Houston Detainees Shipped to Private Jails in Mississippi and Louisiana
by Anthony W. Accurso
With the Harris County Jail (HCJ) short 139 guards, minimum staffing ratios set by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards (TCJS) have mathematically capped the number of beds that can be filled at the Houston lockup. As a result, the County has been shipping excess detainees to privately-operated jails—CoreCivic’s Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi and two for-profit prisons run by LaSalle Corrections in Texas and Louisiana.
Meanwhile, when TCJS inspectors gave their signoff to a safety inspection on August 20, 2024, it was HCJ’s first passing grade in nearly two years. Yet the score may not have been fairly earned; TCJS admitted providing “technical assistance” to jailers during the inspection. TCJS Executive Director Brandon Wood insisted that the help amounted to nothing more than a “clarification” of agency standards “to make sure that everybody was on the same page and had a clear understanding of what would be expected.” But inspectors found that jailers were miscalculating the state-mandated minimum staff-to-detainee ratio, on top of which 15 of some 15,500 required guard rounds were logged late.
“These were minimum standards that had to do with supervision and life safety, and supervision is the reason we’ve been failing inspections,” said Texas Jail Project Executive Director Krishnaveni Gundu.
Even as TCJS inspectors began their work on August 12, 2024, detainee Hugo Mota, 41, suffered a “medical emergency” and died, one of seven detainee fatalities recorded since the year began. TCJS has no authority over HCJ’s medical staffing, which Gundu also criticized.
Out-of-State Contracts for Jail Beds
The County has negotiated a new contract with LaSalle and expanded the number of detainees and prisoners shipped to the CoreCivic facility. Both firms have repeatedly been accused of cutting corners on safety, food and medical care to juice profits.
In response, CoreCivic said that its Tallahatchie lockup has been subject to “rigorous” on-site inspections by the American Correctional Association (ACA). But a November 2023 report by the federal Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General decried ACA for providing “sham investigations” to the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP); after that, the prison system cut ties with the organization in March 2024, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, July 2024, p.18; and August 2024, p.35.]
In light of that, Harris County’s newest $11.3 million contract with CoreCivic signed in December 2023 might seem like a bad idea—except that conditions at HCJ aren’t much better. A shocking number of detainees have died in custody there, 39 from the beginning of 2022 to mid-2023, as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, Aug. 2023, p.1.]
“So what you often have is this situation of very unequal bargaining power, where the agency isn’t really able to meaningfully enforce whatever standards the private prison may have agreed to,” said David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. “So, as a practical matter, when a public agency puts prisoners in a private facility, they’re essentially surrendering control over how they’re treated.”
The Justice Management Institute also criticized the County’s move and recommended that District Attorney Kim Ogg (D) make “uncomfortable, but necessary changes” by dismissing “all non-violent felony cases older than nine months” to alleviate the backlog of detainees. Ogg’s office was forced to make a similar move in 2019, when 57% of felony cases were dropped or deferred. But the DA has more recently rejected such recommendations.
Additional source: Houston Public Media
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