Advocates, family members denounce jail deaths at Texas Capitol hearing
This story is part of the KXAN investigation, “Mental Competency Consequences,” a project supported by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism.
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Advocates and family members of people who have experienced mental illness in custody met Thursday at a Texas Commission on Jail Standards hearing to speak publicly and raise awareness of jail deaths and a state hospital system backlog that has left thousands of mentally ill people waiting for treatment for months, or years, in jail.
EXPLORE: Mental Competency Consequences
More than a dozen individuals and advocates stepped up to the microphone in the packed Capitol hearing room to tell their stories of loved ones who died in the county jail system.
Diana Claitor, former director of the Texas Jail Project, spoke on behalf two men – Julian Torres, who died May 5, 2023, at the age of 40 in the El Paso County Jail and Jonathan Taylor Ngumbi, 32, who died in Kaufman County Jail on Nov. 2, 2023.
Claitor and her organization – including current executive director Krishnaveni Gundu – had assisted both men and their families for years as they navigated the criminal justice system with mental illness, she said.
“It is a shameful thing,” Claitor said. “I think it is astounding and horrifying I am standing here with these two families again; except this time, they don’t have their sons. Their sons are gone.”
Brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, person after person took their turn in the public comment period to share their tragic stories.
The circumstances of the deaths and locations varied widely, but nearly all of them shared a common denominator: the people who died in custody were experiencing a mental health crisis.
The commissioners listened and thanked the speakers. TCJS regulates all county jails in the state by monitoring populations, staffing and standards. Its mission is “to assist local governments in providing safe, secure and suitable local jail facilities,” according to its website.
Data: Texas state hospital backlog sees modest decrease
Last August, Texas had more than 71,000 people housed in county jails, with more than 44,000 of them awaiting trial, according to the most recent available month of data from TCJS.
Gundu, co-founder and current executive director of the Texas Jail Project, helped organize family members who spoke at the TCJS hearing at the Texas Capitol.
“It is really hard hearing these stories,” Gundu said. “More than half the people who died in jail custody in 2022 had been identified as mentally ill at least once since the 1980s,” she added, citing reporting by Houston Landing.
“We are in so much worse shape than we were” 10 years ago, Gundu said. “We have not invested in front end preventative solutions. All you’ve done is expand the carceral system.”
For years, KXAN has followed the Texas Health and Human Services Commission’s struggle to move people found incompetent to stand trial from jail to state hospital beds for competency restoration.
With state hospitals full, people found incompetent to stand trial – and ordered to receive competency restoration – are placed on a waitlist and typically stay in jail until a state hospital bed becomes available. The waitlist grew consistently for years and peaked at more than 2,500 individuals in the summer and fall of 2023. Since that time, the waitlist has inched down and more beds have come online.
Exactly how many people have died while on the waitlist isn’t clear because no state agency tracks that information, and the waitlist is secret due to health privacy laws.
HHSC efforts
In a statement to KXAN, HHSC said it “continues to work with all parties to ensure individuals on the state hospital waitlist are admitted as quickly as possible.”
HHSC acknowledged the recent downtick in the number of people on the waitlist. On Feb. 1, there were 1,947, HHSC spokesperson Jennifer Ruffcorn said.
For several years, HHSC has been renovating and expanding its state hospitals. The Legislature appropriated $1.5 billion in the last session for that purpose. When all the projects funded since 2017 are completed, there will be an additional 618 state hospital-owned beds, including 384 more maximum-security beds.
HHSC has also purchased private psychiatric beds, including 193 state-purchased inpatient psychiatric beds, with 70 in rural areas and 123 in urban communities.
The agency has also been working to shore up its staffing levels, which were hit hard by the pandemic. HHSC said it currently has 7,186 full-time employees in the state hospital system, which is down about 220 compared to pre-pandemic levels.
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