County eyes probation overhaul
$35M proposal would replace aging residential treatment facility where offenders focus on life skills
It has been more than a decade since Harris County offenders on probation worked out at a military-style compound in Atascosita as part of a defunct program that emphasized exercise and discipline.
Instead of dropping to do pushups, violators now take life-skills and education classes — strategies viewed as better-suited for keeping probationers with substance abuse and mental disorders from cycling back into jail.
But the 24-acre complex itself is still a relic of the boot-camp era, complete with unused ropes and obstacle course languishing in the back and a series of corrugated metal buildings and white tents serving as dorms.
And with capacity far exceeding demand and offenders facing a perennial wait list, county officials want an overhaul. They are pushing to raze the existing boot camp and build a modern facility that would nearly double the county’s capacity.
The initiative reflects a national movement to reduce recidivism and costs of incarceration, with even Republican lawmakers in states such as Texas and Georgia seeking to shift away from repeatedly seeking jail time as the end-all solution, particularly for nonviolent crimes.
“It’s really getting these people what they need to get back on track,” said Teresa May, director of Harris County’s department of community supervision and corrections.
To do that, offenders who’ve been given probation as an alternative to jail need to brush up on skills that they may never have learned. They spend days attending classes, like those taught by Elisha Enard.
On a recent day, it is time for role-playing in Enard’s classroom, where she talks about empathy and communication. She plays a probation officer while a man asks if he can be sent home. Not yet, she tells the man.
“Sometimes we have to combine different skills,” Enard explains, referring both to communicating needs while also understanding the emotions of the probation officer, or a significant other.
These types of courses are central to how county officials aim to
reform those on probation suffering from substance abuse or mental health disorders at facilities. It’s a program that can cut recidivism rates from as high as 75 percent for individuals who don’t take the program down to 25 percent, May said.
“Now more than ever, this is something that you’re seeing in more and more municipalities,” said Karen Dugosh, a senior scientist at Treatment Research Institute. “Jails are overcrowded, prisons are overcrowded. When individuals have these underlying conditions and you’re not addressing them, they’re just going to cycle in and out of the jail and prison system.”
Risk assessments
The county’s community supervision department has come a long way in recent years. The Atascosita complex was built in 1991, when boot-camp programs were common in the country and before they were deemed largely ineffective. Harris County scrapped the program in 2004.
The agency was mired in a scandal in 2012, with revelations that its overburdened drugtesting program had led to the wrongful jailing of some probationers and defendants awaiting trial based on false positives.
May took over the department in 2013. She implemented the risk-assessment screening for those sentenced to probation. It sends those considered at a “high” or “moderate” risk of getting re-arrested — based on criminal history, education level and family and social support, among other factors — to the Atascosita complex or to a similar program in downtown Houston.
The community supervision department oversees close to 45,000 offenders on probation — two-thirds of whom have committed felonies.
The Harris County Jail, one of the largest and most-crowded in the country, houses roughly 9,000 inmates every day.
Almost 300 people are on a waiting list for residential treatment programs like those run at Atascosita. Eighty percent of those are waiting in jail, according to county statistics.
The county’s residential treatment programs for probationers run about four to six months, May said. They are mostly felony cases, with some misdemeanors.
Funding source uncertain
The program works, said Rik Ramon, 52, who was arrested and charged with drunken driving in June in Harris County and later convicted. He has spent about three months at Atascosita, learning about helping others and leading an Alcoholics Anonymous group there. He said he will continue being involved in AA after he gets out, likely at the end of March.
“I’m looking forward to getting back to my family,” he said.
The question for the county’s expansion plans, now, is where the money will come from. The county’s proposal would require $30 million to $35 million in county funds to knock down everything at Atascosita, rebuild and consolidate its downtown operations there. The county has already spent about $3.5 million on design and engineering for the project, May said.
That would also set the facility up to bring in local businesses — builders, contractors, landscapers — looking to hire, May said.
The plan would almost double the overall capacity from 630 beds to 1,000, which county officials estimate would increase the number of people diverted from jail from 1,775 to 3,110 each year. That, in turn, would result in $17.2 million in annual savings.
The state provides funding for the program, which has remained at roughly $11.9 million annually for years. County officials are seeking $5.7 million more from Texas to fund the new operations.
“It’s a tough session,” May said. She acknowledged that “the last thing the Legislature wants to pay for now is more prisons and more prison beds.”