For years, Tarrant County has struggled to keep its jail fully staffed. Now, the county is trying a new proposal that doesn't involve hiring its own detention officers.
Tarrant County will try to fill some of the nearly 180 open jobs in the jail by using a private staffing company. Recana – which previously operated detention facilities for the state’s Operation Lone Star border enforcement campaign – will source new jailers, who will operate as contractors, jail administrator Shannon Herklotz told county commissioners earlier this month.
This is the first time Texas Commission on Jail Standards Executive Director Brandon Wood has heard of a jail using “a temp service-type model,” he told KERA News.
Wood's agency makes sure jails run according to state rules. Contract jailers will be subject to the same requirements as Tarrant County-employed jailers, he said.
"We won't differentiate between the two,” he said. “We're just going to ensure that Tarrant County is meeting the minimum standards that's required.”
As of last year, jailers were making up for the vacancies by working a minimum of 52 hours a week, and overtime costs are rising.
As of September, overtime salaries for the confinement bureau in fiscal year 2025 totaled $17.2 million, county budget documents show. That’s up from $16.4 million in 2024 and $14.1 million in 2023.
Incarcerated people feel the consequences of understaffing, too. There aren’t enough detention officers to transport them to off-site medical visits, a review of the Tarrant County Jail’s medical systems found last year.
Tarrant County is allowed to decide how it wants to staff up its jail, Wood said. KERA News reached out to some national corrections advocates to ask them whether it could work.
Why is understaffing an issue?
Recruiting people to work in jails and prisons is not easy, said Brian Dawe, the national director for the corrections officer organization One Voice United.
People don't go into corrections because it's a dream job, he said. Usually, it's because of economic necessity.
"And when you have a situation where the pay does not equal what you have to go through, then you start to see a decline in the number of people that are on the job," he said.
Dawe started his career in Massachusetts prisons in the 1980s. Working in that setting can be physically and psychologically dangerous, he said. A focus on "turning keys and counting heads," with no involvement in rehabilitation or reentry programs, can feel meaningless. And long overtime hours strain officers and their families.
“After you've done three sixteen-hour shifts in a row, you could care less about the dishes or the clothes or the kids going to soccer,” Dawe said. “You just need sleep."
The understaffing problem is widespread across jails, which generally hold people awaiting trial, and prisons, which hold people who have been convicted.
While Dawe said he’d need to know more about Recana’s program to have a fixed opinion, he expressed skepticism people would move from other places to become jailers in Tarrant County.
"Are these guys rejects from police departments or former corrections departments that can't get a job where they're at? Why would they go to Texas?” he said. “I'd just have a lot of questions I'd want answered before I'd ever engage. I mean, you're dealing with people's lives here. This isn't a Coca-Cola factory."
Recana’s plans for Tarrant County aren’t clear. The company declined to do an interview for this story. A spokesperson said it was too early in the process to comment publicly.
The spokesperson also declined to share a copy of the proposal Recana was asked to submit when it was competing for the jail staffing contract. KERA News has submitted an official public records request for the proposal.
Liberty County, outside Houston, was supposed to be the first to try staffing a jail with Recana contractors. Commissioners approved a contract last year but didn't go through with it because of the cost, Liberty County Sheriff Bobby Rader said in an email.
What do we know about the contract?
Tarrant County will guarantee placement for a minimum of 50 jailers from Recana, according to the county's request for proposals, which is publicly available online.
The contract jailers have to have a Texas Commission on Law Enforcement basic jailer’s license, and the sheriff’s office will provide training on skills like CPR and using force, the request states.
The Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to questions for this story, including one about the anticipated cost of the contract per week.
At a commissioners court meeting on Oct. 14, Herklotz told commissioners Recana is needed because the company has a further recruiting reach.
Recana will pay contract jailers' living expenses for 30 days while they get settled, County Administrator Chandler Merritt said. Tarrant County also has the option to hire Recana jailers permanently.
Recana’s previous experience comes from the state’s immigration enforcement effort, Operation Lone Star. Recana staffed processing facilities on the border, according to the company’s website.
Those facilities are now closed, according to Wood. They were regulated by the state jail commission, and Wood said they didn’t find any problems with them.
Two lawsuits against Recana over its work during Operation Lone Star are working their way through the courts, according to a report from Bloomberg. They allege Recana’s slow processing times left people detained too long.
The company is also bidding for ICE contracts, Bloomberg reports.
Daniel Landsman is the vice president of policy for the prison reform group Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM). While the Recana contract might help Tarrant County, it won't be a solution everywhere, he said.
"It's not something I could see working at a national level, because we only have so many correctional officers to pull from," Landsman said. “And the issue that we’re facing is we simply don’t have enough.”
Landsman, whose work focuses on the prison system, said the “flip side” of the understaffing problem is the population problem.
One solution to understaffing is to reevaluate who needs to be incarcerated, he argued. FAMM advocates for identifying people in prisons who might not need to be incarcerated anymore, like people over 55 or those dealing with serious medical conditions.
Tarrant County has tried to limit its jail population. The Mental Health Jail Diversion Center opened to offer an alternative to jail for low-level offenders with mental health problems, but it wasn’t enough to “materially reduce” the jail population, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.
At one point, the county spent more than $40 million on jail overflow space, sending local detainees to a private prison in West Texas. That contract ended early after KERA News reported on safety violations at the private facility.
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