Travis County Commissioners Court
October 31, 2006
Item 36
And we had 36 on consent.
>> no.
>> didn't we?
>> 36 is is to consider and take appropriate action on variance request to Texas commission on jail stz to convert posts one and two and half of the second floor of the Travis County jail into holding cells for the central booking facility. Major?
>> when we -- the restructure I just mentioned on the classification section included --
>> [ inaudible ].
>> when we met with jail standards to speak of the reclassification issues, what we discovered through speaking with with them on all of the different issues is that the way the standard reads on classifications is that prior to permanent housing, a full blown classification has to occur on that person. Now, what we've done since we opened the new central booking in the year 2000 is as the open seating filled up, we would move them up to posts one and post two. You can put any classification in there, whether they're minimum or need yawm. The problem is you're not supposed to mix the minimums and the maximums. But this is the way we had always operated. In our conversation with jail standards over how we're going to do our face to face classification with our corrections officers that y'all give gave nus this year's budget, they noted that the standard only allows you to keep people in holding cells before moving them to permanent housing.
>> as needed?
>> right. The number be of chairs is 65 and the holding cells down in intook ising is is only -- central booking is only 16. The last few months we've averaged 175 people a day. The numbers just don't add up. As we get too many people, we dress them out and take them upstairs. So they informed us that we were in violation of that standard. So in working with them, we looked at a different number be of options that we could do, so the agreement that we came up with is if I asked for this variance to where we call if -- I have to do this it would take our permanent housing and we would call them, we would call it holding. And we had to put two conditions on it, though. We would have to single cell them, which we do in post one and n post two. We do that already.
>> in post one and post two single cell, be those are not an issue either. Where our real issue comes in is the cells in the two north and two south in the jail itself. The women, as an example, of course we can't put them in post one and post two. Those are all male units. So we've selected units in the jail proper for the females that come up from booking. But because of their interpretation of this standard, I am now going to have to single cell the women because until they're absolutely classified with the criminal history and all those things, we don't know what we're mixing. We possibly could be nix mixing minimums and maximums. So we have to agree to -- if we do that, if we bring people up from central booking, they have to go into single cells and they have to provide 30 minute checks. That's what this variance would do, it would allow us to call our permanent housing holding, preclfks holding cells with the stipulation being that we would have to single cell the persons and do the checks that we're already doing.
>> so we think we can single cell and do the third as many checks if granted the variance.
>> that's correct. Now, where it hurts us is we're eliminating variance space. We're going from a population on that floor, and I don't have them memorized, down to the design capacity of 96. '
>> [one moment, please, for change in captioners]
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, November 1, 2006 11:30 AM