Overcrowded Texas prisons are packed with inmates – many are extradited to other states

By Ella Rose Lipton

AUSTIN, TX – Jess Hampton was wrongfully accused of child abuse in East Texas and deported 100 miles away. He has spent 11 months in a Louisiana prison cell waiting for the day he can finally return home, the Texas Tribune's Pooja Salhotra reports.

Unfortunately, Hampton's case is not an isolated one.

The Texas Tribune reports that prisons across Texas are unable to adequately house the high inmate population, resulting in millions of taxpayer dollars being spent on “transporting (inmates), many of whom have not yet been tried and are legally presumed innocent. Some are sent to neighboring counties, others are bused across state lines.”

Hampton's innocence is a given, and this is backed up by the thorough investigation by Child Protective Services, which supports Hampton's claim that the abuse “never happened.” Yet his bail remains unchanged – $250,000 – far below the amount the Hampton family can afford, The Texas Tribune explains.

Hampton is a war veteran and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Tribune writes. However, his mental health was not a priority because prisons are not equipped to support the mental health of inmates.

The distance presents additional obstacles for Hampton because his now-fired Texas-based lawyers failed to appear at one of Hampton's hearings, Salhotra said.

The Texas Tribune explains that the situation is getting worse and worse, exacerbated by the state's inflexible laws and institutions, such as the mental health care system. “The system essentially forces prisons to take in psychiatric patients even though they don't have the resources to do so.”

According to an analysis by the Texas Tribune, while crime rates have continued to fall since 2020, incarceration rates have risen sharply, and “the number of county jails in Texas holding (inmates) elsewhere (out of state or country)” have “increased by 10 percent, according to data from the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.”

To counter the rising incarceration rate and the transfer of prisoners to alternative prisons, “law enforcement officials say there is a need to increase space in prisons,” Salhotra explains.

Civil rights activists and criminal defense lawyers argue, however: “The state should invest more in mental health and alternatives to incarceration and adjust its bail policies so that the decision about who is released pending trial is not actually based on the person's wealth,” reports the Texas Tribune.

Krish Gundu, co-founder of the Texas Jail Project, which advocates for people in Texas county jails, says law enforcement should try to understand why people end up in prison and argues that they need to “get to the root of the problem.” Law enforcement agencies, which answer to the Republican-dominated Texas legislature, “are unlikely to follow their advice,” says author Salhotra.

According to The Texas Tribune, “The state has long relied heavily on prisons to control crime and maintain law and order. Texas has 751 prisoners per 100,000 residents, one of the highest rates in the United States, according to a recent report from the Prison Policy Initiative.”

Andrew Mahaleris, press secretary for Gov. Greg Abbott, said in an email to The Texas Tribune, “Governor Abbott will continue to work with the Legislature to end the revolving door bail policy and keep dangerous criminals off our streets.”

According to Salhotra, Mahaleris failed to “answer questions about how the state will respond to prison overcrowding. The governor appoints the nine members of the TCJS, which conducts regular inspections of all county jails.”

Salhotra traveled to the Harris County Jail to gather more information and reported that it “did not appear overcrowded… A cell block that could have held 70 people but housed fewer than 50, the infirmary was nearly empty, and everyone admitted had a place to sit. And yet about 2,000 of the county's roughly 9,300 (inmates) were housed in facilities as far away as Tutwiler, Mississippi, and Olla, Louisiana.”

Salhotra explains that the Harris County Jail alone spends approximately $50 million on transporting/housing inmates across various facilities. Salhotra notes that this problem is largely due to “a persistent staffing shortage.”

According to Salhotra, Dustin Fawcett, Ector County Judge and county executive, explains: “To compensate for the problem of prison guards, everyone is raising prison guard salaries, which means the cost of housing” the inmates goes up, which increases overall costs.

According to Fawcett, the government provides “little help.”

Salhotra writes that most detainees have not yet been convicted or punished, forcing them to “return to the county where they were arrested for court hearings. In 2023, the county spent about $91,000 on (detainee) transportation costs, according to county records.”

While supporters of the defendants say the state should arrest fewer people, Wallace, the Trinity County sheriff, said, “People need to be arrested for minor offenses to keep them from committing more serious crimes,” Salhotra reports.

“If someone spends a few weeks or 30 days in jail, they may say, 'I don't like this,' and may not be convicted of a serious crime,” Wallace said.

Wallace agrees with Texas Republicans, who control both houses of the legislature and all state offices, Salhotra reports. He adds that the policies pushed by Republicans result in people staying in prison longer and that “judges are prohibited from releasing people charged with violent crimes from prison unless they post cash bail or a portion of that amount to a bail bond company.”

Supporters say the law keeps dangerous people off the streets. Critics say the law disproportionately affects poorer defendants who have not yet been convicted, according to the Texas Tribune article.

As The Texas Tribune reports, prisons have become “the largest source of mental health care in the state.” “Inadequate or inaccessible community-based mental health care means that police officers are often the first to respond when a person is in crisis.”

Unable to receive treatment from doctors, people are arrested for criminal behavior and their underlying mental health issues go untreated, Salhotra writes, adding: “As of June 14, 1,173 prison inmates were on the waiting list for a bed in a state mental hospital. These beds are reserved for people deemed unfit to stand trial.”

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AUSTIN TX Jess Hampton Louisiana jail cells unable to adequately accommodate high inmate population The Texas Tribune