SHOWDOWN LOOMING OVER COUNTY CALABOOZE ON THURSDAY

By Juan Montoya
Is it a case of law enforcement just doing to good of a job, prosecutors and the courts taking forever, the federal government being subsidized by county taxpayers, mismanagement at the county jail, or all of the above?
This Thursday, the Cameron County Commissioners Court will tackle the knotty problem of what to do with the surplus of county inmates being held at the county corrections facilities and with those that are being shipped out at taxpayers expense to be housed in Brooks and Zapata counties.
The case has taken on an urgent character because the recent report by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards indicates that Cameron County is not in compliance with the jailer to inmate ratio of 1 to 48.
There are currently (as of Sept. 27) 1,489 inmates in the county's four facilities (Rucker-Carrizales, CRDC, OCJ, DCI, DC2). Another 107 have been shipped out to Brooks(80) and Zapata (27) counties at taxpayer expense. And Sheriff Omar Lucio has told the commissioners that unless he gets another 24 jailers to meet the commission's dictates, he will have to ship another 80 county inmates elsewhere (Coastal Bend, La Villa, etc.) on Thursday.
Currently, the county has 156 jailers under Lucio's command of the sheriff's department.
Lucio estimates that it costs county taxpayers approximately $7,000 a day to transport, guard, feed and clothe these inmates, while if they were held in Cameron County, that total would drop to about $2,000 a day.
One more thing, of those 1,489 prisoners held in the county's four facilities, 300 were serving federal sentences ranging from illegal reentry to human or drug smuggling where the federal government pays the county to house them. The bulk of them, 277, are serving their sentences at DC 1, in downtown Brownsville.
The commissioners are in a quandary: What to do about the rising cost and the overflow? With limited resources and a budget that needed an infusion of more property taxes from the taxpayers, what options do they have?
Cameron County Judge Carlos Cascos has included an item on the agenda that would explore the "privatization" of county jails (Item K).
While no one believes that the political will is there for the commissioners to pass that item, it is one of the alternatives some see as a way to stem the hemorrhaging of county money to house the prisoners.
Still, others, see the answer in the huge backlog of cases of prisoners who are being held for a variety of lesser offenses that must await their full 90 days in jail before they are finally given their day in court. Many of these are also on hold by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Once they get their day in court and are given their state sentence, they are delivered to immigration officials who then in turn sentence them on the federal offense.
Yet, in some cases, the sentences for the state offenses for which these ICE-hold prisoners are being detained are less than the 90 days they have spent incarcerated at taxpayer expense. Not only must the county pay for the legal defense of these prisoners, but they must also be fed, clothed and guarded for that time.
"If the sheriff says he needs to ship out 80 inmates to comply with the commission's standards, I bet I could process 20 of them in one afternoon," said County Court-at-Law Judge Art McDonald. "A lot of them are going to be given probation or released to the federal government. Why not let the federal government pay for their keep?"
He once asked county auditor Martha Galarza whether she had figured out the savings to the county that his televised arraignments and pleas had saved the county and was told that it had saved Cameron County thousands of dollars. However, she had not totalled that amount, he said.
"I'm only one judge," he said. "There are 10 others of us in the county."
Since late last year, McDonald has utilized state grants to establish short-circuit arraignments and pleas from the county's facilities, unclogging a docket that has clogged the county's jails. Some wonder why the rest of the judges in the county can't help to expedite the process to get these inmates off the county's hands.
At least one commissioner, Pct. 1's Sofia Benavides, stated during the budget proces that this route should be considered.
"A major area of concern is the huge amounts of money we spend on those incarcerated by our courts," she wrote. "It is no secret that many of those waiting trial for sundry crimes are on ICE hold for various immigration offenses. Many times these prisoners wait as long as 90 days to go to trial. Often, their sentences are for less than the amount for that which they have been held at taxpayer expense. This, as well as other cost-saving measures should be explored immediately since the savings accrued will surely be helpful once we get over this budget crunch."
"I believe in punishing the wrongdoers like anyone else," said a local attorney, "but if it means that an inmate is going to be detained at my expense and then end up being assessed time served and released by the federal government, what's the sense? There has to be some practical thought in what we're doing."
Overcrowding at the county has other consequences.
In some parts of the cells in Carrizales, gangs of inmates are in effect running the cell pods. Whether it's Vallucos, el Texas Syndicate, Mexican Mafia, Sureños, or others, they are for all practical purposes running their cells and establishing their own discipline. Unless there's an alteration, guards seldom venture to disrupt their system of control.
"It's a situation that should make everyone concerned," said a former inmate. "When you first go into Carrizlaes, the corrections officers ask you who you're running with. They are up front about you telling them the truth because if you don't belong to one of the prison gangs and they mix you up with them, serious harm could come to you."
And then there's the bad blood between the commissioners and the sheriff. They were caught in a dispute concerning the bailiffs at the judicial wing of the county courthouse and Lucio made it clear that he didn't appreciate them assigning bailiffs under his department to individual judges.
Add that to the fact that the commissioners voted to allow for an election by sheriff's deputies to enter into collective bargaining with the county, and the bad blood boils even more.
"Unfortunately, politics have a way of getting involved in these things," said a courthouse insider. "The sheriff has legal control over the deputies, jailers and bailiffs, but the judges stepped in and defended their bailiffs. It didn't please Omar any."
On the other hand, the sheriff's detractors point out that the sheriff has had ample time to finesse his administration of the county jails.
"If after all those years Omar still can't get it right, maybe it's time someone else ran that outfit out at Olmito," said a commissioner's supporter.