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The Harris County Jail has failed yet another state safety inspection as the troubled facility continues to struggle with persistent overcrowding and understaffing.
Since September 2022, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards has deemed the Harris County Jail noncompliant with the state’s minimum jail standards after four previous inspections. The fifth TCJS inspection was recently conducted two weeks ago and found a total of three safety violations:
- The jail is required to maintain a state-mandated staffing ratio of one detention officer for every 48 people in the facility. After reviewing staffing rosters, inspectors determined that staffing did not meet the minimum requirement;
- Detention officers are expected to conduct face-to-face observations every 30 and 60 minutes. They failed to consistently conduct these observations at least 1,400 times in January;
- Out of 173 detainees going to court in the 30 days prior to the inspection, a total of 32 of them housed within the jail’s specialized units did not receive prescribed medications.
The jail’s previous safety violations included medical neglect and keeping people in holding cells for an excess of 48 hours, which is prohibited by state law. However, while the sheriff’s office says many of the previous violations have since been resolved, persistent understaffing has resulted in an inability to properly observe and care for those held in the overcrowded facility.
MORE: Lucio Vasquez discusses this story on Houston Matters
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“The inspection team reported that we do not have enough staff for the number of people currently held inside our jail facility,” said Jason Spencer, chief of staff at the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. “The inspection team also reported that although our detention officers have a 99%-plus success rate for completing their face-to-face visual contact rounds, we still do not meet the standard.”
“While we have made improvements in both of these areas, we have not yet hit the mark,” he added.
Additionally, in regard to the 32 detainees who weren’t given their medication, Spencer said “The practices that led to this oversight have been corrected.” Overall, Spencer says inspectors were “highly (complimentary)” of the jail’s cleanliness and general mood. He added that inspectors cited inadequate staffing and Harris County’s backlog of criminal cases pending in criminal court as the major drivers of the county’s compliance issues.
“A multi-pronged effort to improve conditions”
Spencer says county officials have taken a “multi-pronged” approach to improve conditions in the jail. Back in September, officials approved a 12% salary increase for detention officers in an effort to retain and recruit more jailers. Despite the investment, the sheriff’s office reported 190 detention officer vacancies during a presentation to the Harris County Commissioners Court on Tuesday.
Officials have also invested millions into several multi-million-dollar contracts to outsource pre-trial detainees to four private facilities outside of Harris County. As of Tuesday, 9,218 people were in the county’s custody, but 1,071 of those people were being outsourced to private facilities in Louisiana, northwest Texas, Beaumont and Mississippi, according to the Harris County’s jail dashboard.
Jail reform advocates — like Krishnaveni Gundu, the executive director of Texas Jail Project — say Harris County’s outsourcing is an unsustainable solution that places even more strain on the county’s already backed-up court system.
“None of those solutions are actually helping with reducing the jail population that would make things safe in the jail for both the staff and the people that are sitting in cages,” Gundu said.
Regardless, according to Spencer, “the [TCJS] inspectors encouraged Harris County to continue exploring opportunities for outsourcing.”
Nearly 300 days ago, the commission issued a remedial order focused specifically on the county's inability to consistently maintain staffing levels. As a result, the commission in December began reducing the jail’s approved capacity by 144 beds each month until staffing is stabilized.
State officials have been chipping away at the jail’s variance beds, which are short-term beds that were granted by the state years ago to temporarily increase the facility's approved capacity. As of Feb. 1, the commission had taken away 432 of the jail's 580 variance beds, according to Brandon Wood, the executive director of the commission.
This comes just one day after a woman filed a federal lawsuit against the county alleging a detention officer beat her inside the jail, which she says led to her suffering from a miscarriage. Another federal lawsuit was filed last year accusing the county of creating a "culture of death" inside the Harris County Jail. Last year, at least 19 people died while in custody. This followed a record number of in-custody deaths in 2022, when at least 27 people lost their lives — the highest number in nearly two decades, according to county records and data from the Texas Justice Initiative.
Read the most recent noncompliance letter sent to Harris County below: