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By Laura Nicholes
TAC Legislative Staff
The Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, Article 104.002 Expenses for Prisoners, paragraph (a) says, “Except as otherwise provided by this article, a county is liable for all expenses incurred in the safekeeping of prisoners confined in the county jail or kept under guard by the county”.
The cost of providing health care to inmates is a variable over which counties have limited control; the number of inmates depends on the number of “detainable offenses” committed and fluctuates with changes in population, as well as with different times of the year. The Texas Association of Counties has attempted to gather data on inmate medical, dental and mental health care as a way to track this uncontrollable expense and its impact on county budgets and local tax payers. The following information was provided by counties in response to questions on the 2008 County Expenditures Survey.
Inmate Health Costs
Question: What were the total expenditures for INMATE medical, dental and mental health costs in your county jail? Include costs associated with either a county jail or a privately run jail holding county inmates under contract with the county.
One hundred eight counties responded with information for the following analysis:
- The cost for inmate health care is skyrocketing in 2008. Of the three Largest Counties, only Harris provided data for this question. In 2008, Harris County budgeted $22.3 million, which is almost double what they spent in 2007. In large part due to this increase in Harris County, inmate health costs increased 338.8 percent over seven years for the counties in the greater than one million population bracket. As a significant contrast, Large Counties’ expenditures only increased by 42.7 percent over the same period.
- The Smallest and Small Counties both had a considerable increase in average expenditures, 63.2 percent and 136.7 percent respectively, over the eight years covered by the survey.
The table below contains the change in average expenditures for all five of the county brackets.
Blue Warrant Inmates
Question: What were the total expenditures for medical, dental, mental health care applied to Blue Warrant inmates?
Forty six counties responded with information for the following analysis:
- This is a new question asked this year and was prompted by recent legislation that attempted to reduce overcrowding in local jails by making some parole violators eligible for bond prior to their parole hearings. Currently, parolees accused of violating their parole are housed in county jails while awaiting their parole revocation hearings. House Bill (HB) 541 would have allowed eligible parolees to post bond without being held in custody pending their hearings. HB 541 would have given judges and counties another tool to manage county jail populations without jeopardizing public safety as only technical violators and those with new, low-level offenses would have been eligible. During the session, HB 541 successfully passed both houses, but ended-up on the Governor’s veto list.
- Medical costs associated with blue warrant inmates are difficult for counties to isolate from the general cost for inmates, as evident from the responses that were received. Only 37 counties were able to provide data for all three years which may contribute to a reported decline in blue warrant medical expenditures between 2007 and 2008.
- A spike in Large County expenditures occurred in 2007 is from Smith County spending $3.5 million on blue warrant inmates’ medical costs, more than any other county that reported their expenditures and more than double what the county spent the prior year.
- A comment from Smith County noted the cost for blue warrant inmates cannot be extracted until all expenses are paid by the county. Given the lack of data from responding counties on how much they budgeted for 2008, it seems likely that many if not most other counties also need to wait until all expenses are paid before they can arrive at a total cost. The extent to which this contributed to the apparent decline in expenditures for three of the categories cannot be determined at this time.
This article was adapted from the County Expenditures Survey report. A copy of the report can be downloaded in PDF format from the TAC web site (http://www.county.org/resources/countydata/products.asp#reports ).
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