Jail standards commission: Bexar jail understaffed

In the debate between the Bexar County Commissioners Court and the Sheriff over whether the jail is adequately staffed, the state Commission on Jail Standards this week came out with an estimate siding with the Sheriff to say current staffing levels are insufficient without using overtime. Reported the SA Express-News ("State says jail needs additional staff," Feb. 1):

A staffing analysis of Bexar County Jail, recently completed by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, supports Sheriff Amadeo Ortiz's contention that the jail is understaffed, officials said in a news conference Tuesday.

To meet state standards, 801 jailers are required for the jail's current population of about 3,600 inmates, according to the analysis.

An additional 121 uniformed officers are needed to fill what commission Director Adan Muñoz said were essential positions to “operate an efficient facility,” but they aren't required by the state.

The total number of officers needed at the jail, based on the analysis, is 922, which is 92 positions more than Bexar County budgeted for the 2011-2012 fiscal year.

In an interview, County Manager David Smith dismissed the analysis and repeated his call for a study by an independent third party.

If county commissioners don't accept the state commission's findings and adjust the budget accordingly, Muñoz said, the jail “would probably be in noncompliance” for failing to meet the state's minimum jail standards.

“Hardly ever have we been far off from an estimate on how a county should run its jail,” said Muñoz, whose agency was asked by Ortiz to conduct the analysis.

Last week, the state agency conducted an annual inspection of the jail, which passed. The inspection focuses on the required ratio of one officer to 48 inmates, but Ortiz said the facility only passed because officers are working mandatory overtime.

From December 2010 to December 2011, Ortiz said, he approved 41,000 hours of overtime, and he spent $1.2 million in overtime for fiscal year 2010-2011.

He said he plans to stop forcing officers to work overtime soon and will ask the Commissioners Court to accept the analysis and make appropriate staffing changes.

Staffing costs generally are driven by the jail population, which requires at least one guard per 48 inmates. In theory, de-incarceration reduces expenses, but reliance on overtime means the county is paying a 50% premium on core labor costs. I don't understand why reducing the jail population at the Bexar County Jail hasn't reduced staffing needs, but Grits will be surprised if an independent analysis comes in too far below the TCJS estimate of how many jailers are needed.

See related Grits posts:

• Bexar commissioners wonder why 1,000 fewer prisoners brings no budget savings
• Bexar jail personnel problems glaring
• Reduced jail population spurs budget, staffing cuts at Bexar jail, but do they go too far?

Grits commenter played role initiating lawsuit over timely competency restoration

The SA Express News had an editorial today praising a district court ruling last week requiring state mental hospitals to timely accept defendants for "competency restoration" who've been deemed incompetent to stand trial by the courts. Here's a notable excerpt:

In San Antonio, criminal defendants in need of a bed in a state psychiatric facility are routinely spending months in the Bexar County jail waiting for transfer.

Late last week, there were 17 inmates at the Bexar County jail awaiting transfer to a state hospital bed. Some of them have been in the county jail for almost 300 days.

In what many hail as a major court victory for the mentally ill in Texas, state District Judge Orlinda Naranjo has ordered the Department of State Health Services to transfer defendants who have been ruled incompetent to stand trial due to mental illness to a state psychiatric hospital within 21 days of receiving a judge's order, the Austin American Statesman reported.

That is indeed great news for advocates and the families of defendants with mental health problems who have fought long and hard against the criminalization of the mentally ill. Mental health patients need treatment and should not be held in local lockups. On average, mentally incompetent prisoners are spending up to six months in jail before being transferred to a state hospital.

The state attorney general's office has not yet decided if it will appeal the judge's ruling.

Complying with the judge's order will be a major undertaking. Over the last two years, there has been a waiting list of about 400 inmates for the 800 available state hospital beds.

I had forgotten about the backstory to this lawsuit when Grits wrote about it on Friday, but as it turns out this litigation actually originated - believe it or not - from a comment posted on this blog. As recounted in this 2006 post, the group Advocacy Inc. (which has now changed its name to Disability Rights Texas) first learned about the issue from  a Grits post, filing the lawsuit after investigating the case of a commenter who turned out to be an attorney with an incompetent client. Of course, Beth Mitchell and the lawyers at Disability Rights Texas did all the work, and the situation is so messed up that surely litigation was inevitable, anyway. But I'm pleased as punch at the small role this blog played in initiating the process.

MORE: From the Texas Observer.

Who watches for sleepers when watchers sleep?

Brilliant! When the "Occupy" movement came to San Antonio and took up residence in a downtown park, the city sent a parks-police officer to the protest site to enforce the city's ban on sleeping there. The protesters snapped photos of the poor fellow (who of course didn't ask for the assignment of harassing  "Occupy" protesters) while sleeping on the job. KENS-TV reported that "the officer was supposed to be keeping an eye on the Occupy camp to make sure that the protesters didn't fall asleep, and to write them tickets if they did." In other words, he'd have probably done more harm had he been awake. Via Injustice Everywhere. Related: See "Police v. OWS," from The Crime Report. See also: Matthew 7:3. Your tax dollars at work, San Antonio.

Bexar commissioners wonder why 1,000 fewer prisoners in jail brings no budget savings

Grits wrote on Sunday that it's "almost becoming the norm in Texas jails to understaff them considerably and make up the difference paying overtime at time-and-a-half." I was writing about the jail in Midland, but the same thing's going on, reports the SA Express News ("Disputes over jail staffing may move closer to resolution," Dec. 20) at the Bexar County Jail in San Antonio, much to the commissioners court's consternation. The story opens:

Guards are being forced to work excessive overtime and will continue to steadily quit as their morale hits all-time lows, the consequence of cutting 100 positions at the Bexar County Jail through attrition, warns Sheriff Amadeo Ortiz.

But ask county commissioners and County Manager David Smith, and they'll tell you the mandatory overtime is unnecessary, the jail is mismanaged and wastes money, and the 2012 budget cuts reflect the actual needs at the facility.

Conflicting views of the jail aren't new in Bexar County, but a new staffing analysis by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, the state jail oversight agency, is expected next month and could bring the two sides closer.

“We have no vested interest as a third party,” said TCJS Executive Director Adan Muñoz. “Our only concern is: Can you get enough people to show up when you need them to? We do this routinely for jails, and it usually amounts to a difference of opinion between commissioners courts and sheriffs' offices.”

The commissioners court is frustrated that reducing the jail population hasn't resulted in tangible savings for the county budget:

“Obviously we don't agree with the way that they're running the jail,” said County Judge Nelson Wolff. “They refuse to recognize the fact that we have 500 less prisoners, and they still want the same number of people. It doesn't make sense to us.”

In January 2009, when Ortiz took the helm, there were 932 detention officers and the average daily inmate population was around 4,300, according to Smith. That summer, population peaked at around 4,600. Last week, it dipped to less than 3,600, a level not seen in a decade.

Staffing wasn't cut until the 2012 budget, passed in September. Exactly how many guards remain depends on whom you ask.

“We've used tons of money on drug courts, on mental health courts, on trying to treat people instead of incarcerate them,” Wolff said. “We've brought the population way down, but there's no savings on running the jail.”

For starters, kudos to Bexar County (and it could only result from a collective effort by many people) for reducing the jail population 22% in a year-and-a-half. That's a remarkable accomplishment. And indeed, it does seem queer that overtime costs haven't declined as a result.

At a staffing ratio of 48-1 (mandated by the Commission on Jail Standards), in theory a reduction of 1,000 inmates would allow the jail to have 20 fewer guards on duty at any give time. Other jails that have reduced populations were able to commensurately reduce jail expenditures. So I can understand commissioners' frustration. But classification issues and other complications aren't taken into account in such back-of-the-napkin calculations, so it's good they've turned to TCJS as a neutral arbiter.

Such conflicts between sheriffs, who run county jails, and commissioners courts, who hold the purse strings, are a fundamental, structural feature of jail oversight in Texas. While providing additional checks and balances, it also frequently results in gridlock and needless conflict over rather routine  management decisions, particularly when commissioners and the sheriff come from different political parties or indulge in personal feuds. I don't know who's right about the jail staffing question in Bexar County, but it seems to me a factual dispute, not an ideological one.

Choosing gifts for the amnesiac, and other tall but true tales

A few Sunday morning odds and ends:

Debating the legality of D.I.V.E.R.T.
The 14th Court of Appeals said a Harris County judge was within his realm of discretion to refuse to use DA Pat Lykos' much-heralded D.I.V.E.R.T. program on DWI cases because it amounts to deferred adjudication, which is illegal for DWI under current Texas law. Does that mean the program itself will be overturned as illegal in and of itself on appeal? Not necessarily. Mark Bennett thinks Murray Newman overstates the legal import of the case and that David Jennings' take is too politicized, but between their various posts you can get a good sense of the issue. This is a strange one. As far as this non-lawyer can tell, D.I.V.E.R.T. may be technically illegal, but if the prosecutor offers it and it benefits the defendant, nobody is in a position to challenge its legality on appeal. Hundreds or even thousands of DWI defendants have been processed through the program. What happens to those contracts, wonders Bennett, if a DA is elected who thinks they were illegal? ¿Quien sabe?

Decked Out: Austin PD halls decked with expensive, distracting in-car computer system

When purchasing a new in-car video system, did City of Austin "officials fall for a system too expensive to buy and too impractical to use"? A former garage employee alleges in the Austin Chronicle that Austin PD essentially rigged a bid to favor a preferred vendor for expensive, in-car police equipment when a cheaper in-house solution was available. The purported whistleblower says APD created detailed specifications they knew only a single, preferred vendor could meet, but really they just needed extra battery power for vehicle video systems which could be done in-house, he says, on a much cheaper basis. Jordan Smith, as usual, provides an excellent, detailed account. Incidentally, having recently mentioned the issue of distracted driving at Austin PD as a large source of civil liability for the city, I was interested to see Jana Birchum's photo (at left) of the inside of an APD cruiser decked out with the new rig. Who wouldn't be distracted with all that gadgetry in their face? Moreover, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If cops get to do this, how can you then criminalize texting while driving? There's a friggin laptop pointing at the driver with a QWERTYUIOP keyboard, no less!

Pressing prostitute for patronage procures prosecution for San Antonio police
In San Antonio, "A police officer accused of accosting an 18-year-old woman for sex after she was targeted for a drug arrest four years ago pleaded no contest Wednesday to one count of official oppression and will lose his Texas peace officer's license." The sentence of one-year deferred adjudication probation, though, means the conviction may eventually be expunged from his record - a courtesy unlikely to be extended to the 18-year old he coerced for her various offenses. Reading the account from the SA Express-News, it sounds like the underlying facts amount to using a drug-warrant as a pretext and coercion tool to solicit the the services of a prostitute on behalf of a fellow officer, who fondled the woman but was then rebuffed when he could not pay. The two cops then stood lookout on behalf of a third, unidentified "friend" who paid for oral sex. Another former SA police officer - the one who would've liked a freebie but couldn't afford it - is awaiting charges related to the same incident. You can only lean on folks so hard, I suppose, even prostitutes with outstanding drug warrants. I've often wondered how common this is. The incident reminds Grits of a study out of Chicago, discussed here, which found that 3% of all tricks performed by sex-workers operating independently (without a pimp) were freebies given to police for protection. Via Injustice Everywhere.

Abuse alleged at South Texas detention center
Bob Libal at Texas Prison Bidness lets us know about a recent media report I hadn't seen:

Last month, PBS's Frontline aired a damning exposé of the immigration detention system that focused on MTC's Willacy County Processing Center.

The show, which you can watch online in its entirity, reported a pattern of sexual and physical abuse by guards at the MTC facility.  Frontline correspondent, Maria Hinojosa, highlights stories of terrifying and repetitive abuse and harassment of immigrant detainees at the facility.

See a transcript of the show. Relatedly, from Slate/Alternet: "How private prisons game the system."

Newspaper sides with Harris DA on crack-residue policy
The Houston Chronicle editorial board sides with District Attorney Pat Lykos in the debate with police unions and their proxies over prosecuting felonies based on residue-level drug amounts when officers arrest someone with a crack pipe. See Grits' earlier discussion.

Please keep pretending the naked emperor is clothed
Border Patrol officers are fired if they voice critical opinions about the drug war.

Holiday gifts for the amnesiac
If anybody out there is looking for Christmas gifts for Judge Ken Anderson or former Williamson County Sheriff's Sgt. Don Wood, after their amnesiac performances in recent depositions, I'd humbly suggest books on mnemonics. A mind, they say, is a terrible thing to waste. Please suggest other possible memory-related gifts or mnemonic tips for the Michael Morton prosecution team in the comments.

Sleazy charity scams should be shut down by IRS or regulated by Texas Lege

The SA Express-News' full story is now online about the Texas Highway Patrol Association - a so-called charity that rakes in millions in donations but gives just a small fraction for the purpose it claims, which is raising money for the families of dead state troopers. The story opens:

From the outside, the Texas Highway Patrol Museum doesn’t look like a multimillion-dollar telemarketing operation.

Based near downtown in a single-story brick building at South Alamo and St. Mary’s streets, the small museum offers exhibits that honor Texas Department of Public Safety troopers.

But it draws few visitors, and people who work nearby have wondered how it stays in business.

“I have yet to see one person inside that place,” said Scott Cates, a waiter and lounge singer at La Focaccia Italian Grill next door. “Matter of fact, I was wondering why it’s even there. What’s the point?”

Records show the museum actually is a telemarketing operation that employs hundreds of workers across the state who generated nearly $12 million in revenue from 2004 to 2009.

The museum is one of 25 organizations registered in Texas that raise funds in the name of supporting law enforcement. Helping police officers and their families is the kind of cause that makes donors open their pocketbooks — especially when an officer dies in the line of duty.

But state officials warn that many organizations, including the highway patrol museum in San Antonio, spend most of the donations on fundraising costs and overhead. The museum collects donations in the name of honoring and helping DPS troopers — even as DPS, the state agency that employs those troopers, warns donors to avoid giving the museum money.

Reported Express-News writer John Tedesco, "for every dollar that was donated to the museum, less then a penny was actually spent on troopers and their families." By contrast, those running the "charity" are doing quite well for themselves: "In 2009, the museum and a related company that publishes Texas Highway Patrol Magazine spent $400,000 on salaries for two executives: Villalva and Tim Tierney. In previous years, the museum has listed assets that included a Land Rover, a Lexus and a Mercedes."

Another damning tidbit: "A museum brochure describes how it partnered with the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving to produce an “award winning program” for students. The MADD chapter in San Antonio says it’s unaware of any partnership with the museum."

Your correspondent was quoted in the story after Grits blogged about receiving a solicitation from the group in August. “I don’t want to see families of troopers who die in the line of duty used as props in a scam,” Henson said. “No one does. It’s just grotesque.” 

It's not just THPA, either. Grits readers may recall that the Houston Police Officers Union runs the same kind of telemarketing operation and had one of its board members siphon off $400,000 to pay for his gambling habit.

I'd like to see the Texas Legislature in 2013 put into law that charities raising money in the name of law enforcement must comply with Better Business Bureau standards on fundraising, which dictate that at least 65% of funds raised should go to the purpose for which donors gave the money. In the meantime, somebody out there - the Texas Attorney General, a US Attorney's Office, the IRS, somebody - needs to shut down the THPA once and for all and then thoroughly investigate the two dozen other entities out there doing the same thing.

See related Grits posts:

• Millions in fundraising for so-called charity pays paltry death benefits to dead troopers' families
• Of buzzards, road kill, charity scams and the Texas Highway Patrol Association
• Houston police union rolling in cash, but six-figure thefts went unnoticed for years
• Sleazy telemarketers capitalize on public sympathy for fallen police

Institutionalization in prison thwarts reentry

The SA Express News over the weekend reported on the case of Randall Church, who says he committed arson soon after being released from TDCJ because he couldn't handle life in the free world and wanted to go back to prison. Wrote reporter Jazmine Ulloa:

Inside his small, gray cell within the Texas prison system, Church forgot the world and it forgot him.

Stepping out to freedom, “I didn't know how to use computers or cell phones or the Internet,” Church said. “The weirdest thing was walking into a store, like Walmart, and have parents hide their children from me, like I was supposed to jump at them.”

Fed up on July 10, 96 days after his release, he poured gasoline through a window of the empty house on the Southeast Side, then threw in flaming rags and paper towels, setting the place on fire.

Days later, he told police he did it because he wanted to go back to his job at his former prison unit.

If true, this was a pitiful and desperate act. That said, I'm personally a little skeptical of the "send me back to prison" motive attributed to the arson. (He didn't turn himself in immediately, and at the end of the story, Church told Ulloa that setting the fire excited him, declaring “It was my Fourth of July.”) But I don't doubt for a second that somebody who went to prison during the Reagan Administration would find it difficult to cope in the modern world without work skills, family or a support network. After a certain point, it's hard to shed an institutionalized mindset to embrace a world so different from the one left behind in their youth (which is something Texas exonerees who've served extraordinarily long sentences have confided to me in the past).

More compelling (to me) than the man-bites-dog story of an offender wanting to go back to prison was the accompanying meditation by Ulloa on the perils of reentry facing those returning to society after long prison sentences:

While Church was behind bars, the federal and state prison population more than quadrupled.

The numbers of inmates in the United States grew from 319,598 in 1980 to 1.5 million in 2009, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Corrections costs skyrocketed. States today collectively spend more than $50 billion a year by some estimates.

Studies indicate the United States has the highest proportion of its population locked up, its offenders tending to serve some of the lengthiest sentences in the world.

But more striking are the reports that show recidivism rates, the number of people who, like Church, return to correctional facilities after their release, lawmakers and prison reform activists said. A report published just this year by the Pew Center on the States found that on average more than 40 percent of those released from penitentiaries are reincarcerated within three years, for committing a new crime or for violating the terms of their release.

In the past decade, the debate among criminal justice circles has shifted to focus on programs and resources that can help prisoners re-enter society.

President George W. Bush included prisoner re-entry in his 2004 State of the Union address, marking an end to the country’s “period of punitiveness” and paving the way for the Second Chance Act and other legislation to help prisoners adjust to life after incarceration, [Ann] Jacobs [of the Prisoner ReentryInstitute] said.

“We are at a time in our culture when the prison budgets are depleting budgets for higher education in most states, when there are more African American men in prison then there are in college. We can’t allow that as a society. It will pull us all down,” Jacobs said.

Today, almost every state has re-entry programs and resources to assist the 700,000 people on average who are released from correctional facilities annually, but almost every state is under budget pressures.

Texas is known for its toughness on crime and is the country's leader in rate of imprisonment but undertook wide-ranging prison reforms in 2007 that have significantly reduced the state's recidivism rate.

Only 24.3 percent of Texas inmates released that year returned to prison within three years, according to the Texas Legislative Budget Board.

But looming budget cuts could hinder this progress in giving inmates “the tools to live responsibly,” said Ana Yáñez-Correa, director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition.

“While people are in prison, they need to be given vocational programs and counseling and cognitive thinking programming, so that when they get out, they can support their families,” she said.

For inmates like Church, such resources could make a difference in the transition back to the outside world.

Whatever the truth behind Church's motives when he set that fire, such issues are real and faced by more than 70,000 prisoners released from TDCJ facilities every year. Most of those folks, by any measure, don't want to return to prison, but too many will return to a life of crime if they aren't afforded other, realistic options.

Bexar court used bureaucratic ruse to keep suicide off jail stats

While preparing a post the other day on staffing at the Bexar County Jail, I ran across a brief story from the SA Express-News about a jail inmate who hung himself in a detoxification cell at the jail in June. "Adrian Rodriguez, 31, was pronounced dead at University Hospital  on Saturday. He had been found hanging in a detoxification cell at the jail Thursday, the Bexar County medical examiner's office said. He died of complications of a hanging; his death was ruled a suicide."

Notably, the Bexar County Jail has been criticized for having far more inmates commit suicide than national averages, and for failing to adequately screen inmates for suicide risks. In this case, "A screening at the City Magistrate's office and again at the jail, where [Rodriguez] saw a psychologist, found 'no indication that he was suicidal,'" A consultant hired last year to analyze jail suicides found that the jail exhibited "an unexplained tolerance for potentially suicidal behavior."

What drew my attention, though, was the bureaucratic sleight of hand used to keep from counting this event in the jail's overall suicide tally. Reported the Express News, "While in the hospital, he was given a personal recognizance bond Friday, so 'he was technically not in custody,' said Adan Munoz, executive director of Texas Commission on Jail Standards. 'We are going to follow up, if there's anything there, but it's not being handled as an in-custody death.'" So they found the guy hanging in his cell, he died from injuries sustained in the hanging, but it's not officially an "in-custody death." Really?

The inmate had been arrested on a robbery charge and had " a lengthy criminal record," according to the paper, so it's pretty clear the personal recognizance bond was merely a ruse to keep another suicide from going on the jail's record. Jailers can't issue personal bonds on their own, though: They'd have needed the cooperation of the District Attorney's office and a local judge to push the bond through, and they'd need to do so in an extraordinarily expedited fashion to get it done between the time the inmate was found hanging in his cell and when he was declared deceased.

One wonders how many other jail suicides have been whitewashed off the books in Bexar County in this fashion?

Bexar jail personnel problems glaring

Lots of problems cropping up at the Bexar County Jail recently related to personnel issues:

Last week, "A Bexar County detention officer was arrested when he was caught trying to smuggle what he believed to be drugs into the county jail," while another was "charged with violating the civil rights of a person in custody, accused of sexual contact with a female inmate. Trials this summer saw convictions of a jailer who smuggled a hacksaw blade to an inmate in a taco, and another jailer who smuggled a cell phone into the jail in a box of ramen noodles.

Then there's the matter of sufficiently staffing the jail, which presently is sending prisoners to other counties despite having hundreds of empty beds because staff aren't available to guard the extra wings. County commissioners say it's fully staffed, as Commissioner Tommy Adkisson wrote in a recent op ed:

our jail, typically packed with inmates, has for most of this year been able to produce 600-700 empty cells. Recently, inmates were sent to one of the surrounding county's jail, creating a stir and questions about how that could be when we have surplus space in our jail.

Though staffed for a capacity of 4,600 inmates, we apparently were not able to guard 3,800 inmates with such staffing. Since every 400 inmates cost Bexar County $8 million, Commissioner's Court, the primary guardian of the tax rate, must scrutinize this and allow our sheriff to help us understand how this can be.

Indeed! Adkisson has long been one of the few commissioners in the state who understood so intuitively the relationship between high incarceration rates and high taxes, or at least he's one of the only ones willing to discuss it publicly. It should be said, though, that not everybody agrees with him that the jail is staffed for full capacity. A Bexar deputy recently told Grits that they'd been understaffed for years, only covering shifts with mandatory overtime, and that eliminating so many slots in the most recent county budget would only exacerbate problems. That assessment simply doesn't jibe with comments by Adkisson and other commissioners that the jail has more staff than it needs. Hard to judge who's right without more information, but the fact that commissioners included significant overtime in the budget for jailers tells me even they realize they don't have enough deputies to cover shifts with the staff they've presently got.

Shortcomings in the county's handling of suicidal inmates may also relate to shortstaffing, with notable failures in screening inmates and few services available to suicidal inmates, resulting in one of the highest suicide rates among jails nationally.

Managing jails is a messy business because of the "too many cooks" phenomenon. The Sheriff manages the jail but county commissioners control the budget. Meanwhile police, prosecutors and judges  make most of the decisions that determine how many people end up in jail at any given time, with no reference at all to budgetary constraints. Add in the bureaucracy at the local probation department, the deputies union, and other various actors and the result is a hodge podge of competing interests and agendas. That's not just in Bexar, that's the structure in every Texas county and in most other states as well. The biggest questions surrounding jail managemet are as much political as managerial. It's hard to solve such quandaries when the various actors can't even agree on what the problems are.