“In this facility, numerous jailers, all employed by the Live Oak County Sheriff’s Office, repeatedly raped and humiliated female inmates over an extended period of time.” A federal lawsuit is revealing terrible details about an obscure county jail in south Texas where women held pretrial were subjugated to terrible abuse.
While two of the jailers who assualted the women are already serving time, here are new detains of horrible oppression during pretrial detention. “Guards would withhodl food, drink essentail hygiene items, threaten to harm her or take away privileges” unless the woman allowed them to all .” And that’s just the beginning. Thanks to Courthouse News for great reporting.

Former Swisher County Sheriff Benavidez has been charged with official oppression–as a public servent, he intentionally subjected another person to mistreatment. Or in this case two people. Both his victims have had to file a lawsuit, because they were punished for reporting the assaults and lost benefiits and pay, after county judge Harold Keeter actually refused to press charges. Both women were humiiated and sexually assaulted; the good news is that the second woman had her cell phone camera on during the whole nasty incident!

Read this new story about the way many jails release people in the middle of the night, into dangerous situations. This is an issue that Texas Jail Project helped bring to the attention of lawmakers and the sheriffs and the public . . . .

HOUSTON — It was 1 a.m. when Acy Williams, a slight, 53-year-old homeless man, walked out of the Harris County Jail and onto the dark, desolate streets of downtown Houston. He wore plastic flip-flops, dingy scrubs and a black fedora. He had no money and no phone, and the Houston Metro buses ran infrequently at that late hour. He decided he would just have to walk several miles across the city to the spot in South Houston where he hoped his belongings were still safely stowed.

The excellent blog called Texas Prison Bidness… http://www.texasprisonbidness.org/ now has an interactive map which has color-coded pins to show exactly which county jails and prisons and immigration prisons are run by private prison companies like CCA and Geo, Inc. Click on a pin and you get the basic info, for example, clicking on Del Rio

Check out the excellent blog called Texas Prison Bidness… http://www.texasprisonbidness.org/ with its new interactive map which has color-coded pins to show exactly which county jails and prisons and immigration prisons are run by private prison companies like CCA and Geo, Inc. Click on a pin and you get the basic info, for example, clicking on

By Polly Ross Hughes, Houston Chronicle AUSTIN – A civil rights lawsuit announced Wednesday blames the private corrections system for the 2004 suicide of a South Texas woman found hanging in her cell after reporting that a male inmate raped her. LeTisha Tapia, who died at the Val Verde County Jail in July 2004, was