Texas' overcrowded and understaffed jails send people awaiting trial to other counties and states

Two Saturdays a month, Sorcha Costigan climbs into her Jeep and drives 100 miles from Sabine County into Louisiana, all the while worrying about another vehicle part malfunctioning and how much the gas is going to cost.

It’s important to her, though, to see her husband as much as possible. Jess Hampton is being held at Louisiana Workforce, a private prison in DeQuincy, Louisiana, even though he is charged with child abuse in East Texas.

Hampton adamantly claims he’s innocent, but he can’t afford the $250,000 bond to secure his release before his case is resolved. And the distance between where he’s locked up and where his criminal proceedings are playing out has made it difficult to connect with his lawyers. Even after a Child Protective Services investigation found that the abuse Hampton is accused of committing never occurred, he couldn’t get his bond reduced further.

His attorney at the time, based in Nacogdoches County, didn’t show up to the hearing.

“He never presented one scrap of evidence, nor did he ever respond to any of my requests for contact,” said Costigan, who has been advocating for Hampton during the nearly eleven months he has been incarcerated far from home.

Every day across Texas, counties as large as Harris and as small as Sabine struggle to properly house the people held in their jails. So they spend millions in tax dollars transporting inmates, many of whom have yet to stand trial and are legally considered innocent. Some are sent to neighboring counties; others are bused across state lines.

A combination of factors is worsening the situation. Solutions prove elusive. And people like Hampton and Costigan are bearing the consequences.

The number of Texas inmates who were housed outside of their county of arrest surged from 2,078 in June 2019 to 4,358 in June 2024, according to a Texas Tribune analysis. The number of counties relying on outsourcing has also risen. In June 2010, 31% of Texas county jails housed inmates elsewhere. In June 2024, 41% counties did so, according to data kept by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.

“Counties are having to think outside the box,” said Ricky Armstrong, assistant director of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. “We know there are some counties housing people out of state. It’s not something we recommend or encourage, but we see that as a necessary evil.”

Several factors are worsening the situation. The number of new jail cells in Texas isn’t keeping pace with the state’s explosive population growth. Several counties are still trying to dig themselves out of the caseload log jam the COVID-19 pandemic caused.

A 2021 state law limiting who can be released while awaiting trial is increasing the number of people in jails and lengthening the amount of time they stay there. So, too, is the overburdened mental health system in the state, which essentially forces jails to take on psychiatric care even though they are ill-equipped to do so.

And finding jailers is difficult — which exacerbates the problem because under state jail standards, fewer jailers means lock-ups have to lower the number of inmates they hold, even if there are cells available.

Meanwhile, violent crime rates did increase in recent years, but appear to have peaked in 2020 and have since gone down.

“It’s very difficult to know exactly what is driving incarceration rates, but typically it’s not crime rates,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst, who cautioned against drawing a direct connection between the amount of crime in a community and the size of its jail population. “It’s more about enforcement.”

Law enforcement officials say jail space must increase, though residents opposed to tax increases to fund expensive construction costs hamper those efforts.

Civil rights advocates and defense lawyers argue that the state should invest more heavily in mental health support and alternatives to incarceration. They also say the state should adjust its bail policies so decisions about who is freed until trial are not effectively based on a person’s wealth.

“We are addicted to carceral solutions,” said Krish Gundu, co-founder of the Texas Jail Project, which advocates for people in Texas county jails. “If we really cared about not having these people in jails, you’d look at why they are ending up in jail and solve the problem at the root.” But Texas’ Republican-controlled Legislature is unlikely to follow their advice. The state has a long history of relying heavily on incarceration to control crime and to maintain law and order. Texas locks up 751 per 100,000 of their residents, one of the higher rates in the United States, according to a recent report from the Prison Policy Initiative.

“Texas has been, and always will be a law and order state, and criminals must know that justice is awaiting them,” Gov. Greg Abbott ’s press secretary, Andrew Mahaleris, told The Texas Tribune in an email. “Gov. Abbott will continue to work with the legislature to end revolving door bail policies and keep dangerous criminals off our streets.”

Abbott’s office did not answer questions about how the state will respond to jail overcrowding. The governor appoints the nine members of TCJS, which conducts regular inspections of all county jails.

“Some of the ones that do have available beds struggle with staffing issues,” Brandon Wood, the agency’s executive director, said at a TCJS meeting this month. “We will continue to study the issue.”

Staffing challenges

On a Thursday morning in April, the processing center at Harris County Jail did not appear overcrowded. A cell block that could accommodate 70 people housed under 50, the infirmary was nearly empty, and everyone in intake had a place to sit. And yet about 2,000 of the county’s roughly 9,300 inmates were being housed in facilities as far away as Tutwiler, Mississippi and Olla, Louisiana.

This costs the county roughly $50 million per year and is in part due to a persistent staffing shortage. Harris County Jail is approved to hold up to 9,448 inmates — but only if they have enough guards to monitor them.

A staffing shortage is one of many reasons — along with failures to provide medication and extended stays in holding cells — that the jail has been out of compliance with state standards since September 2022. The state’s regulatory body mandates a minimum of one jailer per 48 inmates.

Staffing has always been a challenge, said Jason Spencer, the chief of staff for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. But the issue worsened with the 2020 uptick in violent crime.

“That creates more tension in the jail, and makes it a tougher place to work,” Spencer said.

He added that a higher proportion of people in the jail are accused of murder and are more difficult to manage. About one-third of detention officers quit each year in Harris County. But the number of people awaiting trial in Harris County has grown at the same time, stemming from a backlog first created by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an effort to increase jailer recruitment and retention, Harris County increased the starting pay for detention officers from under $19.99 an hour to $22.39 an hour. County officials also approved a $2,000 retention bonus.

Phillip Bosquez, who oversees the jail and is assistant chief at Harris County Sheriff’s Office, told state jail officials in May that retention was improving. But this month the jail still had a shortfall of 139 jailers, Bosquez told state jail officials.

Similar situations play out across the state.

“My big issue is that everybody is having this jailer issue,” said Dustin Fawcett, the Ector County judge who is that county’s chief executive. “And so in order to compensate for that jailer issue, everybody is increasing salaries for jailers, which means they are going to increase their cost of housing an inmate.”

Ector County, which sits in the petroleum-rich Permian Basin in West Texas, also increased jailers’ salaries last year. But that didn’t completely solve the staffing shortfall — the county is still short 52 jailers, Fawcett said — and officials have continued sending inmates to other counties for a fee ranging from $55 a day to $80 a day.

The state awarded $125 million in grants to rural sheriffs’ departments and prosecutors earlier this year as part of Senate Bill 22. But Fawcett said the funding isn’t enough.

“It’s a fraction of our budget, and yet we are constitutionally required to have these facilities,” Fawcett said. “There is little help from the state.”

Costs to counties

Trinity County Sheriff Woody Wallace can’t help but feel like his department is wasting taxpayer money.

Nearly $1 million — or roughly 10% — of the rural East Texas county’s budget has been sent to other jurisdictions that house inmates who can’t fit in the jail, which was built in the 1930s to accommodate up to seven inmates. Today, it can hold up to 16 inmates. And in June, Trinity sent 17 inmates to other lock-ups, costing the taxpayers up to $75 per inmate, per day.

Then there’s the cost to transport the inmates.

“We are driving as far as 3.5 hours away,” Wallace said. “I have a small jail staff, and we are having to scramble to find vehicles and people to take them.”

Most people in jail haven’t been convicted or sentenced, so they still have to return to their county of arrest for court hearings. In 2023, the county spent about $91,000 in inmate transportation costs, according to county records.

Sometimes figuring out where to house the overflow population is onerous, Wallace said, since those lock-ups also become overcrowded.

“Just because we have a contract doesn’t mean they’ll accept inmates that day,” he said. “They’ll say not today, maybe tomorrow.”

Since 2022, at least eight counties — Sabine, Harris, Wilbarger, Newton, Chambers, Tyler, Loving and Liberty — have sent their overflow jail population out of state to Louisiana, Oklahoma, Colorado and Mississippi, through contracts costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

“Outsourcing is the single most expensive thing we do as a county,” Daniel Ramos, Harris County budget director said at a Feb. 1 TCJS meeting. “Everything we can do to bring these folks home and have a safe jail is worth the money.”

Disagreement on solutions

Advocates for the criminal defendants say the state should arrest fewer people, especially for minor crimes such as possession of small amounts of marijuana, a Class B misdemeanor in Texas.

“Jail space is a finite resource and we can’t keep expanding it indefinitely,” said Michele Deitch, a senior lecturer at University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law and LBJ School. “The space needs to be for people who are too dangerous.”

But Wallace, the Trinity County sheriff, says people must be arrested for low-level offenses to deter them from committing more serious crimes.

“If someone spends a couple weeks or 30 days in jail, they might say ‘I don’t like this,’ and maybe they won’t graduate to felonies,” Wallace said.

That’s a refrain state lawmakers echo. Republicans control both chambers of the Legislature and every statewide office. Their hardline stance on law and order has translated into policies that keep people in jail for longer. Those policies include Senate Bill 6, which passed in 2021 after Abbott, the governor, made bail-reform an emergency item on the legislative agenda.

SB 6 prohibits judges from letting people accused of violent crimes out of jail unless they pay a cash bond or a portion of that amount to a bail bonds company. Proponents say it keeps dangerous people off the streets. Critics say the law disproportionately impacts poorer defendants who haven’t yet been convicted.

Last year, Abbott pushed for a constitutional amendment to expand the circumstances in which a judge can deny bail. It failed in the House but is expected to be proposed again next year.

Some people fear if that passes, overcrowding and understaffing will only worsen.

“There’s nothing inevitable about the size of a jail population,” Deitch said. “That’s a decision that is made and there are only two things that affect it: how many people are going in and how long they are staying there.”

As jails have filled up, they’ve also become the largest mental health provider in the state. Inadequate or inaccessible community mental health care means that law enforcement officers are often the first to respond when a person faces a crisis.

Instead of being treated by doctors, people end up arrested for criminal behavior, and their underlying mental health issues remain. They then often sit in jail for months until a state mental health bed becomes available.

As of June 14, 1,173 people in jail were on the waitlist for a state mental health bed, which are used for people deemed incompetent to stand trial. The state has allocated money to build more state mental health facilities, but has struggled to adequately staff those facilities.

“Jail is not the place for someone with a mental health issue,” Crockett Police Chief Clayton Smith said during the East Texas Mental Health Summit last year. “Sometimes that’s where that patient ends up because of a lack of beds, but ultimately, jail is not going to help the mental health patient at all.”

Effects of outsourcing

Before the child abuse accusations, Hampton lived a quiet life in Sabine County’s Rosevine community with his partner, Sorcha, and his son. Hampton worked as a farrier and blacksmith, trimming and balancing horses’ hooves. He also sold firewood that he cut and split by hand. In his free time, he enjoyed hiking national forests and kayaking on the lake.

“My philosophy was work hard, play hard and live life,” Hampton wrote in an electronic message from prison.

After a dispute, a family member accused Hampton of sexually abusing a child. A Child Protective Services investigator who followed up on the accusation multiple times and interviewed the child found that the abuse did not occur, according to an August report that Costigan provided The Tribune. An agency spokesperson said the case had been closed and that its details are confidential.

A military veteran, Hampton has fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few years ago, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after his time in combat. Hampton said he learned how to regulate the effects of the disorder, but he’s now noticing a regression.

“Since I’ve been locked up I find it much harder to regulate,” he wrote.

Back home in Rosevine, Costigan does what she can to help with his defense, advocate for his release before a trial, visit him and keep their home running. But it’s not always easy.

“The stove is out, the refrigerator just died, my dryer doesn’t work,” Costigan said.

Hampton could probably fix them. But nobody seems to know how long he’ll be behind bars.

After missing an arraignment hearing, Hampton’s lawyer was one hour late to another court date. Costigan filed a grievance against the attorney, who did not respond to The Tribune’s requests for comment but disputed Costigan’s accusations in a filing to the state bar association.

Hampton is now represented by a court-appointed attorney, who vows to get Hampton’s bond reduced and at least one of the charges against him dismissed.

For now, it’s just a waiting game 100 miles from home.

“I just don’t understand how they are shuttling pre-trial people to Louisiana,” Hampton said. “Do you know how hard it is to prove yourself innocent here?”

This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.