Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, has a problem. A very big problem. People booked into the Harris County Jail are dying, and most of those deaths were completely preventable.
An investigation by Huffington Post showed that in the year since Sandra Bland’s death in 2015, inmates died in the Harris County Jail at a higher rate per capita than at most other jails in the nation. At least 12 inmates died between July 13, 2015 and July 13, 2016.
One of them was Patrick Brown of Katy, a Houston suburb. He was beaten to death in April in a holding cell two days after being arrested for stealing a guitar. Sheriff Ron Hickman told KHOU in Houston that while the holding cell has cameras, his correctional officers are tied up processing 350 inmates per day in Texas’ biggest county jail. Many of the correctional officers are forced to work double shifts because the jail is chronically understaffed. Some 40 percent of the correctional officers have been on the job for two years or less.
What’s the big deal? Well, without enough staffers, a lot of things can go unnoticed–severe injuries, signs of illness, or mental problems such as suicide. Without enough people who are trained to recognize the signs of potential trouble, the results can potentially be disastrous.
Take what happened to Patrick Green, for instance. Green was arrested in December 2014 after relapsing into a drug addiction. According to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by his parents, Green became gravely ill in late March 2015, but the correctional officers ignored signs of his suffering for two days. The officers ignored numerous calls for help from other inmates, even when they held Green up to the glass to show them how sick he was.
When two officers finally came to Green’s pod on March 24, they kicked him several times before taking him to the jail’s clinic. It took another eight hours for the nurse on duty to call an ambulance. Green died later that night in the hospital of acute bacterial meningitis. Green’s parents contend that he died in part because his cell pod was “extremely filthy,” with “orange and yellowish grime” in the bathroom and water fountain and “black dirt and mold-like material” on the vents. The pod was not cleaned on a regular basis until after Green’s death.
Besides forcing inmates to live in filthy conditions and looking the other way when it causes them to get sick, Harris County jail officials also don’t do enough to stop potential suicides. As early as 2009, the Justice Department warned Harris County that jail conditions were potentially “dangerous for suicidal detainees.” However, that warning has apparently gone unheeded. The Houston Chronicle has uncovered no fewer than 35 instances where correctional officers skipped mandatory 30-minute checks on suicidal inmates–and in some cases, faked logs to cover it up.
Then there are cases like those of Danarian Hawkins, who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder long before his 2012 arrest for pulling a knife on a man. In June 2013, he tried to use his bedsheet to hang himself from the sprinkler. After a brief time in the mental health unit, he was placed back in general population–and allowed to keep a bedsheet in his cell.
According to one officer, he and others had heard so many inmates talk about killing themselves that they didn’t think Hawkins was serious. In February 2014, he tied his bedsheet around the smoke detector and hanged himself. His mother filed a federal civil rights lawsuit two days after the Greens filed theirs, claiming among other things that her son only got cursory treatment at the clinic on several occasions before being put back in general population.
Simply put, this situation should be an outrage to every fair-minded person in the Houston area, and across the nation. At this point, the only acceptable solution will be a root-and-branch housecleaning of both the jail and the sheriff’s office as a whole. And that will only happen under court supervision. There is no other way to prevent unnecessary deaths at the jail, as well as to protect the rights of the inmates. And yes, they do have rights.
