Denial of Treatment

People in jail have a right to their medical diagnoses - and jailers must be held accountable for properly stewarding those tests and acting swiftly upon receiving the results. It’s always been bad. Now it’s worse.

First hand account: After requesting her results repeatedly, a woman was told she was positive, only to be told two days later they had made a mistake and she was in fact negative.

First hand account: For those with other pre-existing conditions, it’s even worse: One gentleman lost consciousness at least 3 times after his insulin was repeatedly delayed for hours and given without food. People with epilepsy - including a veteran in Harris county jail - are going months without their seizure medicine.

First hand account: In Harris county jail, Texas Jail Project identified half a dozen individuals who were not given a mandated comprehensive mental health screening at intake - some of whom had a history of suicide attempts.

First hand account: Texas Jail project documented a range of people having their regular medicine regimen changed without consultation or reason. Sudden medication adjustments are disruptive and represent a break in continuity of care for these vulnerable populations. Lower dosages for regularly prescribed medications is not care.

Racial Disparities

Texas’ county jail system is a decades-long project in Black family separation. In Texas, Black people constitute 13% of state residents, but 27% of people in jail and 33% of people in prison.

It is one thing to know that there are statistically more Black people in jail, but it’s quite another to know a mother’s story — to ask how her incarceration has impacted her children, where they are while she is in jail, how many jobs she had to work to pay her court fees, or how medical practitioners in jail treat her differently than her white counterparts. Data without humanity is an incomplete picture.

As Cedric says, “I do not want to be another Black man in jail and not a father to my only daughter. I have missed too much time already.”

Segregation and Isolation

Poor Food Quality

Texas Jail Project has logged over 40 testimonies of being served raw meat, expired food, and/or caloric-deficit meal plans. We know that people in Harris county jail weren’t served hot food for over 3 months last year. And to this day, many folks are still receiving damaged, cold, and unhealthy food -even pregnant women.

Back-Logged Court Dates

Repeated delays in court appearances, entrenching the court backlog and forcing individuals to wait even longer for their rightful day in court.

Repeated exposure of the virus in dorms means repeated delays in court appearances, entrenching the court backlog and delaying justice even further.

Overcrowding

Persistent cohorting. Mixing COVID-19 positive and negative people in dorms. Based on first hand accounts, jailers only quarantine COVID-19 positive or symptomatic individuals for 10 days - not 14 - and re-enter them in the general population without re-testing them.

Denial of Basic Necessities

Persistent lack of soap, posted information, and masks. In most jails, hand sanitizer isn’t available.

First hand accounts: Women forced to fight over a single bottle of soap, individuals being explicitly denied masks, jailers not wearing masks on duty, and a lack of posted bilingual information on the virus.

Blocked Transparency

As the COVID crisis intensified, so too did the disappearance of any transparency from state agencies charged with the health and safety of nearly 65,000 individuals - over 80% of whom are pretrial, not yet convicted - held in 239 county jails spread across 254 counties.

Death

As of October 2020, over 80% of COVID-19 deaths in county jails were pretrial individuals, with the overall custody death toll this year much higher than the 110 reported in 2019.