Pre-Gustav prisoner evacuations at TYC, TDCJ

The Austin Statesman's Mike Ward reported three hours ago that:

Texas Youth Commission officials early today started removing incarcerated youths from the Al Price youth lockup in Beaumont, and state prison officials said they plan to start evacuating adult felons from two Beaumont prisons early Saturday.

On moving the prisoners, despite the hassle and expense, I say better safe than sorry if there's a chance of a Category 4 hurricane touching down there. Here's a picture from a state jail unit in Beaumont after the much-smaller Hurricane Rita in 2005:


Sometimes the weather can provide interesting opportunities to learn something unexpected about the system. After Hurricane Rita damaged several prisons and jails, a couple of Texas counties for a while found themselves in the position of being unable to arrest low-level offenders for several months because of weather-induced overcrowding. In Gregg County, the jail actually had extra space but was renting it out for immigration detention, so they chose to turn away arrestees instead. For the most part, officers gave out citations instead instead of processing defendants through the jail.

Because these counties went several months with radically reduced numbers of arrests, I suggested at the time that their crime data should be examined to determine if there was a resulting increase or decrease; that never happened, though a Gregg County commissioner later told me he didn't think there'd been a noticeable difference, which was also the conclusion reached by officials in Chambers County.

While one certainly hopes there's no damage necessitating similar outcomes because of Gustav, I'd still like to see some neutral and credible researcher go back and analyze crime data for those counties during the months after Hurricane Rita. I'd like to know whether their inability to jail low-level offenders tangibly, measurably harmed public safety.

RELATED: Texas Prison Bidness has been raising questions about treatment of immigration detainees held by private prison companies during the last round of evacuations in the run-up to Hurricane Dolly.