Tarrant County will keep sending local prisoners to a private prison outside Lubbock — with a plan to renovate a local jail in an effort to end the expensive contract by 2025.
Tarrant County first started sending local jail inmates to the Giles W. Dalby Correctional Facility, four hours west of Fort Worth, last year. On Tuesday, county commissioners extended the contract at a cost of $22.5 million, increasing the number of available beds at Dalby from 432 to 500 for 15 months. Funding will come from federal pandemic relief money that county commissioners recently shifted away from affordable housing and childcare.
The private prison serves as a pressure valve for the local jail system, as the jail population rises and hundreds of jailer jobs sit vacant. Now, the county also needs somewhere to send local prisoners while the main downtown jail, the Tarrant County Corrections Center, undergoes major safety renovations starting this year, according to county staff.
Republican County Commissioner Manny Ramirez said he wasn’t happy with the cost, but the county had no choice but to extend the contract.
“I’d like to see us put on a path to where we’re not burning $20 million a year on an outside contract,” Ramirez said.
County staff do have a proposal: Renovate the Cold Springs Jail, just north of downtown Fort Worth, creating an additional 384 medium-security beds. That renovation could be done by December 2024, when the MTC contract expires, County Administrator Chandler Merritt said.
“Our intention is to make this, hopefully, the last extension that we’ll have to do,” he said.
Commissioners are set to vote on an architectural services agreement for the Cold Springs renovation at their Oct. 17 meeting, Merritt said.
Commissioners voted along party lines — Republicans for the contract extension, Democrats against.
The county should do more to decrease the jail population instead of using a private prison, Democratic County Commissioner Alisa Simmons said. People in jail for minor crimes like criminal trespassing, with bonds of $500 or less, don’t need to be in a cell, she said.
“It’s unnecessary. It’s wasteful. I don’t know if the problems here are originating with some of our judges setting bonds too high, defense attorneys not being aggressive enough on behalf of their clients, or both,” Simmons said. “But I know that there are alternatives to incarceration for someone serving a $200 bond, which are more economical to the taxpayer.”
“We need to get those people out of our jail,” Simmons’ Democratic colleague, County Commissioner Roy Charles Brooks, said.
In Tarrant County, magistrates set bond amounts for people charged with crimes. If a person can pay, either on their own or with the help of a bail bondsman, they can leave jail and deal with their case from the outside.
Generally, the more severe the alleged crime, the higher the bond. When deciding a bond amount, magistrates also consider a person’s criminal history, their risk of committing more crimes and their ability to pay, according to the county’s website.
Republican County Judge Tim O’Hare didn’t fully disagree with Simmons, but the jail renovation is urgent, and the $22.5 million contract is necessary, he said.
“We’re kind of in a pickle here, where yeah, that does seem like an exorbitant amount of money,” O’Hare said. “I believe it’s the opinion of the staff that we don’t have a year to spare to get Cold Springs up and running.”
Without the Dalby facility, the local jail could become overcrowded and lose its state certification, according to agenda documents.
O’Hare also agreed with Simmons that the county should do everything it can to push for video magistration. That’s a process where people who are arrested can meet the magistrate over video, get their bond amount, pay it and leave police custody without ever entering the Tarrant County jail system.
That will be a big shift for some local police agencies, according to Fort Worth Police Department Deputy Chief Mark Barthen. The Fort Worth city jail is just a holding tank, designed to hold people for about 12 hours. If magistration takes any longer, people might have to go to the county jail anyway, he wrote in an email.
“There are no beds, limited restrooms, and limited meal service (it is literally meant to be a temporary holding facility),” Barthen wrote.
FWPD is working with the county to determine if it is possible to get 15 people arraigned over video each day, keeping them out of the county jail, Barthen said.
Some residents have protested the use of the Dalby facility since it was approved last year. On Tuesday, Nan Terry, a Tarrant County resident and frequent speaker at Commissioners Court, questioned the wisdom of using a private prison.
“Even the feds don’t use private prisons anymore,” Terry said. “Why are we?”
In 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order to phase out all federal contracts with private prisons, to reduce “profit-based incentives to incarcerate.”
The contract renewal comes less than a month after a man in Tarrant County custody died while being held at Dalby. He died of a terminal illness in a Lubbock hospital, according to the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office.
