"For those who ultimately receive probation or are discharged, being jailed hundreds of miles from Houston also complicates efforts to connect them with employment, housing and substance use or behavioral health treatment — support that is correlated with better outcomes, including lower recidivism, for those reentering society"
AUGUST 7, 2022
by Marc Levin
When someone is locked up, they don’t stop being a father, mother, son or daughter, and soon some Harris County family members will face driving more than 7 hours to see their loved one behind bars. Several years ago, the wife and child of an incarcerated man named Charles Davis died in a car crash on a trip to visit him, but much more commonly many families in Harris County simply won’t be able to afford the long trip.
On July 20, the Harris County Commissioners Court approved spending $25 million to send hundreds of jailed individuals to a privately operated prison in West Texas, adding to almost 600 people already sent out of the county, that group at a Louisiana jail. This stopgap approach that relies on one-time federal funds is costly and unsustainable, demonstrating that further actions are needed to address our jail population crisis in a safe and effective way.
It’s important to note that neither the County Commissioners Court nor Sheriff Ed Gonzalez has direct control over the jail population, and that commissioners faced a lack of other immediately viable options to address the dangerous conditions in the Harris County Jail. But the drawbacks to outsourcing are significant, and go well beyond the cost to taxpayers.
For starters, pretrial defendants housed near Lubbock or in Louisiana will likely have far less access to in-person meetings with their attorneys and visitation with family. For those who ultimately receive probation or are discharged, being jailed hundreds of miles from Houston also complicates efforts to connect them with employment, housing and substance use or behavioral health treatment — support that is correlated with better outcomes, including lower recidivism, for those reentering society.
While overcrowded and understaffed conditions have fueled over a thousand assaults and dozens of deaths in the Harris County Jail since 2021, it is difficult to monitor the quality of conditions, programs and health care in remote lockups. At least one person shipped out of the county to Louisiana has died — 35-year-old Billie Davis, who had been confined in Louisiana’s LaSalle Correctional Center.
In September, the commissioners are scheduled to receive staff recommendations on more sustainable solutions to the jail crisis. In the meantime, we all must ask: what can be done to help the county avoid choosing between two bad options?
