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Michael Gove visited Lone Star State last month to see first-hand the Republican-led rethinking on crime that is reversing strategy of mass incarceration
You might expect a foreign visitor eager to learn about the penal system in the Lone Star State to head for the Texas Prison Museum near Houston, to check out the star exhibit.
But Michael Gove was not here to view " Old Sparky ", the electrifying last seat of 361 prisoners from 1924 to 1964. Nor was he seeking to know that Texas has executed 530 people since 1976 -- more than the next six states combined. Or that 12 have died by lethal injection this year, most recently on Wednesday.
The UK justice secretary visited last month to see a very different side to the Texas legal system. In recent years the state has been at the forefront of a Republican-led rethinking on crime and punishment that is radiating across the country and reversing the failed Reagan-era strategy of mass imprisonment that has given the US the largest prison population in the world.
Its genesis was not a sudden burst of liberal compassion from Texas's hard-nosed lawmakers, but cold financial reality. By 2007, the state had trebled its number of inmates in a little over 15 years, to some 172,000. (A figure twice as high as the current number in England and Wales, which has both a population twice as large and the highest per capita prison population in western Europe.)
Anticipating more guests, the state corrections agency asked for $2bn to build new prisons. Lawmakers did not want to spend the money. A Republican state representative, Jerry Madden, and a Democrat, John Whitmire, teamed up to figure out a way forward.
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