In Texas’ state jails, the inmates are sentenced to just two years or less. But every summer, former inmate Maggie Luna remembers, the women inside worried their short sentences may take their life. “All of these women that were suffering with me had not a lot of time, and they feared that they were getting death sentences,” she said. “Several times I told my mom, ‘I hope I make it out of here.'”
Harris County Commissioners Court this week approved a package of public safety measures to support state legislation to create additional district courts, expand the county's holistic assistance response team program and look at enlarging the public defender's office. The measures are aimed at ongoing efforts to reduce the ongoing backlog in the county's criminal courts system and relieve persistent jail overcrowding.
The Texas Senate passed a bill Tuesday that would eliminate a requirement to investigate all deaths in county jails, making deaths from presumed natural causes exempt. Advocates say if it becomes law, jails could escape accountability for medical neglect. The state has required an outside law enforcement agency to investigate all jail deaths since 2017, with the passage of the Sandra Bland Act.
Desperate to restore order within the walls of the five youth prisons it operates, the Texas Juvenile Justice Department has been asking judges to push more of its most troubled kids into the adult prison system.
In the Lone Star State, a person’s path through the justice system is rarely guided by justice. It’s guided by politics. A young person of color fears when a police car follows them, knowing some police scour the streets looking for an excuse to turn on their red and blues. A person short on cash can’t make bail, calling the jail their temporary home – a rich person cuts a check and walks immediately.
Youth justice advocates, including some Houstonians, are fighting in support of a bill that would see the closure of the state’s five juvenile detention centers, which they say have been beset by “dangerous and inhumane conditions.”
