Good to hear. When Harris County District Attorney Mike Anderson toppled incumbent Pat Lykos in last year’s Republican primary, some county budget hawks got fidgety. The campaign’s central issue, after all, was Anderson’s opposition to a Lykos policy that treated cases with drug residue of less than 1/100th of a gram as misdemeanors. Lykos was [...]
Posts Tagged ‘jail overcrowding’
Sobering center opens up
Good. Mayor Annise Parker joined council members on Thursday to unveil the innovative Houston Recovery Center, a place where people who are intoxicated can sober up instead of being arrested. Officials say there’s only one other similar facility in Texas. “Turns out that a significant percentage of the people we were putting in jail, were [...]
I got those empty prison cell blues
There’s a lot of excess prison capacity around the state, which is a big problem for a lot of communities that once thought building prisons, to be operated by private entities, would be a boon for them. Just over a decade ago, prisons were a growth industry, and Texas was the undisputed king. The state [...]
Trace cases to be prosecuted as felonies again
So says our new DA. Newly elected Harris County District Attorney Mike Anderson said Thursday he will prosecute as felonies drug cases that involve trace amounts of crack cocaine, reversing his predecessor’s stand on the so-called “trace cases.” “If there is enough evidence to test in a lab, then we’ll take the charges,” Anderson said. [...]
Once again on bail and jail overcrowding
Grits returns to a familiar topic. Harris County has successfully reduced its jail population in the last couple of years to the point where they no longer must ship inmates to jails in Louisiana and other Texas counties due to overcrowding. And despite Chicken-Little pronouncements from the police union and tuff-on-crime zealots, the sky didn’t [...]
On locking up prostitutes
It doesn’t make much sense. Busted 32 times in 17 years for prostitution in Austin and other places, Beatryce Hall’s rap sheet reads like a frequent-flier ticket for Texas prisons: 11 times in 11 years. Many of those trips were courtesy of a 2001 Texas law that allowed prosecutors to charge prostitutes with a felony [...]
Harris County probation director resigns
Some fairly big news that has nothing to do with hurricanes, the GOP convention, or the Voting Rights Act. Paul Becker, the director of Harris County’s probation department, resigned Wednesday in the wake of allegations the department mismanaged thousands of drug tests used to decide the fates of probationers and suspects out on bail while [...]
Privatizing psych hospitals makes as much sense as privatizing prisons
Especially when it’s the same outfit doing the privatizing in each case. Sixteen months after the Montgomery County Mental Health Treatment Facility opened in Conroe, the state’s first publicly funded, privately run psychiatric hospital is facing at least $53,000 in state fines for serious shortcomings in patient care. The private operator, Geo Care, is a [...]
Hard times in the prison building business
Bad news for the mostly small counties that are left holding the bag on their bond debt, good news for the rest of us. The dusty West Texas ranch town of Anson, once known for its no-dancing law made famous in the 1984 movie “Footloose,” has a dubious new claim to fame: the Jail to [...]
The Sheriff’s office is hiring
Good. Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia says by balancing his department’s $392 million budget, he’ll be able to transfer 100 deputies from jail duties to crime-fighting jobs in the next year while hiring hundreds of new civilian jailers. During a news conference Monday, Garcia said when he took office in January 2009 the department was [...]
Better budget news
For the city. The city of Houston may have $21 million more in income in the coming fiscal year than it had planned on before Wednesday. That’s when it got the news that the Harris County Appraisal District projects that taxable values in the city — and by extension, the amount of taxes it collects [...]
Interview with Sheriff Adrian Garcia
Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia was elected in 2008 with the highest vote total of any candidate on the ballot. He inherited an office that was tainted by the scandals of his long-term predecessor, a jail system that was overcrowded, understaffed, unsafe, unsanitary, and under the spotlight of federal and state inspectors, a hiring freeze [...]
Inmate outsourcing on the way out
This is unequivocally good news. Dropping inmate numbers at the Harris County Jail will let the county end its nearly 5-year-old practice of shipping overflow inmates to Louisiana and other Texas counties within days, Sheriff Adrian Garcia said this week. The jail population has fallen 31 percent since 2008, to 8,573 inmates. The jail has [...]
More on the crime lab and the city jail
Here we have some more information about Mayor Parker’s plans for the crime lab, though it’s still not really clear where this is going. Parker wants to make the lab independent of HPD and the city, overseen instead by a local government board similar to the Port of Houston Authority, whose members are jointly appointed [...]
Lykos v Anderson
I obviously don’t have a dog in the Republican District Attorney primary fight, but I like a good high-profile political battle as much as the next junkie, so stories about it are interesting to me. [DA Pat] Lykos argues she is a reformer with three years of improvements under her belt while Mike Anderson, a [...]
Reducing prison population is hard
And we’re taking a step backwards. Last summer, when tough-on-crime Texas closed its first prison ever, legislative leaders were jubilant over downsizing one of the nation’s largest corrections systems by more than 1,000 beds. It was a first big step, they said, toward saving taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in coming years. Meanwhile, prison [...]
More on Lykos versus the cops
Here’s another Chron story about the recent dust-up between Harris County DA Pat Lykos and six Harris County police groups that don’t like her policy that trace amounts of crack will not be prosecuted as felonies. Two points that are worth highlighting from the story: State District Judge Michael McSpadden has presided over Houston’s criminal [...]
Lykos versus the cops
Various law enforcement unions are not happy with Harris County DA Pat Lykos. Leaders of six Harris County police organizations Tuesday announced a vote of no confidence in District Attorney Pat Lykos, saying she has “shirked her duty” and has turned down viable cases for prosecution. The no-confidence vote – a rare public fissure in [...]
Disciplining deputies
The Chron has a long story about the disciplinary issues at the Sheriff’s Department. A Houston Chronicle review of Sheriff’s Office discipline reports from 2007 to August provides a sobering look into a department plagued by deputies, jailers and civilians accused of violating laws they are charged to enforce and breaking department policies more than [...]
A better way for law enforcement to deal with the mentally ill
Good. Three Harris County Sheriff’s deputies will have new partners riding shotgun soon, if county officials approve a pilot program pairing them with mental health workers to deal with mentally disturbed suspects. Sheriff Adrian Garcia said he wants to treat the mentally ill, not jail them. “This will help keep those in crisis from becoming [...]
Bailing out the bail bondsmen
It’s not often that the District Clerk makes front page headlines, but ours did late last week. Harris County District Clerk Chris Daniel has not collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in court costs since taking office in January because, critics say, it would hurt business for bail bondsmen who contributed to his campaign. “He’s [...]
More ankle monitors
Harris County will try using ankle monitors on some inmates as a way of reducing the jail population. The program, approved unanimously by Commissioners Court last week, is the county’s latest stab at thinning the jail population. As of Wednesday, the county had 9,850 inmates, including 978 being held in other Texas counties or in [...]
County hires jailers to save money
Harris County Commissioners Court has finally admitted that having an adequate number of jailers is more cost-effective than paying for scads of overtime. Just as Sheriff Garcia has been saying all along. Sheriff Adrian Garcia’s payroll was a contentious issue last year. More than once, Garcia asked permission to add employees, saying shortages exacerbated by [...]
Still talking about jail overcrowding
Here’s another op-ed about jail overcrowding in Harris County and what to do about it. It’s all familiar stuff – we’ve only been talking about this for a million years or so – but I was struck by what wasn’t said. Harris County has made strides to safely reduce the jail population. Harris County District [...]
We’re still not bonding out enough people
I’m sure this will make a lot of people uncomfortable. More than 15,000 people were collared in Harris County for misdemeanors in the final months of 2010, but 70 percent of white inmates were released on bond before trial, compared to 50 percent or less of Hispanics and African-Americans, a new report critical of detention [...]
Ankle monitors
Also on the Commissioners Court agenda this week, Harris County will take another small step towards reducing its jail population by experimenting with ankle monitors for low-risk inmates. Commissioners Court granted Sheriff Adrian Garcia permission Tuesday to do a trial run on 10 to 20 inmates who work outside the jail under armed guard. If [...]
State cuts will equal local costs
Grits is absolutely right: Cuts to state mental hospitals would be a massive unfunded mandate for county jails. [S]heriffs across Texas are increasingly frustrated and worried about the ever-decreasing amount of bed space available at state mental hospitals. Too often, when mentally ill offenders come to their jails, sheriffs who are required to provide appropriate [...]
The cost of jailing parole violators
We sure do spend a lot of money putting people in jail that don’t really need to be there. Each month, an average of 2,286 state parole violators are housed in Texas jails, a policy costing taxpayers at least $42 million a year. Harris County has the largest tab — estimated at $7.6 million. This [...]
It’s getting cheaper to outsource inmates
Now how much would you pay to ship your excess inmates somewhere else? The county now can send an inmate to Louisiana for as low as $23 a day. Changes to the deal with the private Emerald Correctional Management also now have the company picking up the transportation tab that Harris County used to pay. [...]
Pretrial services
Interesting story about one of the many ways the county’s budget shortfall is manifesting itself. With the blessing of the county attorney’s office, Harris County Pretrial Services has stopped supervising inmates let out of jail on bail, forcing bail bondsmen to more closely monitor their clients and sending judges scrambling to find someone to keep [...]
The county’s financial picture is pretty grim, too
This, too, is ugly. County budget officials are looking for more than $130 million in spending cuts for the fiscal year that begins on March 1. Budget officials and county government department chiefs have three months to come up with a plan for how much and where to cut. Commissioners Court then will adopt and, [...]
How much would you pay for those inmates?
Harris County has a new plan for dealing with its overflow jail population. Under the new plan, the county’s purchasing agent would ask for all interested bidders to submit their lowest prices for taking inmates, much like it does for the construction of a road. The bid specifications state that the contract is worth as [...]
The county’s budget woes
Don’t look now, but Harris County is running really low on cash. The $154 million reserve fund Harris County started its fiscal year with is expected to be nearly gone by March as it gets spent to cover shortfalls in property tax collections. Budget projections released Tuesday show the county entering the fiscal year that [...]