Overcrowded jail

New money will be spent on old ideas for reducing the inmate population.

A bus to Beaumont costs about $20, and Texarkana will set you back around $30. But for Harris County, it’ll cost about $180,000 a month.

Our jail is overcrowded, and Sheriff Ron Hickman has responded by sending 133 inmates to private jails in Jefferson and Bowie counties. This follows on 100 inmates being shipped out in June 2015. Before Hickman took charge, it had been about two years since a Harris County sheriff had to resort to this expensive and disruptive practice.

Now inmates are denied easy access to their attorneys. Family visits become a multi-hour trek. And taxpayers have to cut a check to some other county.

The problems with an overcrowded jail don’t end there. Resources are stretched thin as the sheriff’s office struggles to maintain control of the state’s largest county lockup — and so far it looks like they’re failing. The number of internal inspectors has been cut. Overtime expenses have skyrocketed. Innocent people are dying. Earlier this month, a 46-year-old man, Patrick Joseph Brown, was beaten to death by two other inmates under the vigilant eye of a security camera, but no one was watching the monitor on the other end. Brown had only been in jail for one day accused of stealing a guitar; he hadn’t been convicted.

There are plenty of tools at the sheriff’s disposal to keep the jail population down. Former Sheriff Adrian Garcia used every trick in the book to shorten sentences and keep numbers in check. But, as Hickman has pointed out, the real levers of power sit in the Harris County Criminal Justice Center.

Judges have extensive control over the makeup of our jail, and right now they’ve decided that they want it filled with the presumably innocent. About 75 percent of the people sitting in that cold, fetid tower of concrete haven’t been convicted of a crime. For those sad souls, affording bail is the greatest barrier to freedom. Some people will even spend more time waiting behind bars for their trial then they could ever face in an eventual sentence.

It hasn’t always been like this. In 2001 about 39 percent of people in Harris County jail were waiting for trial. In 2015, it was 60 percent.

The Harris County District Attorney’s Office is finally working to tackle this problem with a $5 million initiative. The stated goals are to reduce racial disparities and improve conditions in the jail, but you don’t have to commission academic studies or borrow from the vanguard policies of progressive enclaves on the coasts to know what Harris County has to do.

We stand alone as the one major county in Texas that doesn’t regularly rely on personal recognizance bonds for low-risk offenders. Most major cities assign PR bonds in about 25 percent of cases. In Harris County, we use it about 5 percent of the time.

Those so-called PR or signature bonds would let people go about their normal lives until their court date, and could reduce the jail population by 67 percent overnight, according to University of Houston law professor Sandra Guerra Thompson. We’re glad that judges are, in the words of state District Judge Susan Brown, “ready to try some new things.” But many of these ideas aren’t new. They’ve been tested all over our state and nation. The pre-trial office has been recommending a greater use of PR bonds for years. It shouldn’t take $5 million to figure this out. After all, a bus ride to Dallas or Travis County only costs a couple bucks.