Media spotlight week 6/9/25
June 13, 2025
Read the highlights of Texas Jail Project news coverage below and click on the links to read the full articles. The Dallas Morning News: Dallas County’s overcrowded jail ‘is broken.’…
Topics: 2025news, Mental Health, Overcrowding, Pretrial Policy
Dallas County
Read the highlights of Texas Jail Project news coverage below and click on the links to read the full articles.
The Dallas Morning News: Dallas County’s overcrowded jail ‘is broken.’ Officials look to Miami for solutions
This article in the Dallas Morning News, which we pitched around Continuity of Care Query (CCQ) checks describes the investment Dallas County is making in an effort to decrease the jail population. In recent years, bookings have decreased, while the jail population has increased due to delays in the court system. As per Texas Jail Project’s case work data, jails have seen a steep rise in the population of people with serious mental illness due to these individuals not receiving timely and appropriate care in the community.
The county jail system is now the largest warehouse of people with mental illness in Texas. CCQ check is mandated by the Sandra Bland Act to determine if the individual was enrolled or received any services from the state’s public mental health system in the three years prior to the date of booking. It’s an essential data point that should be tracked to understand why our jails are becoming warehouses of people with mental illnesses.
Dallas County officials are considering a program, modeled after one in Miami-Dade County, that would prioritize connecting people to mental health resources and keeping people with mental illness and substance use out of jails.
The fact that almost three-fifths of people booked into the Dallas County Jail last year had a history with the public mental health system shows local mental health and behavioral health authorities are failing, said Krish Gundu, co-founder and executive director of Texas Jail Project, a nonprofit that advocates for incarcerated people.
Why, she asked, are people receiving treatment in the public health system ending up in jail? She said solutions must also focus on prevention, which means addressing more than mental health, such as housing and access to basic healthcare.
Some hallmarks of the Miami-Dade model include:
- 40 hours of crisis intervention training for law enforcement officers
- Connecting people with hospitals or crisis stabilization instead of arrest
- The option to participate in community-based treatment instead of jail
- The opportunity to have charges dropped after participating in treatment programs
The model is praised for decreasing jail populations and saving money. Miami-Dade County even closed one of its jails. Both Dallas and Harris Counties have spent tens of thousands of dollars visiting Miami to copy the model. Unfortunately, the Miami-Dade model has fallen short of its goals: many people keep coming back because they are unable to comply with their treatments. They are now building an actual brick and mortar “diversion center.” Many of these people would end up being ineligible for a “diversion center” due to their high level charges.