Harris County Jail passes state inspection for the first time in two years

For the first time in nearly two years, the Harris County Jail has met Texas minimum security standards, a significant achievement for the long-troubled facility.

The jail, operated by the Harris County Sheriff's Office, received a certificate of compliance from the Texas Commission on Jail Standards last week after passing a four-day inspection.

The Harris County Jail has been deemed noncompliant with Texas minimum security standards since September 2022, when an inspection found dozens of inmates waiting in cells for more than 48 hours to be processed, a violation of state law. Follow-up inspections found understaffing, inadequate medical care and lax monitoring of a person who died in the jail.

To solve these problems, the Harris County Sheriff's Office hired dozens of people and transferred hundreds of inmates awaiting trial from the overcrowded center to other jails. The Sheriff's Office's recent actions have cost taxpayers dearly, however, with up to $50 million spent on housing people in other agencies' jails.

The certificate of compliance represents a notable development for the jail, which for years has faced allegations of mismanagement and overcrowding, exacerbated by a backlog of cases in the Harris County criminal court system.

“While receiving a passing grade from the state is an important accomplishment, it has never been our primary goal,” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said in a statement. “What's more important is knowing that we are doing everything in our power to make the jail safe and secure for the thousands of people in our care and for everyone who works within the jail walls.”

While giving the Harris County Jail a satisfactory rating, state inspectors provided “technical assistance” on four fronts.

During the inspection, conducted August 12-15, inspectors found that the sheriff's office had improperly included detention officers who responded to emergencies and transported inmates to court hearings in the state's required staffing ratio of one detention officer per 48 inmates.

Inspectors also found that two fire alarm control panels needed to be replaced and that prison staff were late in completing 15 routine checks on inmates, although this represents less than one percent of the 15,668 rounds inspectors checked.

“Failure to address technical assistance areas in a timely manner may result in the issuance of a notice of non-compliance,” inspectors wrote in a report.

Great progress or barely better?

There were 9,350 inmates in the Harris County Jail as of Monday, according to the county's data dashboard, and more than 1,300 were housed in facilities near Lubbock, central Louisiana and northwest Mississippi. Harris County Jail facilities are designed to hold up to 9,400 inmates.

Phillip Bosquez, deputy chief of the jail squad for the Harris County Sheriff's Office, said during a jail commission meeting earlier this month that the number of jail guard vacancies has dropped from 180 to 139 in the past three months. He attributed this to a 12 percent pay raise approved by Harris County Commissioners last year and said it was an effort to attract new staff.

The improvements coincided with a decline in prison deaths this year. Seven inmates have died so far in 2024, most recently a 49-year-old man on Monday. The sixth death in custody at the prison occurred on Aug. 12. By comparison, there were 19 inmate deaths in 2023 and 27 in 2022.

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“There is ample evidence that we have made great progress in meeting this higher standard,” Gonzalez said in his statement. “For the second year in a row, we have seen a significant decrease in the death rate among inmates at our prison. We have also seen an increase in the retention rate of our prison guards, which is a sign that working conditions are improving.”

Krish Gundu, executive director of the Texas Jail Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates for county jail inmates, said in a statement that she found the timing of the issuance of the certificate of compliance and the recent prison deaths ironic.

Gundu also said she found it “deeply disturbing” that prison commission inspectors provided technical assistance to the sheriff's office during the August prison inspection and that the agency “still barely meets” required staff-to-inmate ratios.

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