned, though, that two dramatic turns of events could torpedo the proposed settlement: “First, Jail Commission figures indicate that the overcrowding in the Harris County jail is reaching crisis proportions.” Also, one ranking assistant attorney general, Bob Ozer, raised the possibility of returning to federal court, reopening the Ruiz case, and attempting to remove the prison system from the jurisdiction of the federal court. After noting that the case had already been in the courts about fifteen years, and that the state was already involved in a vast prison-building program, Selden posed some tough questions to counter this proposal: “In a return to federal court, after expensive legal discovery, when would the case actually be tried? How long would the trial last? How expensive would it be for the litigation costs, not only for the State, but also on behalf of the inmates?” He wondered also on whose side the U.S. attorney general and Justice Department would intervene this time. And he closed with his st
rongest reason for not reopening the case: “If we spend anticipated months in a court battle and anticipated millions of dollars in staff time and legal fees, can Mr. Ozer give us any assurance as to a final victory?”

  Ann supported the Ruiz settlement, and in time so did Dan Morales, but estimates from the Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council projected that 24,000 more prison beds would be needed to accommodate all the inmate growth projections—on top of those already budgeted and under construction. Dorothy recalled, “Ann said, ‘All right, if they’re going to do that, twelve thousand of them have to be treatment beds.” At a cost of $1.6 billion, the governor’s demand sailed through the legislature. Texas had gone from last or nearly last in the country to first—at least on paper—in providing drug-and alcohol-treatment programs in its prisons. Dorothy and a few devoted colleagues had to find a way to pull it off. “What would these prisons look like?” Dorothy said. “How would they train guards to administer them and counselors to run these programs? We visited treatment prisons in Chicago, Staten Island, and Tucson. The joke around the country was ‘Have the Texans been to see you yet?’ We didn’t know how to do this on such a grand scale.”

  Ann had been tacking fast toward the center since before she took office. Despite the fiscal restraint and skill she had shown as treasurer, the business community had wanted little to do with her as a gubernatorial candidate. They didn’t trust anyone who came billed as an Austin liberal. Yet despite the continuing animus of the insurance, petrochemical, and oil-refining industries, she turned out to be a pleasant surprise to many business leaders. In late 1991, General Motors announced plans to close its assembly plant in Arlington. Working with local governmental and union leaders, Ann took the lead in offering GM $30 million in tax incentives if the plant stayed open. In addition, to advance the clean-air initiatives she and Garry Mauro had promoted, she promised that if GM would manufacture vehicles that could be fueled by compressed natural gas, the state would buy 1,000 of them. The plant stayed open, and although GM never started production of these clean-air vehicles, executives said they were impressed by the state’s offer.