Finally, after years of Texas Jail Project and community advocates pushing the McLennan county commissioners and the Texas Commission on Jail Standards to hold LaSalle, the for-profit operator, accountable for all the custody deaths and medical neglect, the county has decided to end its contract and take back its jail.

For the second time this year, Bowie county jail has been found out of compliance after the July 6th suicide of 48 year old Michael Rodden who was arrested only three days prior on a drug related offense. The Attorney General's Online database of custody deaths reports 15 suicides in Texas county jails and lockups (not including prisons) in 2019.

That's a first! "AG cites possible terrorism in withholding jail death video." What??

Fantastic data driven story about the rise in Smith county's jail population in the Tyler Morning Telegraph with great quotes from TJP's Executive Director Diana Claitor. Erin Mansfield does an excellent job of analyzing the data over the years and asking the type of questions county commissioners and tax payers should be paying close attention to. We wish more county newspapers would look closely at their pretrial populations and push their leaders to invest in courts and community based pretrial solutions instead of bigger jails.

Back in 2011, I published a story on the TJP website about the tragic death of a young man named Micah Aaron Garner who died in the Gregg County Jail--one in a string of deaths at that jail. (Gregg County appears to have since cleaned up its act.)

I said Micah was "jailed to death." It's ironic and sad to see the great WFAA reporter Tanya Eiserer using the same phrase in her in-depth investigation of the ghastly death of Greg McElvy in the Johnson County jail. Read this and note how the sheriff and jail staff falsely blamed the inmate for his medical emergency.

Thanks to the bill by Rep. Mary Gonzalez that was instigated by Texas Jail Project, pregnant inmates will receive better prenatal care and not be shackled during childbirth!

Our heart goes out to this family who was expecting their father to come home from Harris County Jail. Glad they have an experienced attorney like Randall Kallinen representing them.

The number of reported deaths in Texas county jails in 2019 alone is 36. (This is not including the three recent deaths that Texas Jail Project has heard of directly from family members.) Jails have 30 days to report custody deaths to the office of the Attorney General. Failure to report is a Class B misdemeanor. Compare the number of jail deaths in a mere 6 months, to the number of executions carried out in Texas in the past 3 years (not including 2019) - 37.

A Travis County jailer falsified records. Not good, but what's encouraging is that the jail supervisor went through video footage to see if he was really checking on people like he logged in the records and discovered he wasn't. Then they held him accountable.

New Lancet study states - Counties with increased incarceration have increased fatal overdose rates and highlights a largely neglected dimension of the US criminal justice system - local jails!

Hot off the press: an open access study published in The Lancet investigating the associations between economic decline, incarceration rates, and age-standardized mortality from drug use disorders at the county level in the U.S.