Dallas County’s jail population rose to 96% of capacity over the weekend, with the total inmate population surpassing 6,800 on Sunday, coming dangerously close to the cap of 7,119 inmates.
Officials are understandably focused this week on “getting people through the system as quickly as possible,” Dallas County Administrator Darryl Martin told us.
But as they struggle to keep the growing prison population under control, it is still not clear how well a key cog in the system – the criminal courts – is functioning.
How quickly are the courts processing cases? Can they keep up with the surge in admissions the prison always experiences this time of year? How many inmate cases are being tried in court? How many are being tried before juries?
Nobody knows, because for 15 months the county has been unable to provide reliable data on how its dozens of criminal and misdemeanor courts are functioning. That’s because the county botched the implementation of a new criminal case management system in May 2023. Accurate data has not been available since then.
Defense attorneys have said many defendants have been held behind bars far longer than necessary because they were essentially lost in the system due to software problems.
While many factors affect prison population, including the speed at which the State of Texas admits inmates awaiting transfer to prison, court inefficiency may be a significant cause of prison congestion. We have no way of knowing whether judges are processing cases at an appropriate pace or whether they are contributing to prison overcrowding.
In May, we raised the alarm about a looming summer crisis at the prison. At the time, the inmate population was nearly 6,400, about 500 more than the same time last year. Andrew Sommerman, Dallas County Commissioner and chair of the county’s Continuous Improvement Steering Committee, told us at the time that if corrections weren’t made by July, “I’m going to lose my mind.”
Reminded of that comment, Sommerman recently told us that the software fixes will likely be completed later this month or in September. By then, the county should be able to comply with a new state law that requires it to submit detailed reports to the state Office of Court Administration on the performance of each of the county’s criminal courts. Alejandra Pena, director of data and research at the OCA, told us she expects that to happen.
We hope so. We need to know if our judges are doing everything they can to control the disturbing increase in the county’s jail population. And until the technical problems are fully resolved, we won’t know.
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