We liveblogged the full debate over HB 1, the House version of the general appropriations bills for the next biennium, which passed late Sunday night 98 to 49.

Texas' decision to change one of the drugs used for lethal injections has sparked a lawsuit, calls for federal investigation of the criminal justice department and pleas from the drugmaker not to use its product for executions. 

House lawmakers are considering a plan to privatize all of Texas' state jails for low-level felony offenders, a move they say could save the state up to $40 million.

Numbers aren’t all that’s buried in the budget. Lawmakers have filed hundreds of amendments that are political in nature, from repealing in-state tuition for illegal immigrants to trying to push Planned Parenthood out of the family planning business. 

Lawyers for two Texas death row inmates today asked state and federal law enforcement to investigate whether prison officials illegally obtained death penalty drugs the state used in nearly all of its 466 executions.

Two death row inmates sued the state today, arguing that the decision to use a new lethal injection drug was made too secretly and too hastily.

Jim Willett had not intended to spend the better part of his adult life working in Texas’ sprawling prison system. But the business student turned prison guard worked 30 years in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and oversaw 89 executions. 

Judges across the state, and particularly in Harris County, are sending youth offenders to adult prisons even when they have few prior offenses, according to a study by a University of Texas criminal justice expert. 

The national criminal justice expert on how other states have handled controversial prison closings and reduced criminal justice costs and how the Right On Crime Movement might give lawmakers the political freedom to be more than tough when it comes to crime.

The Tribune sat down recently with national criminal justice expert Marc Mauer, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based reform advocacy group The Sentencing Project, to get his advice about how Texas can continue on its so-called 'right on crime' path even as lawmakers slice millions from the state budget. Mauer, who was in Austin for the Barbara Jordan Symposium at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs, talked about how other states have handled controversial prison closings, how others have reduced criminal justice costs and how the Right On Crime Movement — with support from conservative leaders like Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich — might give lawmakers the political freedom to be more than tough when it comes to crime.

Lawmakers at the Capitol today debated eliminating a surcharge on traffic tickets that has been riddled with problems almost since its inception.

Cleve Foster will be the first Texas inmate to receive the anesthetic drug pentobarbital — instead of sodium thiopental — in the three-drug cocktail that will be used in his execution on April 5.

Criminal justice advocates say proposed cuts from rehabilitation and treatment programs would reverse years of reforms in Texas that have helped reduce recidivism and drive down the size of the prison population.

Sights and sounds from Huntsville when prisoners were released from the Walls Unit on March 4.