Harris County Jail fails inspection
A lack of staff to care for inmates is cited; sheriff ’s office will need to submit remedies
The Harris County Jail has again been found to be noncompliant with state standards, in part because the jail doesn’t have enough staff to watch and care for the thousands of inmates held in custody every day, officials said Friday.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office on Friday afternoon announced that it had failed a weeklong comprehensive inspection conducted by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards and will remain one of 13 Texas jails considered noncompliant with state rules.
As a result of the inspection, the sheriff’s office will need to create a plan to correct its deficits and submit it to the state within 30 days.
“We take the results of the inspection very seriously and appreciate the guidance,” Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said in a statement. “We are actively working in all areas of our detentions system to put corrective plans in place, and with proper staffing to handle the overcrowded jail population, we can promptly address the deficiencies.”
In its statement, the sheriff ’s office said it was told that “the jail needs more staff to properly serve the people ordered into custody.”
The agency had about 250 vacancies for jail detentions officers and jail deputies, and Harris Health, which provides medical care in the jail, has also struggled to hire nurses and other providers to meet demand. The sheriff’s office said jail populations are at their highest point in more than 10 years and blamed a backlog of unresolved cases in the Harris County court system.
The jail was specifically cited for not performing timely visual checks on prisoners and for the long time it takes for people to be booked into the jail. The inspection also knocked the jail’s health care performance in triaging patients in nonemergency situations and said that in two instances, inmates didn’t received their prescribed medications on time.
There were 9,834 inmates in the jail as of Thursday, according to the county’s jail population dashboard. About 3,000 inmates receive psychotropic medication, according to the jail data.
It’s not the first time the jail has been found out of compliance with the problems identified Friday. In September, the commission found that the jail was holding people in booking areas for more than the maximum allowed 48 hours after their arrest. In December 2020, the jail was also cited over its lack of visual checks.
Between 2016 and 2018, the jail was found out of compliance with state rules five times.
The most recent inspection found that there had been improvements in overall cleanliness and that people in the jail
“seemed to have a more positive disposition than they had observed in the past,” according to the sheriff ’s office.
In an email Friday afternoon, commission Executive Director Brandon Wood said the most recent inspection of the jail was preliminary and had not yet been approved by him. He said he wouldn’t comment on the preliminary report but that a final report would be made public.
The sheriff ’s office said it expected the final report to be published in “coming days.”