Travis County Commssioners Court
October 29, 2002
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Item 27
>> Item number 27 is to discuss statistic -- discuss and
receive status report from jail overcrowding taskforce and take appropriate
action.
>> morning judge, commissioners. What I just handed out is
the latest and greatest in terms of numbers from the sheriff's office regarding
the jail population. I can walk through the bullet points if you would like
me to. And that also includes a status of the pilot 24 hour magistration.
As of the last time a jail sub population report was run, which was a snapshot
on the 15th of October, the jail population has fallen to 2553, which is about
300 inmates fewer than the same month last year and about 350 inmates fewer
than our peak in August of this year. So substantial progress has been made,
which is attributable most likely to the fall -- to the jail overcrowding
reduction strategies that have been implemented by the jail overcrowding taskforce.
All segments of the pretrial population, which has been the largest problem
population, has fallen since the same month last year, and with the exception
of the pretrial a and b misdemeanors. This includes a six percent reduction
of pretrial felons, which is the largest pretrial population and actually
makes up more than half of the total jail population. And we believe that
can be attributed to the da's office rocket docket as well as the increased
efforts from the da's office and the district judges to expedite the disposition
of felony cases. On the pretrial a and b misdemeanors, they decreased more
than any other population between July and September they fell by 50 50%,
which is very remark believe and we believe that was due to the implementation
of the super jail call which started in August and ran through September.
On October 1st the county courts at law transitioned off of doing a super
jail call and went to what they consider to be more routine procedures closer
to the way that the jail dockets used to be handled prior to the implementation
of super jail call, but with increased intention to getting cases filed faster
and disposed of faster than they were prior to the super jail call. Since
the beginning of October there's been a 39% increase in pretrial misdemeanors.
When I got these numbers yesterday I sent them out to those people who are
handling the disposition of misdemeanor cases and asked them to give some
attention to those and we'll have that as an agenda item next Thursday.
>> can we send the county court at law judges another e-mail
that says the commissioners court does not believe that the -- in view of
the 39% increase in October, we do not believe that going back to the old
way of doing docket calls is working?
>> yes.
>> that even if we don't go to the super misdemeanor docket
call, we ought to go to something in between how we did it historically and
the super docket call, right?
>> and I think realistically we need to look at the physical
impact that will have because all along there are reservations about if we
keep doing the super jail call, there might be additional needs that we should
find. And we kept saying, well, let's see, let's see.
>> right.
>> if we don't do the super jail call everyday, the difference
was all of those would go to one court. And if we keep using all of the courts,
why don't we add three or four to whoever is going everyday. It's a numbers
thing, but it's money in the end. And we had 400 plus pretrial misdemeanors,
right? We've got that down to about 200. If its increased 39%, it's back up
to about three hundred.
>> yes.
>> in my view, that's unacceptable.
>> well, it is unacceptable, judge, because it really is
something that can be easily disposed of. And I think the most efficient way
is to have -- have it concentrated in one court, whether the county court
judges take a week at a time or a day at a time, it's most effective when
it's in one place because all the attorneys can go to one place and the transportation,
we only have to take people to one place. And it really minimal lies the impact
on everybody else during the super jail call. But this is the concern that
several of us expressed when they said they were going to do away with it.
It's like if it didn't work the old way and you change and it works, why on
earth would you go back? But hopefully folks will --
>> but from the commissioners court perspective, if you're
handling an additional 20 a day at super docket call, and there are, what,
five or six misdemeanor criminal courts?
>> five.
>> then if you're going to do it everyday, that means each
of them have to do four more. The choice is theirs. But I think as a system
we need to stay focused on the 20. And these are misdemeanors. And I think
what the little experience -- the pilot showed us was you get them before
the judge and they'll go ahead and dispose of the cases. If you let them just
sit in jail, I don't know whether they're having fun or not, but they don't
feel any pressure to force us to give them their day in court. And super docket
call pacifically enabled us to force them to appear before a judge and either
have the cases set for trial or disposed of. I think that if there were 3.9
experts, it would be one thing, 39% that equates to about 90 to 100 inmates
is a big number.
>> we haven't related that number yet to the number of misdemeanor
arrests that occurred during that same time period. I didn't have a chance
to do that. It could be that there was some great increase. I know there was
a misdemeanor level sting during that time period, so part of that -- that
may be part of what's driving that increase. We need to look at that a little
further. You about I don't think so. Our numbers have been down somewhat as
far as class c diverse. And we haven't seen a great increase in the booking
area. So I don't think it's new bookings. I think it's due to the fact that
the only thing that's really different is the fact that we've stopped the
super jail call. And I'm with you, judge, I don't care whether they do it
per quarter, all in one group, although there may be some ways in which it's
more efficient for the county attorney's office or county clerk's office or
transportation, but what I care about is that they reinstitute it.
>> they will tell us that this number didn't change. This
will be the equivalent of about one and a half million dollars over the year.
>> a lot of pay raises there. The thing that caught my attention
is on the snapshot day, it is sixth line down, convicted felons sentenced
to county time. And that is the number that is consistently going up compared
to the prior month. And again, we're not in the sentencing business here,
but some of us are eligible to go to t -- felons are eligible to go to tdcj.
And if they get sentenced to county time, that means they spend their time
on the county taxpayer's time rather than the state's. I want you all to focus
attention on what does that line mean, is that trend that at least looks disturbing
to me, when it's blue, when means it's getting bigger, not smaller. That is
not helping our number for felons who could go elsewhere on the state's tab,
staying on the Travis County taxpayer's tab 100%. Irk I think the dynamic
going on there is those people in that line are generally people who are sentenced
to county jail time as a condition of probation. So they aren't people who
are really appropriate to send to tdcj, but in the plea bargain agreement
there's an agreement that they need to spend some time incarcerated up front
as a condition of probation. Probably the increases are seen there because
there have been an increase in felony dispositions. My office did an analysis
about what happens if you increase dispositions, does that just shift the
nature of your population from a pretrial population to a post-conviction
population? And the answer to that is yes to the extend that anybody would
stay here for their sentence. So I think that's the dynamic that's going on
there. However, the da's office has indicated that they are cutting way back
on pleading people to up front time in the county jail as opposed to up front
time in the state jail since it's so close by and they are trying to reduce
that -- those people are not in that line item. They're in the one that has
to do with state jail felons that's further down.
>> as a quick follow-up, it would be helpful to get some
analysis of just how much up front time are they doing here as as a condition
of their probation. Is it 30 days, is it 60 60 days, is it 180 days? I'm just
trying to get a sense of how much quality time they're spending with us. Again,
100% on the county taxpayer tab.
>> we'll try and get that for you from the da's office. And
I would also note, though, that enjusticely these people will have pretrial
time that they've served that is credited against the sentence, so the amount
of time that they actually spend in the county jail post- sentence is generally
less than what they were snntsed to.
>> and there is the management of the jail population if
they move into the convicted status when we know before we had a pretrial
felon, who might have been in a medium or maximum security capacity and now
we know he has 30 days in the county jail. That classifies him as a misdemeanor,
of which we have an abundance of those. I agree with you, commissioner, I
think we need to continue to look at the issue of whether or not if the judge
-- it's the judge's discretion to make that choice, but perhaps remind the
judges of the I want pact it has when they make the choice to place them in
the Travis County jail instead.
>> the other sort of problem area that we're going to try
to address next is the fact that because of the increase in felony dispositions,
we're seeing a backlog of people who need to be made paper ready to send off
to tdcj, whether it's to id or state jail. I think the dispositions have increased
and it's out stripped the work load capacity of the folks who are tasked with
getting people paper ready. But we've seen some pretty large increases in
those post-conviction populations that are waiting for transfer, and we need
to address that with the jail overcrowding taskforce at the next meeting or
to. And we've had some brief discussions about it soof, but we haven't come
right out and addressed it.
>> we've also had a dynamic for the first part of October
when we had a couple of the hurricanes down along the coastline that the prison
system shut down on us, and so we wound up sending -- as of late we've sent
-- this month we've sent like 349 inmates to either state jail or prison.
And that's a significant increase. That's like over -- about 100 over our
normal transfers. So that has been beneficial. We're still having some issues
actually, although that's hopefully been taken care of where the state trail
has for the first time been starting to tell us they couldn't take people.
And it wasn't because they were full of Travis County inmates but because
they had inmates in from harris county. But I had a conversation with the
warden last Wednesday, in fact, he told me that they had sent almost all of
those back from where they came. So hopefully we won't be running into that
problem in the future.
>> as far as we know, the state still has six to seven thousand
empty beds? Statewide?
>> 60,000?
>> 627.
>> six to seven thousand, I was going what? The state does
have capacity within the system. One of the difficulties I think they're running
into is that they have continued to build institutional division facilities
and haven't necessarily built the additional state jail facilities. And now
those facilities are starting to fill up, but -- so I think the state certainly
has the capacity to continue to take your inmates. They just have to move
theirs around.
>> sheriff, there's a time when the state jail was basically
being used as a transfer facility because they couldn't even find state jail
felons to move in there. Is that over?
>> what they've had is actually some -- the kind of -- if
they just had straight Travis County population they probably would be somewhere
around 730 or so in the jail, state jail. So what they moved in for a while
was they moved in some harris county state jail inmates, but my understanding
is that they have moved them back out. Partly because of crowding in other
places and partly -- the hurricanes really did cause some great concern because
there are some facilities located that would be extremely vulnerable. You
don't wait until it hits to try to evacuate a thousand inmates. So that was
part of the problem. So I'm hopeful that we won't be running into this in
the future, but we're going to keep on top of it. [one moment, please, for
change in captioners]
>> things move much more smoothly, don't clog up various
places where a magistrate is required such as the approval of the probable
cause affidavits and getting people actually through magistration and getting
their personal bonds approved. That has made the facility work a lot more
like it was intended. Smaller groups coming in to be magistrated instead of
the large groups that we have seen since the facility opened. From the perspective
of demonstrating the impact, my office is doing -- did a study this past Friday
night, doing another study tonight looking at how long it's taking to get
people from arrest through release, numbers from the commissioners court by
mid November on that. We have preliminary counts from central booking that
we have been getting from the sheriff's office on a daily basis. It appears
from those counts as though there has not been any impact, any actual population
of central booking. So the main question was is 24 hour magistration going
to allow the sheriff's office to free up that overflow unit that's being used
in central booking, used by central booking that's in the county jail. The
answer to that right now appears to be no. However, we have not looked at
what the arrest load was for those two weeks versus what the population on
hand is. There may be some correlation there. There was a sting during the
two week period, which I mentioned before that may have driven up numbers
for a few days, we are going to look at things from different angels to make
sure we don't have some confounding factor that's covering up the impact.
Also information that we are going to be getting from the sheriff's office
about what might be saved operationally on their side by virtue of having
the central booking operation move more smoothly. Major balagia might want
to talk more about that from the transportation perspective.
>> well, on the what we have mowed are our numbers, I don't
know if it's a combination with what we are doing with the class c and the
24 hour magistration, we are seeing in the overflow units that those numbers
are way down. In fact last night we had no one in our male overflow units.
The female are full. Which isn't good. But the males we had zero in those
units. And our population on post 1 and post 2 was 41. Which is -- which means
that we have one empty unit there, which is -- but that's been tracking like
that for the last -- you know, since we have been doing the 24 hour administration.
So what katy is saying as far as an operational perspective we have love it
because it is allowing the central booking facility to operate in the manner
in which it was designed to operate. So we are seeing those efficiencies.
In the long run, would we be able to stay out of the overflow units? As long
as our population stays at this level, yes, we will. And those can -- can
revert back to permanent beds or, well, we have a couple of options there.
We can revert them back to permanent bed, of course. Also eliminate some variance
beds. You are giving up prime real estate when you give up a maximum security
bed. But the ultimate goal from the sheriff's office viewpoint is that we
hope at -- one day to get to a point where we can give up all of our variance
beds because it's not the way you should operate a correctional facility.
You should not have any variance beds whatsoever. You should only be operating
with your design capacity.
>> mr. Balagia, in that 24 hour pilot project -- I get kate
I need to address this -- I guess I need to address this same question to
you. When you come back in November, I guess with your report, to make sure
that the numbers that we are looking at -- I understand that -- about the
smooth -- the movement within the operation, it does work. However, is there
any way we can tie in those numbers of -- of using the pilot project because
it's a working component of the 24 hour magistration. Of course maybe we need
to continue to do it. But this is just a snapshot to see if the -- if there's
something that -- that we need to continue to -- to do as far as freeing up
space. And right now I'm hearing some things, but as far as associating the
counts, the number of persons that -- that go through the pretrial, it would
be a 24 hour magistration, that short window. That we are trying to address.
In my mind, it -- will there be any sufficient data for -- for us to look
at to make a decision one way or the other? And if it's having an impact,
of course, significantly as far as what -- what I may hear you suggesting
this morning, major, I think we need to have it based on those actual numbers
and maybe look -- looking at maybe extending i. I don't know. But I would
like to have it whereby the numbers and the performance of the pilot project
is based on the [inaudible] to move forward with it for maybe another period
of time to see if there is really a strong relationship --
>> well, commissioner, we will certain work with the county's
office gather all kinds of data for you to look at. I think there are several
different thing much one is if we can eliminate our need to use -- to set
aside beds for central booking overflow, that -- that directly helps us in
managing our population because like the major said, that is prime real estate.
That is maximum security downtown beds. Right now we have been forced to use
them for people that are going to get out of jail the next day. Isn't make
accepts. The other part of -- doesn't make sense. The other part is in moving
people through the process in a expeditious manner, so what our experience
has shown us is that it does work. It works extremely well. It's been -- pretrial,
staying up all night with this --
>> impact study, ready by mid November.
>> I'm hoping November 19th.
>> November 19th, yes.
>> and we are -- we are going to look at impact from every
angel that we can look at it from. Some of the information will be hard statistics,
some of it will be anecdotal information, we will try to give a well rounded
report.
>> that will give the jail overcrowding task force a chance
to look at it.
>> that's my hope, yes.
>> before we look at it again.
>> okay.
>> the efforts of what we are doing here in Travis County
are already making waves around the state. Bexar county has been in contact
to basically say can you tell us what you all are doing. A serious problem
down there.
>> that's a lengthy -- we've had some lengthy conversations
with them.
>> I'm sorry, kate, I gave them your direct phone number.
[ laughter ]
>> they have heard that we've had very good results of the
team effort that's been pulled together of everyone within the criminal justice
center. They are very appreciative of the ground that's already been blazed
in this direction.
>> they had a remedial order placed on them at the last jail
commission meeting.
>> anything else on this item today?
>> your honor --
>> yes, sir?
>> I would like -- I would like to address the court on this
matter. And get the support that we can.
>> sit down and talk into that microphone and give your name,
sir.
>> okay, sorry, I'm mac martinez, [inaudible] I want to commend
katy for all of the work she does. Certainly the sheriff's office has done
a lot of work. Clearly this is a management issue. Getting the jail population
down and keeping it down is a management issue. It concerned me yesterday
that I got the numbers of the rise yesterday. I think if we are going to maintain
a grip on this problem, we are going to have to formalize the reporting system.
We absolutely have to formalize the reporting system. I'm not getting numbers.
If I don't get numbers,ian go to the courts and say we need to set more cases
or what's not being set. If we could formalize the system where I could get
by court, the name of the inmate, who is pretrial and incarcerated, broken
down, I could do a lot with that because I can go to court and say I want
this case set. Can you set this for me, why isn't it set? I can call the defense
attorney up and say what's the problem, why aren't we dispossessing of that
case? But right now I'm being toldian pull that out of the computer system.
But if I can get the court to support that, perhaps that would instigate us
being able to do whatever program we need to do or re-- reallocating resources
so that we can do that because that would be key if we could do that. Then
we can get the -- the settings on a shorter time period. And right now the
prosecutor's office has no control over settings. We are not involved in the
setting days. I can be if I have got that kind of information. I think that
was what was key to getting it done in the first place is how we started doing
that, then we lost control of that.
>> we had a conversation about -- involving i.t.s. And this
-- this whole issue now. Where are we on that, kate some.
>> i.t.s. Has attended the past two or three meetings of
the jail overcrowding task force, they are being invited regularly to hear
the discussion about this. Additionally my office in the next couple of weeks
will be publishing a draft of a report which will probably go out to the entire
jail overcrowding task force for review that has to do with a comprehensive
look at the data issue that's we have encountered on this project and other
project that's have prevented us from doing things, recommendations for rectifying
those things.
>> in the meantime --
>> in the meantime, I'm not sure that there is a solution
until the court's portion of i.j. System is up and running, which we are told
at this point is going to be June. We could give the county attorney's office
a list of people who are sitting in the jail who have an indisposed misdemeanor
case. What we cannot do is break those out by court accurately. If the county
attorney's office would like, a weekly or semi weekly list --
>> weekly would be good.
>> okay.
>> I think the judges need to get a weekly list.
>> even if it's just a pull list and they can figure out
who is in what court.
>> we can do that without any problem.
>> who provided the list of inmates for super docket?
>> how did that happen?
>> I don't know.
>> the super docket --
>> it wasn't my office.
>> it's the same source, isn't it?
>> my office generates felony reports right now but not anything
on misdemeanor [multiple voices]
>> consider bringing this total number down to one place
every day, you just bring the total number down to five places. Does it matter
to us a whole lot where they end up if they end up in court? I guess from
the county attorney's perspective.
>> doesn't matter to us.
>> if you know inmate john doe is coming down, you know you
need that file, just have it in one of the misdemeanor courts, right?
>> it doesn't matter to us. That lawyer would have to be
notified about what court to be in. That would be court administration. I
think court administration was generating a lot of the first lists. It was
very labor intensive. We were doing it in conjunction with a court administration
and then a lot of -- of the case that we are disposed of. Those are numbers
we are not getting anymore.
>> it may be -- I'm just positing this. It may be by not
having a the super jail call we actually cut off the kind of information flow
that makes super jail call work.
>> I agree.
>> maybe we should look at that.
>> my office will start generating a weekly list to the county
attorney's office and to all of the county court at law judges of all of the
undisposed misdemeanors that are in jail.
>> let's take a look at then -- June is a long time away.
>> we may transition that to court administration when they
have that research analyst. That's the reason we need to person.
>> point well take place.
>> thank you, judge.
>> thank you.
>> kate, I guess if you can, within the impact report to
come before the court, on the 19th of November, could you also maybe find
out from the persons involved within the 24 hour magistration the pretrial,
cscd, also magistrate, if they have any concerns -- about this process? And
I know, you know, we are tacking about 24 hours a day. Of course folks have
to be available in those slots to do the work. So -- so I would like to hear
what their concerns are as they are definitely a vital part in this process
and it would good to know what their concerns are as we go through this [inaudible]
of the [inaudible] image vacation.
>> we can do that?
>> can we also -- good, I would like to see that part of
the report.
>> anything else on 28.
>> one of the things commissioner where you quoted the super
jail call, what we are doing is actually generating the list of a's and b's
every day, my shop. We can't separate it by courts, the court administration
is doing that part, but we can tip to do that. -- we can continue to do that.
>> it's good to see which piece of this is actually causing
the number to climb.
>> [inaudible] court.
>> [ laughter ]
>> yeah, but I mean if it's the fact that we don't have the
one jail call going or whether it's because the [inaudible] is not getting
passed on the best way. I don't know. We want them to go to court. [inaudible
- no mic]
>> some court.
>> our goal is to get that 39% down to zero.
>> yeah.
>> thank you all.
>> thank you so much. This is -- there's good information
here.
>> thank you all.
Last Modified: Wednesday, April 2, 2003 10:25 AM