What does shortage of Travis County Jail officers mean for incarcerated people?

On Sept. 27, 2022, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards received a letter from a person in the Travis County Jail begging for help.

The writer, who had been incarcerated for two months in the Travis County Correctional Complex in Del Valle, described violence and theft among incarcerated people and claimed that they spent 23 hours a day in their cell. The complainant claimed there weren’t enough correctional officers supervising their unit, and those who were present were overworked.

The person wrote: "The guards are forced to work 15-20 hours which makes them care less + less about doing their jobs + makes our conditions worse + worse. This is added to the fact that the population of this place gets bigger + bigger everyday. ...

“Please help us! Please we are all begging for help please!"

The complaint was made during the height of a shortage of correctional officers at the Travis County Jail. In 2022, the officers' vacancy rate reached a high of 35%.

The Travis County sheriff’s office and the Commissioners Court have raised pay and funneled more money into recruiting, leading to a modest increase in correctional officers. But the staffing shortage has persisted as the jail population rebounds to pre-pandemic levels.

In 2023, the average daily population of the jail was the same as in 2019 — yet there were 200 fewer correctional officers.

Advocates told the American-Statesman that staffing can have a significant effect on life inside jail.

Through a public information request, the Statesman reviewed more than 700 pages of complaints about the Travis County Jail, spanning January 2021 to December 2023, from the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. A significant number of those complaints described 23-hour-a-day confinement, as well as limited access to showers and recreation. Some complaints directly attributed these conditions to a shortage of correctional officers.

The Texas Commission on Jail Standards redacted the identities of complainants in the public information request, so the Statesman was not able to contact them.

Travis County sheriff’s office spokesperson Kristen Dark said the jail maintained state standards despite officer vacancy rates and is always “amply staffed” to respond to emergency situations. She also said that, now that pandemic restrictions have been lifted and staffing has improved, incarcerated people are able to spend more time out of their cells.

Travis County Jail population rises, returning to pre-pandemic levels

In line with national trends, the number of people in the Travis County Jail — both at the downtown and Del Valle facilities — dipped in 2020 and 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the jail's average daily population hit a recent low of 1,629.

Most people incarcerated in the Travis County Jail are being held pretrial, meaning they have not been convicted of a crime.

Michele Deitch, a professor who runs the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas, said there were a variety of factors behind the decrease in jail populations. She pointed to how the pandemic slowed courthouse proceedings and led to a push for more people to be released from jail.

By 2022, the jail's average daily population rose to 2,148, matching 2019’s population count of 2,170.

The rebound to pre-pandemic levels echoes population trends in county jails around the country.

Travis County staffing shortage still urgent, despite efforts

The number of correctional officers employed by the Travis County sheriff’s office has been declining since 2018 — when there were 756 officers — but it took a particularly sharp decrease in 2022, when it dropped to 489 officers.

Dark, the sheriff’s office spokesperson, said there was a wave of retirements in 2021, as officers who came on during a “hiring surge” in the 1990s retired after decades with the office. She also attributed low staffing levels to the pandemic, writing in a statement that “the opportunity to telework became mainstream nationwide and attracted people to career changes.”

Even as the vacancy rate worsened, the Travis County Jail was required by state law to have at least one correctional officer for every 48 people incarcerated. To maintain legal standards during the peak of the shortage, correctional officers sometimes worked two shifts in a row, Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez told the Statesman in an interview.

These “mandatory holdovers,” Hernandez said, were sometimes unplanned. A correctional officer could show up expecting to work only one eight-hour shift, but end up having to stay for another.

Hernandez said these double shifts did not affect the safety of officers or people incarcerated in the jail. She also said that, through restructuring shifts, the jail was able to reduce the amount of mandatory holdovers.

Christina Dail, the president of a Travis County correctional officer union, said in a statement that “the shortages definitely have an impact on employees.”

“Our staff are stepping up to fill the gap during this challenging time. They’re picking up overtime shifts, sacrificing time they could be with their families and taking on additional responsibilities,” Dail said. “Of course, they’re experiencing physical and mental exhaustion, but all of us believe in what we do here, and we are committed to serving our community by ensuring safety and security and maintaining state standards in our jails.”

Both Dail and Hernandez pointed out that staffing vacancies have improved in recent years. Hernandez said marketing campaigns had bolstered the office’s recruitment efforts. Hernandez said that since June 2023, there has been a “net gain” in the number of correctional officers, which has improved employee morale.

“We can feel a difference, and it’s giving us a bit of a boost,” Dail said.

As of May 29, there are 544 correctional officers at the Travis County Jail, according to Dark. She said 11 more officers were expected to start the first week of June.

‘Sensory deprivation and excessive confinement’: Staffing shortage’s impact on incarcerated people

Advocates say the staffing shortage likely makes jail conditions worse — concerns that are echoed in jail standards complaints reviewed by the Statesman.

Many complaints reviewed by the Statesman, made in 2022 and 2023, included reports of 23-hour-a-day confinement, limiting access to showers, recreation time and phone calls.

In an entry received in July 2022, a complainant described being “hardly allowed out of our cells."

“We are suffering here from sensory deprivation and excessive confinement," the person wrote.

Being confined for 23 hours a day does not necessarily violate jail standards — which are minimum requirements. Jails are required to let incarcerated people shower at least every other day, and incarcerated people must have one hour of recreation three times a week.

Dark said that, in 2022, pandemic restrictions played a role in how much time incarcerated people spent outside of their cells.

“It was rare, but yes, there were times when inmates were limited to an hour outside their cells,” Dark told the Statesman in an email. She said the safety of incarcerated people is “not affected” when they spend “more time than usual” in their cells.

Some complaints directly tied excessive confinement to staffing shortages. In one complaint, received in July 2022, the writer claimed, “We are punished for the state’s lack of resources daily. 'Shortage of staff!'"

"No recreation, no phone time, no showers,” it read.

Dark acknowledged that “modified schedules” due to pandemic protocols and staffing shortages did affect access to showers and recreation. She said access to public phones was limited, but the "majority" of the jail population had access to tablets for a rate of $0.01 per minute.

Dark said the Travis County Jail was able to maintain minimum standards, even if there was less time outside of their cells than incarcerated people were "used to." She told the Statesman that conditions had improved as staffing increased.

Robert Lilly, an organizer with Grassroots Leadership, works with people incarcerated in the Travis County Jail and had heard accounts of 23-hour-a-day confinement. He was concerned such conditions would lead to poor mental and physical health — and could make it difficult for someone to transition to life outside jail.

"If we can't produce conditions that lend itself to human decency, then release people from the jail," Lilly said.

Krish Gundu, an organizer at the Texas Jail Project, agreed. She told the Statesman that staffing has been a “chronic issue" at jails throughout the country, stretching back before the pandemic. Given how difficult it has been to improve staffing, Gundu said, it's all the more important to reduce jail populations.

“We should be looking at the front end of the pipeline and saying, ‘How can we reduce the inflow of people into jail?’” Gundu said.

Statesman staff writer Skye Seipp contributed reporting to this story.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: How the staffing shortage at Travis County Jail impacts people inside