Dallas County Jail Is Over Capacity. Could It Increase Property Taxes?

After consistently teetering around capacity, the Dallas County Jail exceeded the maximum number of inmates it can hold for the first time in two decades over Labor Day weekend, said Dallas County Criminal Justice Department Director Charlene Randolph during a Tuesday Dallas County Commissioners Court meeting related to county tax rates.

The excess prisoner population could cost Dallas taxpayers tens of millions more each month, as the county weighs options that include paying other municipalities to house Dallas inmates. To do so, the county is proposing a voter-approved property tax increase of $0.222188 per $100.

"We are in crisis," said Randolph. "We are at a hundred percent, our book-ins are at record levels. And so if people are brought here, we have to find ways to get them out."

According to reports, County Commissioner John Wiley Price, who chairs the Jail Population Committee, told the commission that a Monday midnight inmate count at the county jail, the Lew Sterrett Justice Center, tallied 7,124 inmates, which is as many as 20 bodies over what the prison is authorized to hold.

"We've got three or 400 hundred people who are paper ready to be transferred," Price said, according to a report from KERA. "But when the state knows that they have up to 45 days and they pick up 48 here, and then we call them and say, 'Look, can you pick up more?' They pick up 40 there. That doesn't help us."

County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins reiterated Wiley’s statements in an interview with WFAA.

"We’re working with our judges and our clerks and everyone in the system to try to move people through the system faster," Lewis Jenkins said. "What you don’t want to do is turn away dangerous criminals; we’re not going to do that. But we’ve got to find a way to process out our misdemeanor cases faster."

Earlier this summer, already nearing capacity and preparing for the usual uptick and arrests that happen in a holiday weekend, the jail was already renovating decommissioned cells.

"We're going into mothballing and preparing cells that have been offline for over a decade — that's extremely expensive," Price said at the meeting.

The transfer and capacity issues at the Lew Sterrett Justice Center are not new. Just last year, the county paid $160,000 in settlements to two men who were kept in jail months past their scheduled release dates.

“The County’s longstanding flawed process for timely releasing inmates was exacerbated by technological issues as early as May 2023, when the County began migrating case files from the County’s 40-year-old Forvis criminal case management software system (Forvis) to Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey criminal case management software system,” states the lawsuit filed by civil rights attorney Dean Malone.

Issues within the prison, constantly nearing overpopulation, include persistent staffing shortages and continuous failed state inspections. In August, the jail failed yet another inspection after two complaints from inmates held in holding cells hours beyond the 48-hour limit launched an inspection, albeit less comprehensive than the state-mandated inspections that occur every two years. The jail was found to be “noncompliant.” The Dallas Morning News reports that similar inspections delivered “noncompliant” determinations in 2018, 2021 and twice in 2022 for a variety of offenses.

“It is of the utmost importance for us to do what we say we’re going to do,” Sheriff Marian Brown said to the News following the inspection report. “But the challenge is we have hundreds of standards that we have to live up to and any one of those hundreds of standards can put us out of compliance.”