Push for expanded jail by Harris Sheriff ill-conceived

Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia wants to reframe the debate over jail bulding - hoping to succeed where his GOP predecessor failed - by portraying an expanded booking center and extra beds as providing services for the mentally ill. However, Marc Levin and Ana Yañez Correa rightly suggested to the Houston Chronicle that "The costs of running a new building - utilities, staffing, maintenance - will compete for tight budget dollars with reforms that would divert more mentally ill arrestees into treatment instead of cells."

Designating 1,200 beds for the mentally ill may sound like do-gooder public policy, but in the corrections context that simply frees up 1,200 spaces for other new prisoners because there are always more than 1,200 mentally ill offenders in the jail at any give time. If he wants to focus staff and services on these mentally ill offenders, the Sheriff can do so already at far lower cost. While a new wing could conceivably improve the provision of mental health services, it would only do so with the addition of significant new staff - including medical staff and trained mental health professionals as well as guards.

Presently, Harris County doesn't have enough guards to staff the jail cells it operates, and any additional capacity would either require new hires or paying staff costs entirely out of overtime. Harris County Commissioners need only look to Los Angeles - where a $74 million jail sits empty thanks to staffing shortfalls  - to see where these misplaced spending priorities will lead them. (Thanks to a reader for pointing that story out to me.) Before even considering a vote on this proposal, Commissioners should require a detailed staffing plan that demonstrates how Garcia intends to overcome existing staffing shortfalls and staff additional services that will supposedly be provided to the mentally ill. Really, though, the county's immediate priority should be to divert mentally ill offenders to alternative, community-based treatment programs where they can get the care and supervision they need, not endlessly building jail beds in which to warehouse them.

My position on jail building is simple: It's only justified after the most obvious ways to reduce jail populations have been tried, and in Harris County they have not. For starters, Sheriff Garcia chooses to participate in an optional immigration program that needlessly sops up scarce jail beds. Regarding the proposed, 1,000-inmate booking center, in particular, Garcia has failed to enact policies within his authority to reduce unnecessary bookings, like allowing issuance of citations instead of arrests for certain Class B misdemeanors. Instead he'd have the county build space so Houston PD can arrest minor traffic violators.

In that context, it's hard in particular to take seriously complaints that booking facilities are overwhelmed. Garcia could reduce the pressure on intake if he wanted to, and could encourage Houston PD to do the same. Instead he just asks for more beds.

MORE: Chronicle reporter Chris Moran added some detail on the paper's Houston Politics blog that didn't fit into the story.