{A letter to the editor follows. --brendan}

From the Austin American Statesman, Saturday, July 31st, 2004:

Travis County jail fixes could cost up to $265 million

Inmate population to grow 18 percent over next decade, consultant finds

By Kate Alexander

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Saturday, July 31, 2004

Fixing Travis County’s jail problems will not come cheap, a jail consultant has found.

It could cost $190 million to $265 million to deal withneeds at the Travis County Correctional Complex in Del Valle over the next decade, according to the consultant’s study.

Several county officials say they want to proceed cautiously but realize there is little choice about eventually making a major investment.

“We have to do something,” said County Judge Sam Biscoe, who would prefer a more gradual approach to funding the improvements.

Sheriff Margo Frasier said a hefty expenditure is long overdue.

“We needed to spend that big chunk of change a while back,” she said.

Options range from refurbishing many of the existing buildings at the Del Valle campus to constructing a new jail on the same site. The consultant’s recommendation to demolish several buildings and construct a new one connected to the Health Services Building would cost $224 million. The new layout would make the jail more efficient, the consultant said.

Frasier said that despite a coordinated effort to tame the jail population, the long-term problem persists. The report estimates that the prisoner population will increase 18 percent to 2,740 over the next 10 years. The six-month, $117,000 study was done by Criminal Justice Institute Inc., a national corrections consulting firm based in Middletown, Conn.

The jail on Friday had more inmates than its intended 2,275-bed capacity. But the Texas Commission on Jail Standards has allowed the county, for the time being, to have an additional 572 beds.

When Frasier goes back to the jail commission this fall, however, she said she needs to present a concrete plan for giving up those extra beds and deal with the impending growth.

“We’ve done great things as far as keeping the jail population under control,” she said. Still, “we’ve got to spend some money and build some jail beds.”

If the state commission pulls the extra beds, Frasier said the county will have to send 300 to 400 inmates to out-of-county jails at an annual cost of more than $4 million.

Biscoe acknowledged that the state could essentially make the decision for Travis County by eliminating the extra beds. It would be better to comply with the state than to wait for a federal judge to tell the county to do the same thing, Biscoe said.

It is too early to tell how the county would pay for the improvements. County officials acknowledge it would be difficult to sell voters on bonds for the jail work. The county could borrow money without voter approval.

“That is a conversation we need to be thoughtful about and not frivolous about,” said Commissioner Karen Sonleitner.

“Let’s be truly clear about whether there is a true choice here,” she said. “It is wrong to try to put it to the voters as a choice when the reality is, it isn’t.”

The jail problems stem from the late 1980s when the state prison system had tens of thousands of inmates camped out in county jails across the state because state prisons were full.

At one point, Travis County was housing about 1,000 state prisoners, Frasier said. So the county erected a “hodgepodge” of buildings at the Del Valle campus to house the temporary prisoners.

Those buildings were never intended to house county inmates permanently.

“Guess what,” Frasier said. “I still use them.”

The consultants found that those buildings were not built to institutional standards and are crumbling under the constant use. Many of them need to be refurbished or replaced.

The need for new jail beds has been a common refrain for years in Travis County. In 1993, voters approved a bond package that included money to build space for 1,008 new jail beds. But only about a third of those were built after money went toward cost overruns from construction of the Blackwell-Thurman Criminal Justice Center downtown.

Sonleitner said the $35 million in redirected money eventually was replaced, but it was spent on other needs at Del Valle, such as the Health Services Building.

kalexander@statesman.com; 445-3618

August 2, 2004

To the Editors,

The reporting that Travis County jail fixes could cost up to $265 million left several relevant questions unanswered:

1. What was the size of the 1993 bond package?

2. How did the $35 million which was redirected to other needs explode into $265 million in 10 years?

3. What is the expected lifetime of these jail fixes?

4. Assuming bonds were used to fund this, what would the total cost be over the jail’s lifetime?

5. What would be the expected cost of sending inmates to out-of-county jails over this same time period?