Monday Musings: Scott Henson Of Grits For Breakfast

INTRODUCTION

Thanks for the chance to participate in Monday Musings. As a non-lawyer, I’m glad to be considered sort of an honorary member of the PD blogging community. As of just a few weeks ago, I’m officially an unemployed blogger, so you’ve caught me when I have plenty of time to participate!

As a brief introduction, I left college without a degree to take a job as an investigative reporter with The Texas Observer, and have basically been selling the same skill set to one employer or another ever since. I performed opposition research for 68 candidate campaigns between 1992 and 2004, including 22 judicial races. Before Texas changed its law to restrict such jobs to private investigators, I also used to pick up work doing paper trail-type investigations for attorneys, including on two or three capital appeals. From 2000 – 2006 I was Director of the Police Accountability Project at the ACLU of Texas, where I worked on many of the issues I write about on Grits. Our biggest success while I was there was the political dissolution of Texas‘ scandal-ridden drug task force system in the wake of the “Tulia”episode. But I’ve also been involved in everything from analyzing racial profiling data at traffic stops to bigger picture issues of mass incarceration of nonviolent offenders, etc.

Grits has always been a side project, nothing anybody has ever paid me to do. Last year I left ACLU and am currently unemployed, considering several near-term options, and enjoying the extra time to write on Grits during the legislative session. Grits’ future largely depends on where I land in my professional life, but for now I’m enjoying the blog quite a bit and I’ve been committed to these issues for more than a decade, so I doubt it’s going anywhere anytime soon.

Grits covers a lot of ground and is one of the most prolific blogs focusing on legal issues. Can you describe for us how you collect your information and how you decide what makes it onto the blog?

As for how I collect information, I use the personalized Google News function a lot, and during the legislative session also use the state capitol, house and senate websites frequently. I use the state list of newspapers at newslink.org to look for local, regional stories on the themes and issues I discuss. I have a Bloglines account, but the sites and blogs on my blogroll basically represent the main websites I visit – I use my own website as a research center, in a lot of ways, and link to all my favorite sources there. I should also mention that at this point readers send me quite a bit of stuff, which is great. Legislative hearings and meetings of other government bodies generate a lot of new information, and also gather all the players in a room for easy access, so those types of events can produce quite a bit of blogging material. I always love to hear government has spent money on a consultant or staff research on my topics or produced some extensive report, because reading and analyzing those things frequently generates multiple posts and information that’s not reported elsewhere. Ditto, on occasion, for law review and academic articles – I’m a big fan of SSRN. I also file open records requests with state and local government agencies for blogging material (though less often than when I was employed), and pretty much dedicate what little revenue Google ads generate to paying for records requests.

As for what goes on Grits for Breakfast, with few exceptions I start with the assumption that people do not read blogs looking for information, they read blogs because they want to know what that information means. Everybody else has Google News, too – for the most part they don’t need me for links. There’s too much information out there, is the problem, and lots of criminal justice issues are quite complex and multi-layered. So a news item earns a spot on Grits not just because it’s news, or even interesting news (usually) but because I have either new information or a perspective to offer that wasn’t provided in the mainstream coverage – I ask myself whether what I have to say “adds value” to the debate, and if so it goes up.

On subjects I’m focused on over the long-term – jail and prison overcrowding, drug war overreach, pretrial diversion, snitching etc. - I sometimes post items with statistics or anecdotes simply because I want to preserve the information for myself for future use. I’ll include enough of a citation to use later as a footnote if need be and all the money quotes I find interesting or useful. Then, later, when it’s time to prepare testimony or accumulate research for some specific purpose, everything I or anybody else would need to make the arguments are available on the blog without going into newspaper archives, etc., or reinventing the wheel. I’m a fairly prolific and facile writer so those sort of posts don’t take much time and have great benefit, for me and I hope others, down the line.

Finally, I try when possible to provide information at a point in time when people can use it to participate in the process, which often is well before the MSM notice it. E.g., most reporters cover committee hearings after the fact at the Lege, but I preview bills in committee in case people have concerns about them or see bills they want to support. The tactic also has the intangible benefit of framing the issues for insiders (even, perhaps especially, for MSM reporters themselves) instead of just reacting and counterpunching. Blogs are not for the masses – blogs are for elites and information seekers. (Half my traffic, ~ 1,100 per day, comes from Google searches.) I know most people don’t participate in the process at that level, but for those who do, such information can matter a great deal. What’s more, I suspect that more would become involved if they understood how it worked and knew when and where those opportunities arose. At least, those are the assumptions that underlie what I’m doing, whether they’re true or not.

Between Grits for Breakfast and The Wretched of the Earth, the blawgging world gets quite a detailed look at the Texas justice system, often in a very unfavorable light. We posed this question to Wretched, and it would be good to hear your take as well: What do you see going on that gives you hope for the future of the system?

Lots, actually. It’s not that much worse here than elsewhere, I’m just exposing the warts. But in the big picture both parties are split on these issues, which politically leaves lots of room to maneuver for reform. In Texas there’s a working coalition of moderate reformers on criminal justice that’s made up of about 2/3 of the Democrats and 1/3 or so of Republicans who can be counted on to back first steps toward fixing the biggest problems. The Governor has been the bigger barrier. E.g., Texas will likely enact major probation and parole reforms this session to avoid building new prisons, but Gov. Perry vetoed similar measures last session to precipitate the current prison overcrowding crisis. And both chambers in 2005 passed a bill requiring written consent at traffic stops that the Governor also vetoed, but its passage certainly bodes well for other possible legislative reforms. Criminal justice has been one of the only areas where legislators in Texas appear able to work together in a bipartisan way.

If you were given the power and an unlimited budget, what are the first things you would change in the Texas justice system, and why?

The three big ticket items I’d fund with such power and budget are training 10,000 teachers to deal with dyslexic kids and illiterate adults, dramatically expanding community-based mental health treatment, and focusing evidence-based programming on children of incarcerated parents. The reason: those are the biggest categories where funding would make a difference to prevent crime rather than react to it. Dyslexics are three times as likely as others to enter prison, children of incarcerated parents 6-8 times more likely, and the mentally ill are being warehoused in Texas prisons in huge numbers – the state estimates 30% of inmates are past clients of the indigent mental health system. If you can stop people in those categories either from committing crimes or immediately entering prison when they screw up, it would do more to improve public safety than the current lock-em-up approach.

Otherwise, nearly everything I’d do for the criminal justice system would save money – probably enough to cover costs of the above proposals. Half of Texas prisoners are nonviolent offenders, and most shouldn’t be there. Texas should shift resources from incarceration to community supervision, restorative justice and treatment for nonviolent and low-level offenders, especially ratcheting down offense levels for those crimes to more reasonable levels. Another key reform: Shortening community supervision terms to let offenders earn their way off paper through good behavior. On jail overcrowding, I’d make every county have a pretrial services division that evaluated defendants’ suitablity for personal bond, and create a statutory presumption that petty offenders would get one unless a judge identified reasons why not.

Also, make me philosopher-king for a day and I’d also do something radical to reinforce sagging Fourth Amendment rights, which I think have been essentially dismantled by the US Supreme Court. I’d like to see the legislative branch step up to defend those rights since the courts won’t..

How would you describe Texas ‘ approach to indigent defense, and are there ways you can think of to improve upon it?

Our system is fragmented and locally controlled, with a few statewide standards implemented for the first time earlier this decade that are still receiving significant pushback. One bright spot has been that rising indigent defense costs are causing more counties to turn to public defender offices, especially for misdemeanor cases and also for specialized caseloads (Austin just established a dedicated mental health public defender). A statewide task force was established that’s been funding PD office startups with 4-year grants that has spurred quite a few new counties to go that route, and several more are studying whether to follow suit.

You also have a personal blog, Huevos Rancheros, where the tone is certainly lighter. Why did you start Huevos, and do you find it helps to have such a creative outlet?

I used to put more personal or off-topic stuff on Grits, but I decided it didn’t “fit,” whatever that means, either with my own expectations, readers’ or both. Who knows? Anyway, I generate a lot of prose – those who know me would say I compulsively do so - and historically I’ve written on many topics besides just criminal justice. (E.g., for about five years I had a magazine column on healthcare politics.) As a writer I like to explore different kinds of writing, so there’s some fiction on Huevos Rancheros, some sportswriting, travelogues, etc. After the legislative session is over, e.g., I’m considering doing some exercises on Huevos Rancheros to practice generating prose that mimics sentence structure and grammar of some of my favorite authors, but that’d be an odd thing to read on Grits - simply playing around with rhythm and sentence structure without regard to content.

On both Grits and Huevos sometimes I’ll write about something just to learn more about it, following my nose, accumulating links and information on a topic I’ve not examined closely before. In those instances I probably learn more from the article than do my readers. But on Huevos those topics might be movie reviews, sports discussions (though sports bloggers are sticklers as commenters), Texas winemaking or prehistoric archaeology. On Grits, according to a recent site survey, 53% of visitors are there for “professional” reasons, and another 21% because they or a family member are caught up in the criminal justice system. So they probably don’t really care about the off-topic stuff, plus another blogspot blog was free.

THE PD STUFF FIVE QUESTIONS

What other job would you like to try and why?

Since I’m unemployed at the moment, this question takes on greater import than usual! I may get my chance. Perhaps my response should be, “What have you got?” I might like to write professionally again. I left journalism because it’s so frustrating to break a story then watch as nothing happens and the powerful people you’ve exposed just roll on. In the blogging world journalism and activism have merged and some of that has changed, IMO, so it’d be fun to explore some of the new possibilities.

Otherwise, as a kid my family raised and trained horses and I miss being involved in that – it’s tough to make a living because those are dying professions, in a lot of ways, but I really enjoyed it.

Best moment on the job?

Turning a near-worst moment into a best moment. In 2001 in the wake of the “Tulia” scandal, Texas passed legislation requiring corroborating evidence for undercover drug stings. The original filed bill was drafted by a bunch of us sitting around the same desk I’m writing at now, and I negotiated the bill on behalf of ACLU. The original legislation required corroboration for both cops and informants, but the police unions bitterly fought it and I agreed to a compromise requiring corroboration for only informants. A couple of the parents of Tulia defendants were FURIOUS at me because the bill then wouldn’t have affected their kids’ cases. I felt awful about it, but also knew the only other option was no bill at all.

Then a few months later in September the bill took effect. One of the first consequences was in Dallas – home of the wrongful conviction – where the DA began to seek corroboration for mendacious informants on whose sole word they’d previously obtained hundreds of convictions. It turned out much of the drugs these informants had helped seize was fake – 86 cases were ultimately dropped because they’d set up mostly undocumented immigrants using pool chalk packaged to look like cocaine. It turned out ½ of the cocaine and ¼ of the meth seized by Dallas PD in 2001 was fake drugs used to set up innocent people. Statewide hundreds of pending cases were dropped where a CI’s testimony was the only evidence. The day the Dallas News attributed the discovery of the fake drug cases to the law we passed might have been my best day. Or else it was when I saw one of the ladies from Tulia who was mad at me the previous year talking about Dallas and taking credit for helping pass the law in a national magazine. Either way, it was a nice vindication and IMO also a substantive improvement in the law.

Worst moment on the job?

April 19, 2005 at about 2 p.m. - I won’t go into detail except to say that no enemy in politics can ever do as much damage as a trusted friend when they stab you in the back.

If Heaven exists, what do you think God will say to you when you arrive?

“I know it’s not Texas but I think you’ll learn to like it here, anyway.”

If you could only pick one, who is your hero/heroine?

I.F. Stone – the father of modern investigative journalism. Reading his collected IF Stone’s Weekly from the ’40s to the early ’70s was a life changing experience for me, and I’ve mimicked many of his research approaches and methodologies, and developed new ones based on his concepts, from that day to this. As I wrote on Grits a couple of years ago:

In a way, Stone was a proto-blogger. His I.F. Stone’s Weekly was relatively short and punchy, and it only went to folks who particularly wanted it — he didn’t rely on mass distribution, but niche targeting. Using today’s Internet technologies, Stone would have easily found a mass audience and taken on guys like Josh Marshall, who’s pioneered investigative journalism in the “new media.”

Many of the possibilities of what blogging could be, IMO, were explored first by I.F. Stone covering Washington as an “alternative” journalist. With little access himself to the halls of power, he vetted public information, reports, and hearing transcripts to separate out truth from self interest and posturing in ways that presaged what bloggers, at their best moments, do today en masse. It’s hard to even imagine what my life would be like if I’d never heard of I.F. Stone.

Thank you very much, Scott, for taking the time to share your insights with the readers of PD Stuff.

Next week’s guest is Frolics and Detours. If you have any questions you’d like me to consider for her interview, please email them to me.

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