Paul Barrows spends his nights half expecting a late-night call from his son, who is prone to manic late-night walks that leave him lost and disoriented. Barrows’ son, who’s is his thirties and lives with schizoaffective disorder, has recently found a modicum of stability at a Fort Worth group home after languishing for over two years in Denton County Jail due to a backlog of psychiatric hospital beds. Barrows asked that the Texas Observer not use his son’s name to protect his privacy.
When early voting recently opened across the state, Barrows told the Observer that he thought about his son when he voted against Proposition 3, the constitutional amendment that would require judges to deny bail to defendants accused of certain crimes punishable as a felony. The longtime federal law enforcement officer believes the measure will disproportionately harm people like his son who have had run-ins with the law due to mental health crises.
“The state is refusing to address the mental health concerns in the community,” he said. “The general public doesn’t always understand the ramifications of what they are voting for. All they see is the term ‘violent felonies,’ and I don’t think the public understands how that affects those with mental health issues.”
Amid a slew of propositions and, in North Texas, a state Senate District 9 race to replace Kelly Hancock, Prop 3 has far-reaching implications for public safety, overcrowded jails, and state-wide mental health treatments. The debate over the role of bail has intensified at both the state and federal levels, with President Donald Trump recently condemning cashless bail policies as a “disaster” for major cities. While conservatives have pushed for tighter limits on pretrial release, reformers argue Texas’ criminal justice system already overly ensnares non-violent Texans struggling with untreated mental illnesses.
Krishnaveni Gundu’s years of advocating for the humane treatment of incarcerated individuals and the release of non-violent offenders while they await trial have led her to a hard conclusion: Chronic underfunding of mental-health services sits at the heart of Texas’ public safety and incarceration crises. With an estimated 34 percent of the Lone Star State’s inmate population having a mental health disorder, the executive director of the Texas Jail Project said Prop 3 is a distraction from real reforms that could make the state safer.
“We are opposed to Prop 3 because this is going to overload an already overburdened pre-trial detention system,” Gundu told the Observer. “Because of overcrowding, the jail system is already the largest warehouse of people with mental illness in the state of Texas. We cannot keep punishing our way out of this mental health crisis.”
Data from the national advocacy group Mental Health America ranks Texas dead last—51st when the District of Columbia is included—in access to mental health care, and this is despite $1.6 billion in state mental healthcare expenditures in 2024, based on state disclosures submitted to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Prop 3’s author, state Senator Joan Huffman, did not respond to a request for comment by press time. In a recent social media post, Huffman said, “A vote for Prop 3 is a vote for safer streets and a vote for every victim of crime in this state that deserves justice.”
In June, at Houston’s Crime Stoppers office, Governor Greg Abbott signed a package of bail reform bills into law including the measure that put Prop 3 to a popular vote, telling the crowd that “Your efforts have led to a rewriting of the Constitution of the State of Texas to ensure criminals like those who harmed your families will never be out on the loose again.”
The June bail package also included Senate Bill 9, allowing prosecutors to appeal “bad” bail decisions; Senate Bill 40, barring public funds from supporting nonprofit bail programs; and House Bill 75, requiring magistrates to justify arrests lacking probable cause.
With his three decades of law enforcement experience, Barrows has seen firsthand how often the job of dealing with individuals going through a mental health crisis falls on the police. Jailing those individuals doesn’t address the root cause of the problem, he said. In February, Barrows testified before the Senate Committee on Finance, speaking about his son.
“He’s been arrested 15 times in more than 30 encounters with law enforcement,” Barrows told the senate committee. “He cycled through the criminal justice system, which is ill-equipped to address his mental health care needs. He needed long-term civil commitment where he could be in a hospital in a setting where he could live with dignity and purpose.”
According to 2024 state data, targeted public spending on mental health directly correlates with reductions in arrests, reincarceration, and psychiatric hospitalizations. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission’s Mental Health Grant for Justice-Involved Individuals allocated $25 million in 2024 to support roughly 27,000 Texans through ongoing or one-off behavioral health services. The agency’s 2024 report shows that 97 percent of participants who received ongoing services—like outpatient competency restoration—were not rearrested, while 98 percent of those same participants did not require hospitalization for mental health reasons.
Barrows still remembers his son’s promising future after he received a soccer scholarship to Austin College. His mental health problems eventually made classwork impossible. After dropping out of college, he moved to North Texas, where he was charged with criminal trespassing multiple times. In mid-2022, while off his medications, he got into an altercation with two men in Denton and stabbed a homeless man, causing non-fatal injuries. He was charged with a felony soon after and spent two-and-a-half years in the Denton County Jail system due to being found incompetent to stand trial and to a shortage of available beds at a state facility. He was eventually released with time served after accepting a plea deal for a misdemeanor assault charge.
“If you look at all the charges [he] has been facing, he kept getting arrested for misdemeanor after misdemeanor and never connected with the appropriate level of care,” Gundu said. “We wait for a victim to be created before we provide treatment at a state hospital.”
Prop 3 and other “tough on crime bills” are a distraction, Gundu said, adding that state officials refuse to connect the dots between public safety and mental health because they don’t want to be in the business of managing long-term mental health care for the state’s most vulnerable population.
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