ICYMI -- Frozen in Place: How Winter Storms Push Texas Jails and Prisons to the Brink longreads
A message scrawled on the back of a sign across the street from the Dallas County Jail echoes the cries of the prisoners.When Jerome Van Zandt was booked into Harris County Jail in November 2020, he was optimistic. “There’s no way I’ll be here more than three months,” he told himself. A Navy veteran with 20 years of service, he had been caught with less than a gram of crack cocaine and charged with possession and evading arrest.
Like many jails and prisons throughout the state, Harris County's lost access to water during the storm in February 2021. Van Zandt says the toilets filled with feces that festered for four days. At one point during the storm, instead of being served dinner, incarcerated people like Van Zandt were served a slightly larger lunch. It was an apparent attempt at rationing.
“Our needs aren’t met by the city or the county, even though they have the dollars,” says Tiara Cooper. A formerly incarcerated person, Cooper is a staunch advocate for jail reform who works with the coalition In Defense of Black Lives Dallas. “Once again, I feel like the city of Dallas is letting people down, and incarcerated people especially. I don’t see a plan in place for if or when this happens again.
The picture she paints of Carswell during the storm is eerily similar to the stories shared by incarcerated people in Houston, Galveston and Dallas: The intermittent power plunged the buildings into freezing temps. The only warmth was found in scarce blankets crusted with dirt. With the water out and nothing available to drink, people scrambled to discreetly steal milk cartons or whatever liquid they could get their hands on.
A sewage backup created what June describes as “ankle-deep feces and wastewater” throughout her building. According to her, corrections officers let that water sit there for nearly a day. That is perhaps the most frustrating part of all: the lack of action and communication from the people up top. “They made the officers be the face of their inaction,” June says of the prison’s leadership. “There was no communication, no resolution.
“If you can’t provide my basic necessities,” a woman named Allison wrote, “you need to bond me out. I’m starting to feel sick from dehydration. I have a fraud charge. I didn't kill anyone, and I don’t think I should be treated this poorly.” Dominick has an answer to her own question: It’s all about politics. So many of Texas prisons are in various states of disrepair, she says. These facilities are simply not fit to endure extreme cold or extreme heat, and because of the stigma surrounding incarcerated people, there’s little political will to provide the funding needed for repairs or any changes that would improve living conditions.
Meanwhile, Cooper can’t shake the memory of some of the calls she received during last year's winter storm. At the time, she was helping the loved ones of incarcerated people find any shred of information they could about their families. “So many mothers and partners and grandparents had no idea what was going on with their loved ones,” she says. “I could feel the pain in their voices.”Tammy Hinton was experiencing some deja vu this month.
When reached for comment, the sheriff’s office said there have been “no changes” to jail policy concerning weather preparedness. “The Dallas County Emergency Management Teams are equipped with plans regarding severe weather,” a spokeswoman said. As Cooper has witnessed, attempts to reduce those numbers are often met with endless finger-pointing and the kind of hardline law-and-order rhetoric that is baked into Dallas’ DNA. "Criminal justice reform is just not a topic that anyone in Dallas County leadership wants to deal with,” Pishko says. “The right is not willing to do any criminal justice reform at all."
In 2020, Sheriff Brown’s department spent $14.4 million in overtime. It was originally provided for $2.5 million. As Cooper argues, that’s money that could go to programs and initiatives focused on housing, education, homelessness and jobs.
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