COVID-19 has upped the need for information about our county jails, but in the past, “South Texas jails have “notoriously” been places lacking in transparency,” said Diana Claitor, co-founder of the Texas Jail Project, a nonprofit that aims to give voice to those incarcerated in jails.

Our request for records from the Bexar County Jail revealed how a jail can gouge when it comes to the price of public information. TJP’s director describes the situation. “The whole point of getting this information was to help a family find out what happened to their son in the last hours of his life,” Claitor, who heads the nonprofit reform-minded Texas Jail Project, told the Current. “Essentially, it felt like a way of blocking the release of this information.”