The Good Time Bill (House Bill 1064) Explained

Of all the criminal justice reform bills proposed by Texas legislators during the 2023 session, none was more discussed among the inmate population than House Bill 1064, the so-called “Good Time Bill.” Not coincidentally, no other piece of legislation spawned more confusion, propaganda, and misinformation, both within the prison population — which is perhaps understandable, given the paucity of verifiable information that exists behind bars — and on the internet, which is really rather pathetic for exactly the opposite reason.

Despite what some of my neighbors continue to claim, the bill died in committee. It isn’t entirely clear why it lacked sufficient support to make it to a full vote on the floor of the House. The legislative process in Texas was deliberately and unambiguously crafted to kill the vast majority of potential legislation in this very manner: bills just sit there, week after week, not being debated, suffocating until someone finally decides that there just isn’t enough time left on the calendar to address them (unless it’s a bill taking money away from underfunded public schools to give to religious institutions — naturally, there’s always time for a couple of special sessions for that sort of thing). Nevertheless, HB 1064 was intended to address a number of genuine moral, procedural, and fiscal deficiencies in the current parole laws in Texas, so some version of it will no doubt be filed during the 2025 session. I believe it is worthy of your analysis and support.

The purpose of HB 1064 was rather simple: to incentivize prisoners in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice with an accelerated parole opportunity schedule for exhibiting good behavior, participation in agricultural, vocational, or educational endeavors, industrial programs, other work programs, or a treatment program. (If you care to read the actual text of the bill, you can do so here).

Time credited for obeying the rules of prison is generally referred to as “good time.” The real meat of the bill, however, consisted of earned time credits for program participation, so I think this is a more accurate label for the concept, and it is with this designation that I will refer to it below. Under the current parole laws, tens of thousands of prisoners in this state receive no such credits for taking vocational classes, attending college, or obeying the rules. It is probably true that in a perfect world, humans would participate in educational opportunities or behave ethically for the sheer joy that stems from the act of learning or being noble — and many do here. But it is also true in both your world and mine that incentivizing positive behavior produces more positive behavior. That was the entire logic behind HB 1064: to dangle the carrot of an earlier parole eligibility date out in front of tens of thousands of people, in the hope that it produces a better class of ex-prisoners. If that isn’t the point of having prisons in the first place, what is?

Wait, you might be asking — don’t we already do that? Isn’t that how prison is supposed to work in the first place? Alas, the prison system does not always function the way citizens seem to think it does; frequent readers of this site will not be shocked to hear this, as it has been a consistent theme in literally hundreds of entries found in these pages. You could certainly be forgiven for believing in the widespread existence of earned time credits since they have existed in various forms in this nation since the first half of the 19th Century. Prisoners at one of the very first modern prisons at Auburn, N.Y., were given credit time amounting to 25 percent off their sentences for positive behavior and work habits. Then, as now, prison administrators found that the existence of such incentives gave them a powerful instrument for controlling inmate behavior. Conversely, when legislators removed this tool from the hands of wardens during the 1980s and ‘90s, inmate behavior worsened to the extreme that many prisons became the war zones that probably spring to mind when you think about the site of the prison today. This common-sense conclusion is the reason that administrators have consistently revived earned time credits over the past two centuries; after each conservative period in the great cyclical debate over prisons has receded, these are always among the very first implements prison systems petition legislators for. Consequently, most of the states in the nation have some form of good, earned, or meritorious credits, including Texas.

The problem that has developed over the course of the mass incarceration era is that the number of prisoners who are situated in classes that are allowed to accumulate such credits has been severely diminished. The principal mechanism for removing eligibility from these classes has been the rise of the “aggravated” sentence. Prisoners handed such sentences are generally referred to as “3g offenders” in this state. This designation is a reference to an older penal code section that involved the use of a deadly weapon during the commission of certain crimes. It has evolved over the years and flowed osmotically through the penal code, to the point where the term now signifies anyone serving aggravated time. In Texas, this means that one must serve at least 50 percent of one’s sentence before becoming parole-eligible, regardless of behavior, program participation, or character development. HB 1064 was intended to grant 3g prisoners the same earned time credits as the rest of the population.

What are “aggravated” sentences? This is certainly a scary term, evoking all sorts of the worst crimes imaginable. This was not an accident: the term was selected to connote severity. In all fairness, the category of 3g crimes does include all manner of violent offenses, but it also contains many which have no logical business being there, and which impact far more prisoners than a casual observer would suspect. Before we can determine whether a bill like HB 1064 would have done more good than harm, we first need to see who it would apply to, rather than making assumptions or substituting a caricature. The main reason that the class of 3g offenders includes tens of thousands of prisoners that wouldn’t under most conceptions of the term be considered violent is politics. During successive legislative sessions, politicians, following the spirit of the age, used tough-on-crime rhetoric to enhance their Election Day prospects. One of the chief expressions of this strategy was to consistently pass cumulative aggravating enhancements, expanding every two years the definition of what constituted an aggravated crime, and lengthening the number of years in prison associated with each. Over the decades, this terminological creep effectively eliminated entire categories of ordinary, non-3g crimes, to the point where all examples of certain classes of offenses are now considered to be automatically aggravated.

An example might help you to grasp this point. The guy that lives six cells to my left is serving an eight-year sentence for aggravated criminal mischief. He apparently took a hammer to a neighbor’s car following an argument. That was pretty stupid, and I’m not condoning it. While I think a better manner of making amends would have consisted of him having his paycheck docked until he could replace his neighbor’s vehicle, that isn’t the society we live in. Under our current laws, a prison sentence is required. Texas Penal Code Section 28.03 defines ordinary criminal mischief as when someone “intentionally or knowingly damages or destroys the tangible property of the owner.” My neighbor clearly did that; he met the terms that define an ordinary example of criminal mischief. Notice that violence against property is what constitutes the crime. Not against another person — the neighbor wasn’t even present when his Camry got TKO’d — but purely against tangible property. When this offense was first drafted into the code, it was not a 3g crime, specifically because its nature did not involve violent interpersonal behavior, which is supposed to be the hallmark of a true 3g offense. So, what exactly aggravated my neighbor’s case? The court found — as it always does now, due to the past four decades of legislative one-upmanship — that his actions constituted a “crime of violence.” So now we have an offense that always contained a component of violence, but violence of a nature that for decades did not trouble legislators, suddenly morphing into one that required the 3g enhancement. One cannot today, by definition, commit an ordinary example of criminal mischief; the only way you will see someone serving non-3g time for this crime today is if a plea agreement takes the enhancement off the table. Multiply this scenario out across dozens of types of crimes, and you begin to see that “aggravated” doesn’t mean quite what you thought it did.

We have arrived at the point where one’s current sentence need not be an aggravated one for an offender to fall under the 3g parole laws. Texas prisons are teeming with men and women serving time for drug offenses — which are not 3g — who are nevertheless doing aggravated time. Why? Because they had been convicted of an aggravated crime in the past. Two of the 14 men in my section alone find themselves in this sorry category; there is at least one more in C-Section that I know about. My friend Laredo is serving time for possession of less than one gram of a controlled substance. Normally, this offense would have earned him 180 days to two years in a state jail facility (a carceral realm situated in severity between the county jail and the actual penitentiary), but because he had been convicted of assaulting a public servant in 1998, the dope case was enhanced to a third-degree felony and the judge handed him a six-year sentence. Because of his past 3g offense, he got extra time, and he falls under the 3g parole laws, meaning he must serve half his sentence before becoming parole eligible. Again, I do not support his methamphetamine use. But let’s be clear: this is not a dealer we are talking about here. In many states, Laredo would have paid a fine and likely have been required to attend some form of substance abuse class. Instead, he will serve a minimum of three years in prison; his participation in the Faith-Based Program, where I met him, with all its attendant courses on behavioral modification, addiction management, and cognitive intervention, will not in any way help him return home to his family before that three-year mark. Neither will his excellent behavior. Three years of a father not being present for his two sons, a husband for his wife, or a taxpayer for his society. Instead, we have the exact opposite: at least three years of Laredo representing a tax burden. Why? Nobody thought this man’s crime was violent. He is serving this sentence purely because some men in Austin needed an angry sound bite, and the accretion of bad laws they passed removed the ability of his District Judge to individuate Laredo’s case from the mass of others that he dealt with on his daily docket. And so it goes, year in, year out, multiplied by a five-figured factor.

HB 1064 would have helped in this context. By taking all of Laredo’s actual, specific circumstances under consideration, it would have allowed him the chance to earn his way back to his family sooner than is currently possible. It would not guarantee this: each individual prisoner would still have to perform according to the standards that are prerequisites for admission into programmatic options (generally, this means being case-free for at least a year, if not longer). They would still have to complete the classes or training to the same degree of proficiency currently in place and behave in the positive ways required by the bill’s crafters. Even then, parole is not guaranteed. Parole is a privilege, not a right. (It actually was mandatory once upon a time, but those days ended in 1996, a useful point of comparison for the pundits on the internet hyperventilating about how “extreme” HB 1064 was.) Denials are regular, the reasoning usually opaque, especially for anyone seeing parole for the first time. HB 1064 would have simply given the state a chance to open parole eligibility to a wider class of prisoners than is currently allowed if they met the standards presently found in the statute.

In addition to providing prison administrators with a tool for producing safer prisons, the bill would have offered the Texas Department of Criminal Justice a safety valve for controlling prison overcrowding and the budgetary concerns related to those figures. Prisons generally only have one means of controlling inflows: by adjusting how long county jails hold onto inmates destined for the prison system. Parole is the countervailing release valve for these pressures, and transferring control over these decisions out of the hands of politicians in Austin and into those who know the prisoners best was a secondary goal of the bill. This may become vital in the short term, should Texas’s recent attempts to make illegal entry into the country a state crime prove constitutionally acceptable to the Supreme Court. While I do not believe this to be likely, we do have a new conservative supermajority, so no one is really sure what their jurisprudence is going to look like going forward. If I’m wrong, the TDCJ is going to have to figure out where they intend to house tens of thousands of new inmates, some of whom may well be serving aggravated sentences due to repeated attempts to cross the border. The only other option is to build a passel of new prisons, to the tune of multiple billions of dollars — a point I seriously doubt many of Gov. Greg Abbott’s border war fans have given much thought to. Fortunately, we have some hard evidence for the efficacy of earned time credits acting exactly in this manner. In 1997, for instance, New York established a good time program that allowed prisoners to potentially reduce their sentences by one-sixth. The new law saved almost $400 million over nine years, by passing supervision of high-performing offenders off to the parole authorities, rather than keeping them incarcerated.

Although HB 1064 is a mirror of legislation already codified in statute by various states without converting these jurisdictions into dystopian wastelands, it is probably easy to imagine how opponents of the bill framed their resistance. The overwhelming majority of the contrarian chatter on the internet involved imagined scenes of prison gates prized open, long parades of overly muscled and tattooed thugs streaming out to plunder polite society. The implication always seemed to be that “parole eligibility” equaled “guaranteed release,” a point which anyone who had bothered to read the text of the bill would have seen was not true. Nobody makes parole in Texas without jumping through some hoops. If an inmate is behaving poorly or refuses to program or even work, it doesn’t matter what their sentence is or what percentage of it they have completed: they will not be granted parole, no matter how badly the wardens need the space. If HB 1064 had become law, precisely zero inmates would have been released that didn’t meet the standards already currently in use by the state. There was no relaxing of parole requirements in the text of the bill, despite the hyperbolic commentary from some quarters. It is, and will remain, a program that has to be earned.

Let’s remove the fear-mongering imagery of ex-cons roaming a Mad Maxian desert and ask the valid question simply: what kind of impact might a bill like HB 1064 have had on public safety? Here is the honest answer, one you will not have seen on any other site arguing for or against the bill: outside of thought experiments and casinos, no one can precisely calculate the risks and probabilities of rare events. We can take a look at the extant data and make educated guesses based on past events, but nobody has a crystal ball, not the left, not the right. Is it within the realm of possibility that some fool could be granted early parole, leave prison, and then do something horrible? Unfortunately, yes: morons and moral dyslexics abound. This same risk exists for any inmate serving any sentence, whether they are making first parole or discharging their sentence. If someone is claiming that X parole program is going to result in Y increase in crime, ask them for their data. When they cannot produce this — and they will not be able to, since it does not exist, I’ve looked — understand that what they are really posing is a slippery slope argument that inevitably leads to the complete elimination of parole. This is not a position any serious thinker on the subject of the prison is advocating for, and especially not anyone working for any prison administration in America. The broader point here is a useful one for an election year that promises to be filled to the brim with mis- and disinformation: any law, even the ones you love and fully support, can be argued against by hypothesizing a means for gaming it. It’s not hard. In a society this large and complex, an example can always be produced of someone finding a loophole or taking advantage of a law’s intentions. People find ways of defrauding all manner of social safety net laws, but you wouldn’t do away with them because of it. Why? Because the benefits outweigh the negatives. Call this the “missing the forest for the trees” fallacy: an entire forest is not constituted of pine trees just because the first two you come to are pines. To know the nature of the forest, you have to survey the entire thing. Ditto with any proposed policy. Laws are attempts to fix problems by adjusting the dials to find a sweet spot that maximizes benefits and minimizes risks, but none are perfect. You can always find an example of a law failing in a particular circumstance. It is my belief that a bill like HB 1064 helps far, far more men like Laredo than it runs the risk of releasing a monster.

Having given the most honest disclaimer I can imagine, let’s take a look at what the actual data suggest on this balance. In the wake of the 1997 New York law I mentioned earlier, the inmates released early via the new earned time credits were found to have lower recidivism rates than nearly every other group measured (N.Y. Department of Correctional Services, Merit Time Program Summary: October 1997-December 2006 [2007]). When Washington State expanded its use of good time in 2003, researchers actually detected a small overall reduction in recidivism rates for all parolees (E.K. Drake, R. Barnoski, and S. Aos., Washington State Institution for Public Policy, Increased Earned Release from Prison: Impacts of a 2003 Law on Recidivism and Crime Costs, Revised 2 n. 7 [2009]). The conclusion by researchers was that by encouraging inmates to participate in programs, a better class of humans was released into society, which was the entire point of the law. The data for Illinois were not quite as rosy as for Washington, though even there they found that inmates released via the use of meritorious good time deductions were no more likely to commit crimes than prisoners released at the time of sentence completion (Chayet, Ellen F. “Correctional ‘good time’ as a means of early release.” Criminal Justice Abstracts, September: 521-538 [1994]; Austin, James. “Using Early Release to Relieve Prison Crowding: A Dilemma in Public Policy.” Crime and Delinquency 32(4): 404-502[1986]; Austin, James, and Melissa Bolyard. The Effectiveness of Reduced Prison Terms on Public Safety and Costs: The Evaluation of the Illinois Supplemental Meritorious Good Time Program. San Francisco, CA: National Council on Crime and Delinquency [1993]). When these inmates were rearrested, their crimes were typically nonviolent offenses, more often than not dealing with narcotics. Similarly, researchers in Colorado found no evidence of increased recidivism rates during the first eight months after release. That’s what the data we have actually shows. Whatever a priori opinions people may have online, the empirical evidence appears to be rather clear: offering earned time credits does not seem to produce a discernible negative effect on public safety.

Now that you better understand what HB 1064 was intended to address and what its potential effects would have been, where do we go from here? The answer to that question depends largely on your geographical location. If you live outside the state of Texas, the least you can do is share a link to this article among your friends in the criminal justice reform movement; it may very well be that this spurs citizens in other jurisdictions to spend a few minutes researching the parole laws in place there and making some similar suggestions to their own lawmakers. If you communicate with someone inside the TDCJ, send them a copy of this article. There are far, far too many falsehoods swirling about regarding this bill, and it would benefit all of us to be on the same page. If you are a resident of the Yee Haw Republic, your options are many. HB 1064 and its sister bill were coauthored by representatives Carl Sherman and Joe Moody. Unfortunately, Rep. Sherman ran for and lost his primary bid for the U.S. Senate, so it does not appear at the time of writing that he will be directly involved as a legislator next session. Rep. Moody, however, is running. When I reached out to his office to see if he intended to file a similar bill next year, I was told that he “will likely be reintroducing the bill or try to work with another author to get the bill pushed through.” If you happen to live in District 78 (El Paso), I’m sure Rep. Moody would appreciate hearing your support. If you do not, you can find out who your representative is here. Let them know your stance on this bill, and that you would like for them to give it a fair reading, at the very least. Feel free to quote from this article as needed. This is not a partisan issue. I was heartened by the number of Republicans who coauthored reform bills last year, and I hope to see this trend continue in 2025. There is much to like in HB 1064 for conservatives, especially the potential fiscal savings — though, again, those are largely dependent upon the incarcerated living up to the high aspirations of the bill’s writers. If you are someone who is troubled by the apparent backsliding of democratic norms at home and abroad, this is how you combat those feelings of despair: you roll up your sleeves and you involve yourself in the process. As always, faith without works is dead. Onward.