County jail likened to ‘modern-day Alcatraz’
Those who know lockup offer grim look at chaos, overcrowding
Not long after I got sent to prison in New York, I began hearing horror stories from women who’d come upstate from Rikers Island, the East River jail complex synonymous with violence, gangs and sex abuse.
It was only a jail, and we were the supposedly hardened criminals of a state prison — but even we referred to New York City’s notorious lockup as the Wild West.
That was back in 2010, and since then the conditions at Rikers have only gotten worse. But now that I’m out of prison and working as a reporter, I investigate prisons and jail for a living. And these days, it seems there’s a lockup much closer to home that’s drawing comparisons to the Wild West: the Harris County Jail. Over the last few weeks, I’ve filed records requests, chased down internal jail records and talked to lawyers, advocates, former detainees and jail employees. They all paint a similarly bleak picture.
“It’s a modern-day Alcatraz,” said David Cuevas, president of the Harris County Sheriff ’s Office deputies union. “The conditions are untenable for both employees and offenders — we are in a human rights crisis.”
The jail population recently surpassed 10,000 for the first time in over a decade. Dozens of detainees are sleeping on processing center floors or in bed-less holding cells inside underground tunnels. In September, the state flagged the jail as out of compliance for the eighth time in five years, and jail officials say they’re more than 100 officers short. Staff have alleged they’re spread so thin that sometimes they can’t get bathroom breaks and sometimes have to urinate in bags. In the past year, a 60-year-old sergeant was raped in her office, nearly a dozen guards were fired for allegedly beating an inmate to death and — in an incident that has not been previously reported — a woman who was so mentally ill that officers repeatedly spotted her drinking toilet water gave birth alone in her cell. Later, after jail staff took her to the hospital, she allegedly attacked the baby and began stomping on the infant’s head before anyone intervened and saved the child. County data shows that over the past 12 months, inmates carried out more than 4,400 assaults on other inmates and more than 1,100 on jail staff. Twenty-one prisoners have died this year as a result of everything from suicide to drug overdose to untreated medical problems.
“It’s worse than Rikers,” said Krish Gundu, executive director of the Texas Jail Project, a nonprofit that advocates for people in jails. “But media coverage has been next to nil.”
Sheriff ’s office spokesman Jason Spencer said officials are well aware of problems at the jail, and he pointed to the ballooning population as a major cause.
“As a sheriff ’s department, we don’t have any control over how quickly people are coming in or when they leave,” he said. “We just have to take care of them when they’re given to us for as long as they’re given to us.”
For people in custody, the problems aren’t hard to spot, even on a short stay. Tayler — who asked to be identified only by her first name — told me about the eight hours she spent going through intake at the Joint Processing Center after a misdemeanor arrest.
When she walked in, the first thing that hit her was the noise.
“There were people screaming, people crying,” she told me. She remembered it was around 3 a.m., and all the lights were on. She spotted some arrestees sleeping on the cement floors and at one point said she watched in shock as staff dragged a screaming man across the
floor for unclear reasons.
The bathroom had no supply of soap or toilet paper, and Tayler said the officer who asked her questions for intake told her not to report any medical needs or injuries.
“She said it would make the process longer for the both of us, so she just told me to say I was OK,” Tayler said.
Though Tayler was released soon after processing, other people I spoke to who ended up in the main jail facilities described conditions that were far worse.
Andre Taylor — a 26-yearold who spent two weeks in a quarantine unit after another arrestee came in with monkeypox in August — said he and the other men in medical isolation were treated “like animals” and had irregular access to phones, meals and showers.
“They were just throwing our food at us because they didn’t want to come in there,” he said. Instead, the staff sent in inmate workers known as trustees. “But sometimes the trustees wouldn’t feed everybody. It’s like they were trying to incite riots.”
Yet it was the lack of showers, he said, that caused the most tension, regularly leading to standoffs with the staff and sometimes violence. At one point, Taylor said, the men weren’t allowed out to wash themselves for five days — and it was during one of those shower-less stretches that he refused to go back in his cell after retrieving his food.
“I just wanted to take a shower,” he said. “I couldn’t do it anymore.”
Instead, he said, staff roughed him up.
Yet as bad as the quarantine pod conditions were, Taylor said, “general population” sounded worse. During his time in custody, Taylor met elderly prisoners who said they’d feigned illness to get sent to quarantine, hoping that solitary confinement would offer some reprieve from the chaos.
“They were pretending that they had COVID to be safe,” he said.
To Ethan Hamrick, a 25year-old who spent nearly seven months in general population before prosecutors dropped the charges against him, Taylor’s account was not surprising.
During his time in custody, Hamrick said, he witnessed at least one stabbing and regularly saw inmates attack one another using boiling water as a weapon.
“That happens on a daily basis,” he said. “I saw people get jumped to the point where they were naked and screaming for help.”
To Hamrick — who says he’s now turned his life around — the overcrowded conditions and constant violence seemed far worse than during his past stints in jail.
“It’s packed to full capacity, and they’re running out of space,” he said. “People are in these small, confined areas and they’re not leaving to go to any type of recreation at all.”
With nothing else to do, young men — many of whom were facing violent charges and lengthy prison sentences — started forming gangs and began extorting older and weaker prisoners, sometimes attacking them for commissary or access to a coveted bottom bunk, Hamrick said. Horror stories about fights and gangs are a little more common in the state’s prisons, but Hamrick said the jail wasn’t like that in the past.
That uptick in violence may be partly a result of the changing jail population; ever since misdemeanor bail reform took hold, fewer people facing lowlevel charges are stuck behind bars. Though the overcrowding would have been far worse without that reform, the changes also mean that those who remain in the jail now are often a higher-risk population. According to Spencer, the jail spokesman, roughly threequarters of people currently in the jail are facing charges involving violence.
“Because of COVID protocols,” he said, “the single cells that would normally be used to separate violent offenders we’re having to use for quarantine — so that’s a factor. The bottom line is we have way too many people in the jail to run the place.”
Several local attorneys told me that lately they’ve been fielding a rising number of complaints about beatings, medical neglect and unsanitary conditions. One said guards put his client in a cell with standing sewage for half an hour, while another said his clients have begun warning their families not to send money, fearing it’ll just make them targets for extortion.
“It has always been very bad in the jail, and we never thought it could get worse, but here we are,” civil rights lawyer U.A. Lewis told me. Right now, Lewis is handling multiple suits against the jail, including one brought by the family of a man who died alone in his cell last year after he caught COVID while serving a 90-day probation violation. Nobody noticed he was dead until officers came to get him for visitation, Lewis said.
Earlier this month, another civil rights attorney, Randall Kallinen, filed a suit on behalf of the family of 19-year-old
Fred Harris, a special needs detainee who died last year after his much bigger cellmate allegedly beat and stabbed him to death and guards failed to intervene.
In another case Kallinen is investigating, a man ended up in the hospital with his jaw wired shut after several other detainees allegedly beat him on the sixth floor of the main jail on Baker Street.
“Way more people than before have been contacting me about being injured in the Harris County Jail,” Kallinen said. “I get calls from mothers and sometimes from clients themselves. It’s the worst it’s been in years just based on the people who call me.”
When I started writing this piece, I aimed to find out whether the conditions behind bars were really as bad as one inmate described in a letter to the Chronicle published several weeks ago. In it, an incarcerated man named Ted Ogg painted the picture of a chaotic facility run by inmates, flooded with drugs and largely devoid of medical care.
“It’s nothing like one sees on television or in news photographs,” he wrote. “Rest is rare. Peace or quiet is nonexistent. Hope is fleeting.”
As a former prisoner, I knew what he meant. If you haven’t done time, maybe it’s hard to fully understand — but abysmal conditions behind bars aren’t just inconvenient or uncomfortable. They’re demoralizing. They rob you of your basic sense of humanity. They do not help to create people who are able to be better and safer members of our community.
Yet, as a reporter who now covers prisons, I also knew that many people would never believe him. So I started making calls. I spoke with more than a dozen advocates, lawyers and former prisoners and found they offered similar assessments. But when I called union officials and sheriff ’s office staff, I found their assessments were even more dire.
“It’s against policy to bring in a knife or any type of weapon,” said a female jail employee. “But I always kept my knife on me.”
She said that practice was “common” among detention officers, who now fear attacks from desperate inmates.
“It’s chaos in that place,” said another jail employee, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. “The inmates are in charge. They’re selling drugs through CashApp. They’re jumping in gangs.”
Last month’s letter to the Chronicle showed only a “very small portion of what’s happening,” she said. The actual conditions are “25 times worse.”
As she continued to describe what she’d seen, I thought to myself: This sounds like the Wild West. Like Rikers Island.
But there’s one big difference: Rikers Island has fewer inmates than it’s had in years, while the Harris County Jail is bursting at the seams.
The possible reasons for that are numerous: Some people I talked to blamed major slowdowns in the justice system because of Hurricane Harvey and the pandemic, which clogged the legal system and created a backlog. Others said there simply weren’t enough courts, and still others pointed to state legislation that made it harder to bail people out of jail. But to some extent, the exact cause doesn’t matter if people aren’t paying attention.
And when I scan the internet and look at the furor around Rikers compared with the hush around Harris County, it seems like almost no one is.