harris county detains low risk

Harris County Detains Low-Risk Offenders With No Reason

The Harris County Jail is overflowing. Grits has previously argued

that the local elected prosecutor and judges are mostly to blame.

Now it turns out that many jail residents are low-risk defendants who

don't need to be there, but who remain incarcerated because they can't

make bail.

Via Solutions for Texas, we discover this recent report (Word doc) by

the Justice Management Institute analyzing Harris County's "Pre-trial

services" division. According to that analysis, the "unnecessary

detention of low-risk defendants" contributes signficiantly the jail

overincarceration problem. I might look at parts of this more

carefully later on today -- it has a lot of useful history and

background if you care about the Harris County Jail situation -- but

Ann pulled the money quote pinning overcrowding blame on county bail

policies:

the existence of this large block of apparently low risk defendants

in detention should be a cause for concern. To the extent that

defendants who pose no significant risk of nonappearance or of

danger to public safety remain in pretrial detention because of

inability to post bond, the County incurs significant and

unnecessary costs for the operation of the jail. Such detention

also appears to be contrary to Texas law requiring individualized

consideration of the circumstances of each defendant in setting

bail."

Hmmmm ... so Harris County's bail policies are "contrary to Texas law"

and generate "unnecessary costs." A two-fer.