In recent years, we’ve called out Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare for his campaign to undermine elections. We’ve also voiced concerns about inmate deaths and failed inspections at the Tarrant County jail under Sheriff Bill Waybourn.
But for all the bad press that trails our Republican neighbors to the west, the Democrats in charge of Dallas County are no beacon of good governance. Far from it.
Among the latest batch of headlines out of Dallas County: Commissioner John Wiley Price’s outburst against a fellow commissioner was so intense that County Judge Clay Jenkins called a meeting to recess. Meanwhile, the Dallas County jail failed an inspection for leaving two inmates in a holding cell for too long.
This was an off-site review of jail paperwork after state officials received complaints.
Opinion
Our newsroom colleague Tracey McManus reported that state officials found jailers kept the men in the holding cells for two and a half days — longer than the maximum 48 hours allowed — and failed to provide one of the men his prescribed medications. The latter deficiency didn’t count toward noncompliance.
Sheriff Marian Brown told McManus that the jail has updated state officials on steps taken to prevent these occurrences. In one case, Brown pointed to a deficiency in the jail’s software system. She said the jail has to comply with hundreds of standards and that any one could put the jail out of compliance.
But perfection is not the bar to clear here. State officials give some runway to county jails. Lockups can fall short of certain requirements and still be found to be in compliance. However, the state will fail a jail for serious violations that point to systemic or life-threatening issues.
This isn’t a one-off for Dallas County. The jail failed inspections in 2018, 2021 and 2022. This editorial page revealed that the jail failed an inspection in 2022 in part because inmates had tampered with hundreds of cell doors, rendering them inoperable.
Dallas County’s problems aren’t confined to the jail. People have been locked up longer than they should have because of delays in court clerks getting paperwork to jailers and to the state, McManus reported. District Clerk Felicia Pitre, the person in charge of rolling out a new courts software two years ago, didn’t respond to our colleague’s messages requesting comment on her office’s processes.
In June, citing the county’s official jail population report, we noted that about 2,400 inmates were waiting for their cases to go to the grand jury. The Dallas County district attorney’s office disputed that figure. Its own count showed that this number was in the hundreds, not thousands. Soon after, county officials decided to stop including certain categories of data in a daily jail population report because data pulled from courts software for the report was inaccurate.
Two years after the rollout of the new software, some county employees are still having to hand-deliver documents to other departments. And lawsuits from former inmates are piling up.
Unfortunately for Dallas County residents who will foot the bill to defend the county, the excuses are as systemic as the problems.