The Texas Commission on Jail Standards, the statewide regulatory body that oversees county jails, will request that the Texas Attorney General intervene in its longstanding efforts to force the Harris County Jail into compliance with minimum jail standards, according to a motion raised and approved at a commission meeting Thursday.
The move represents a significant escalation in the state’s efforts to improve conditions in Harris County’s troubled jail system, which has struggled to comply with a remedial order since 2023.
“They’ve been out of compliance for an extended period of time and under remedial order for (over) a year now,” said Brandon Wood, director of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, in an interview with the Landing. “I need to have them comply with minimum jail standards… to enforce the safety and security of the staff that work there and the inmates that are housed there.”
In a written statement, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which operates the jail, attributed the jail’s ongoing challenges to systemic failures outside of its control.
“The Harris County Sheriff’s Office continues to work with the Texas Commission on Jail Standards to address overcrowding challenges created by the backlog of local cases awaiting trial,” Jason Spencer, senior policy and communications advisor for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, wrote in an email. “Because of this backlog, the average length of stay in the Harris County Jail exceeds 180 days, which is about six times longer than the average Texas jail. The Harris County Jail also houses 350 inmates who are on a waiting list for the state’s overwhelmed mental hospitals.
“In spite of these challenges, the Harris County Jail has made significant progress toward addressing understaffing challenges, and there are currently only 38 job vacancies for detention officers,” Spencer wrote.
The Texas Commission on Jail Standards first issued the remedial order in May 2023 following several inspections of the Harris County Jail that found persistent areas of noncompliance with state jail standards, particularly a failure to meet the required staffing ratio of one detention officer per 48 inmates.
In response, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office accelerated hiring and outsourced hundreds of inmates awaiting trial from its overburdened downtown facility to privately operated jails in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Harris County’s efforts led to a certification of compliance in August 2024. However, in January, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards issued Harris County a new notice of noncompliance after officials acknowledged they had failed to meet state standards on face-to-face inmate observation.
The acknowledgment followed three deaths at the Harris County Jail in December 2024, at least one of which was related to the lapse.
“Some of the data that we’ve been able to review indicates that (Harris County has) been working on the staffing, but we still have face-to-face observations and other areas of noncompliance occurring,” Wood told the Landing, adding that he plans to make a formal request to engage the attorney general on Friday.
On Thursday, the total Harris County Jail population was over 9,800, according to public data maintained by the sheriff’s office. The jail is only equipped to hold about 9,400 inmates, according to jail officials.
‘Such a huge price’
What the attorney general’s intervention in Harris County’s jail conditions will mean in practice was not immediately clear on Thursday.
One possibility, Wood told the Landing, is that the attorney general could file suit against Harris County, a remedy laid out in the Texas Administrative Code.
Previous interventions by the attorney general in jail standard enforcement have led to jail closures in Calhoun and Howard Counties and a “strenuous compliance program” in Webb County, Wood said.
Wood told the Landing he was unaware that the attorney general had ever intervened in enforcement efforts at the Harris County Jail.
The Texas Office of the Attorney General did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
Advocates for reform celebrated the attorney general’s involvement but called it long overdue.
“It’s been a long time coming, honestly,” Krish Gundu, executive director of the nonprofit Texas Jail Project, told the Landing. “This should have happened sooner, before we had all these deaths, especially the out-of-state custody deaths.”
Three Harris County inmates have died awaiting trial out of state since the county began outsourcing inmates in late 2023, with the most recent death occurring last month in LaSalle Parish, Louisiana. Meanwhile, three inmates have died in Harris County’s Houston facilities in 2025 alone, following 10 reported deaths in custody in 2024.
“I just feel like we’ve paid such a huge price for (noncompliance),” Gundu said. “The community has paid such a huge price.”
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