Paper: Houston Chronicle
Date: Tue 05/09/2006
Section: B
Page: 8
Edition: 3 STAR
 

LETTERS

By RANDALL L. KALLINEN, JIM GREENWOOD, JAMES FITKO, WINSTON P. CROWDER, JOHN D. WILSON
 

Blame and praise over jail

In need of sanity

THE three-year-long Harris County jail overcrowding crisis has not changed and the problem lies squarely at the feet of the local judiciary due to draconian practices that, in some instances, are not even practiced anywhere but Harris County. Decreasing the jail population by 500 is simple and does not put the public at risk.

Just last year, Judge Caprice Cosper agreed that the Harris County jail population of 941 state jail felons was huge and that the judges planned to address the problem. They did not and now that population is 1,294 - a whopping 70 percent of the state total of 1,850. Most of these jail inmates are nonviolent drug users - not sellers - who are supposed to have benefited by the state's new law to put first-time drug offenders into treatment.

Harris County also leads Texas in the odd practice of giving "jail time as a condition of probation." Even after a jury or plea bargain mandates probation, judges often order some jail time in addition to the probation.

Harris County has a probation revocation rate of 17 percent, which is the highest of any large county in Texas. Harris County judges themselves have noticed the difficulty in meeting the myriad probation requirements yet have not acted to lower probation revocations to put Harris County in line with the rest of Texas.

Forty percent or around 3,700 of the jail's population have not been convicted of a crime but are merely awaiting trial. A few decades earlier only 25 percent of the jail inmates were these "pretrial detainees." Such a difference equates to over 500 more inmates today.

Several judges even jail defendants who have not promptly hired a lawyer after they have initially bonded out of jail. Such jailing violates the law and points to a Harris County judicial predisposition to jail defendants as a solution to perceived problems.

It is time to put the Harris County criminal justice system into a semblance of Texas sanity and for the courts to implement the law's mandated compassion to ease jail overcrowding.

RANDALL L. KALLINEN president, Houston ACLU