Jail’s vocational classes change course for women
County lockup’s job-training expands after being male-only for decades
Tamara Ortiz was in jail last year when she found out. The engine of her beloved Ford Focus — the car she shared with her ailing father — had gone up in flames.
It seemed like a fitting symbol.
The 35-year-old had lost her kids, had no job and stood accused of felony drug possession. She got lucky and walked away with probation, but she didn’t stay sober. Now, she’s back in jail — and facing a new charge.
“They say to change people, places and things,” she said, shaking her head. “I should have.”
This time, though, she might be able to change something else. Last month, Ortiz became one of the first women allowed in the jail’s auto repair vocational program, an offering open only to men for the past four and a half decades.
The expanded programming comes amid a nationwide shift in thinking. After years of watching female incarceration numbers balloon, more jails are striving to be “gender-responsive” by offer
ing services tailored to women’s needs.
In Harris County, the change is also a result of last year’s sweeping bail reform, which helped lower the jail population — and cleared out many of the low-risk inmates eligible for vocational programs. Faced with a dwindling number of participants, the jail decided to start offering the classes to women in its custody.
The way Sheriff Ed Gonzalez sees it, it could be the first step in a broader series of changes.
“Corrections historically has been so slow about moving on this issue,” said Gonzalez, a Democrat in his third year in office. “When you’re talking about mass incarceration, punishment seems to be the operative word, and I just don’t agree with that. I think we need to change course.”
Looking for work
The Harris County Jail launched its first vocational programs, a forward-thinking initiative run in partnership with Houston Community College and funding reimbursement from the state, in the mid-1970s. Then housed at the same facility as the old Atascocita boot camp, the first choices included GED, welding and auto body repair.
“It was pretty progressive to have that type of program there,” said Robert Sims, the college’s corrections education director.
Over time, jailers and inmates embraced the programs and officials expanded them. But when the boot camp closed down in the early 2000s and the programming moved downtown to the domain of Capt. Ronny Taylor of the sheriff’s office, he was baffled to find out the offerings included everything from leathercraft to animal husbandry.
“My secretary started giving me bills for hay and feed,” he said, “and I was like, ‘We’re a jail — how do we have these bills?’ ”
Since then, the programming options have changed with the times. Animal husbandry fell by the wayside when the instructor retired, and most inmates from Houston weren’t finding future careers in farming.
The leathercraft class was deemed obsolete when the deputies stopped wearing Justin Roper cowboy boots in favor of rubber and vinyl shoes. Officials cut the upholstery courses when they realized it was cheaper for people to buy new furniture than to reupholster old sofas and love seats. And a few years ago, the radio and TV repair classes gave way to something now more useful: computer repair.
“Our goal is to give these guys training where they can go get a job,” Sims said.
Trying to make ends meet
The first car Ortiz owned was a rickety, tan Buick with high mileage and a missing seat. At the time, the Pasadena teen was working minimum-wage jobs, and she just needed something with wheels to get her to and from work.
The daughter of a school crossing guard and a mechanic, Ortiz was born into a life with few frills. She dropped out of school in the ninth grade; she didn’t like her classmates and persuaded her mom to let her stop going as long as she agreed to get a GED diploma, or high school equivalency. She never got it. Instead, she got a job at the market next door, hoping to help out with expenses.
“We were just trying to make ends meet,” she said.
Ortiz bounced around from job to job — Jack in the Box, McDonald’s, a now-defunct grocery store. She didn’t have the experience to land something better, and when she had her first child at 19, the possibility of finishing school became even more challenging.
At the time, she said, her husband made enough money that they could get by and she could be a stay-at-home mom. Her family helped out some, and she got her dream car: a stick-shift, gray 1984 BMW. After a second child, she and her husband got a Ford Escape — a better family vehicle. For a while, life was good. But in 2009, her marriage fell apart, and life began to change.
Remembering it all on a recent morning last month as she stood in the Crites Street vocational building in her orange jail scrubs, Ortiz sighed heavily before turning back to the rotor in front of her.
Room for more
Currently, there are about 70 inmates in the jail’s vocational classes, and another 400 in the educational programs offered through Houston Community College. Although some of the classroom courses, such as the GED programming at the downtown jails, were already open to women, the more traditional vocational offerings at Crites Street were not.
“I’ve been trying to get women in this program for years,” said Ella Duncan, director of the jail’s inmate services division. “But it was like taboo every time I would mention it.”
Now, every weekday from 6 a.m. to noon, a few dozen men and women learn skills such as welding, printing and design, culinary arts, auto repair, construction and building maintenance. They earn certificates for each module over the course of a six- to eight-week program.
Each class holds 15 to 20 students, but in the wake of bail reform, those numbers are starting to go down. After a federal judge deemed the county’s existing cash bail system unconstitutional and ordered officials to change it, the inmates with low-level charges — those considered minimum-security and thus eligible for vocational programs — weren’t landing in jail anymore.
Taylor noticed the sparsely populated classes during a visit to the Crites building and asked Duncan what they could do about it. That day, she wrote up a proposal to revamp the programs to include women.
Jail officials bought into it. “Historically, what the sheriff’s office had done was look at the low-hanging fruit — the low-level offenders,” Gonzalez said. “And historically with men, there were so many that it made sense to make the program for them.”
‘Go big or go home’
After her divorce, Ortiz got a Chevy Lumina. She held her life together, started dating and held down a job again. But a few years later, in the fallout of her next relationship, she lost custody of her kids and, at 32, fell into hard drugs.
“I was just like, ‘Why not?’ ” she said. “Like they say in Texas: Go big or go home. So I went big.”
She started doing meth and racked up her first narcotics arrest in 2018. It was a low-level charge, and she got out on a personal bond. Two weeks later, she was arrested on a new charge — and that one stuck. She was placed on probation.
“I stayed sober at least four months,” she said. “I wish I could say longer.”
But one day, she said, she was with a friend — a guy who was supposed to give her a ride to probation — and he stopped to smoke some meth.
She joined in and never checked in with her probation officer again, instead partying and running wild until she was arrested early this year with a new charge.
Designed for women
For the past few months, Gonzalez, the sheriff, has been trying to figure out what to do with his jail and how best to serve the roughly 900 women in it. It’s a familiar problem for corrections officials nationwide: Over the past four decades, female prison and jail populations have grown twice as fast as men’s have, but they still live in a prison system built for men.
“Jails just aren’t designed with women in mind,” Gonzalez said. “The 30,000-foot view is that there’s a lot of gender bias in the way we assess women and the way we assess risk.”
Across the country, corrections officials are coming up with progressive plans to create more “gender-responsive” environments that account for differences between men and women when it comes to psychology, trauma, classification and personal histories. Some facilities are just now realizing they need to provide bras and tampons, while others are offering breastfeeding options and programs to let women keep their newborns behind bars.
“Women come into the criminal justice system with very different needs than men,” said Michele Deitch, the University of Texas at Austin lecturer whom Gonzalez credits as a key inspiration for his own interest in change. “They have extremely high rates of trauma. They have high rates of mental illness and substance abuse. If we want to turn around their lives, we need to meet those needs and not further traumatize them while they’re locked up.”
In Harris County, opening up jail programming required logistical accommodations. The bathrooms were all designed for men, and some had to be repurposed. There were no women’s hygiene items at the Crites facility, and officials had to figure out how to transport men and women separately and keep them apart at meal times.
None of it proved insurmountable, and Gonzalez hopes it’s just a start. Now, he’s reviewing everything from how guards are trained to interact with women to whether they’re offering enough access to tampons and sanitary napkins. He’s even talking about redesigning an entire floor to be more tailored to women.
“Everything is on the table at this point,” he said. “I believe in disruption — it just takes a while.”
‘Every moment is precious’
When she gets out — whenever that is — Ortiz knows she’ll need a car.
It’ll take some money, her newly honed mechanical skills and a new engine — but there’s a sentimental value to the old Ford. It’s the last car she used with her mother, who died last year. And it could be the last car she shares with her father, who is dying of mesothelioma.
“I don’t know how much longer I have with him,” she said. “Every moment is precious.”
Together, she hopes, they’ll put in a new engine, working side by side. Maybe she’ll start fixing cars with him for a living and maybe it’ll be the first step toward picking up the pieces and staying off drugs for good.
“I do want to be sober, I really do,” she said. “I’m not getting any younger.”