It was originally enacted in 1856 and underwent substantial revision in 1973, with the passage of the Revised Penal Code, in large part based on the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code.
[3] In 1854, the fifth Legislature passed an act requiring the Governor to appoint a commission to codify the civil and criminal laws of Texas.
[5] According to the Texas Legislative Counsel, the main objectives of the Revised Penal Code were to (1) consolidate, simplify, and clarify the substantive law of crimes; (2) modernize a Penal Code designed for the preindustrialized, rural, and underpopulated Texas society of a century ago; (3) identify and proscribe, with as much precision as possible, all significantly harmful criminal conduct; (4) rationally grade offenses, according to the harm they cause or threaten, and sensibly apportion the sentencing authority between the judiciary and correctional system; (5) codify the general principles of the penal law; and (6) collect in a single code all significant penal law, transferring to more appropriate locations in the statutes regulatory and similar laws that merely employed a penal sanction.
[1] Dean W. Page Keeton of the University of Texas played a key role in drafting, revising, and promoting the Revised Penal Code.
[2] The Texas Penal Code is organized into titles and chapters.