Texas Guide to Jail Tourism
Just kidding. Inside the lives of those who stop and smell and inspect county jails
/ By Maria Sprow

DENNIS CISNEROS KNOWS HIS COUNTY JAILS. For years, he spent three weeks a month driving up and down the highways and roads of the Panhandle and West Texas, going from one county jail to the next. When he got to a jail, he’d stop and talk to the jail staff, asking to inspect everything about the jail and how it functions – its infrastructure, its administration, its separation of inmates.

If this were a hobby, Cisneros would have been a jail connoisseur. He knows which jails in Texas are the oldest, which are the newest. He knows which jails are using direct supervision and which are not, and which are overpopulated and which ones have staffing concerns. He knows their infrastructure and all the things that can go wrong, and right.

“San Saba and Coleman are probably my two favorite jails because they are the oldest jails in the state. They were built pre-1890s, and they are still running,” Cisneros said, with a certain sort of passion that most associate more with Texas courthouses than jails.

But there is no such thing as a jail connoisseur for good reason and this is not a hobby.

“I would rather not go to jail, period,” Cisneros said when asked by CountyMagazine which jail he’d most want to spend the night in, acknowledging that that may be the “wrong” answer, given what he spent his time doing.

Until just recently, Cisneros was one of three jail inspectors hired by the state to make sure each jail is in compliance with state laws and standards.

“The politically correct answer would be, ‘any jail in the state of Texas, because we certify it,’” said Cisneros, who was responsible for certifying 107 county jails but who left the position last month for another job. “But I’ve worked in one for too long and been in too many of them to know that I don’t want to be there.”

His colleague, George Johnson, who spends his time traveling to the 80 or so jails in North and East Texas, agreed.

“That’s just a bad question,” Johnson said.

No, but it was a trick question.

The Academics of Jail Standards

Both Johnson and Cisneros worked in county jails before coming to the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. Johnson was a jail sergeant in Victoria County for 11 years, and Cisneros, who worked at TCJS for more than six years, worked at the Refugio County Jail. (The third jail inspector was out on leave during the time this article was being written.)

Their previous experience helps them identify with those whose jails they are inspecting, they said.

“Working in a jail, you dealt with a lot of confrontation, hostile confrontation, from the inmates. You never knew what you were walking into,” Cisneros said. “When I came to this job, my stress level probably dropped from a million to zero.”

Johnson said that, since switching from jail staff to jail inspector two years ago, he’s come to realize the importance of educating jail staff about the standards – what their purposes are, where they originate from, why they are significant.

“As a sergeant in a jail, I was aware of the standards, but I didn’t know them like I do now,” Johnson said.

There are literally hundreds of standards Johnson has now familiarized himself with: rules regarding smoke management systems, how to conduct searches of inmates during the admissions process, making sure a telephone directory is available for inmate’s use in the processing area, the frequency of observation that must take place depending on the inmates’ past and known behavior, how often the laundry must be done, the amount of sunlight inmates are required to see.

Many of the standards can be seen as sort of an annoyance or just a simple part of the daily routine. To keep jail staff from becoming complacent, it’s important for them to understand that all of these things not only keep a jail running smoothly, but also keep jails out of litigation and jail staff as safe as possible.

“The more you know, the better off you are,” Cisneros said. “Some of these detention officers don’t know why they do something, they are just told to do it. We try to tie the ‘why’ in. All of this stuff comes from somewhere, from previous litigation. It’s nothing that is just pulled out of the air. If it’s a standard, at one point in time, a county has probably been sued because of it.”

Maybe not sued, but it’s true that every single standard comes from somewhere. Jonathan Hortman, the research specialist at TCJS, listed four general sources: case law, legislation, observation of the need for a rule by someone in the field and suggestion made by local officials.

One major lawsuit that had a huge impact on jail standards was the 1972 case of Ruiz vs. Estelle, a class action lawsuit in which inmate David Ruiz sued then-director of Texas Department of Corrections William J. Estelle. The lawsuit stated that the living conditions in prisons went against the Eighth Amendment because they were equivalent to “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The lawsuit complained of a medley of life safety concerns, including overcrowding, inadequate security, inadequate healthcare, unsafe working conditions and severe disciplinary procedures.

It took eight years before the case went to trial, at the U.S. District Court in Tyler, which ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Many other lawsuits, including those against counties, were filed during that time, and it was during those years that several vocal groups – including the Sheriff ’s Association of Texas, the American Civil Liberties Union and the League of Women Voters – came together and pushed the Texas Legislature to pass HB 272 in 1975, which created the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.

“It was a state suit against the state prison system, but there were so many problems identified in Ruiz v. Estelle that it’s very obvious that many standards were a response to that,” Hortman said. “It changed a lot of things across the state.”

Many of the jail standards are the result of legislation and case law from other states.

One such standard is the rules regarding inmates’ right to correspondence, found in the “Services and Activities” section, Chapter 291, of the Texas Administrative Code. That section requires jails to have a written plan for permitting inmates to “send as many letters of as many pages as they desire, to whomever they desire” but also have a plan for rejecting correspondence containing “information regarding the manufacture of explosives, weapons, or drugs” or “material that a reasonable person would construe as written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve the breakdown of jails through inmate disruption such as strikes or riots.” The section also requires that the jail have a plan for reading incoming and outgoing “non-privileged” correspondence.

Those rules spring partly from a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case Turner v. Safley. The case originated in Missouri and involved an inmate, Leonard Safley, who wanted to write to his fiancée, P.J. Watson, an inmate who was being housed in another prison. The state’s laws prohibited inmates from separate facilities from corresponding to each other. Justice Sandra Day O’Conner, in the court’s majority opinion, ruled that inmates have a right to send and receive correspondence, and that a jail could read and retain an inmate’s incoming and outgoing correspondence, but only if it met a legitimate jail management interest to do so.

“That case helped define the perimeters of what mail and correspondence facilities can regulate,” Hortman said.

Though all the standards together won’t completely stop frivolous inmate lawsuits and complaints, complying with standards helps ensure that a county won’t become a target for serious litigation.

That should be good news for county commissioners courts to hear.

“There’s not any county in the state of Texas that commissioners and judges don’t get letters from inmates complaining or threatening to file suits,” said Taylor County Commissioner Stan Egger, who serves on the jail standards commission. “As a commissioner, its comforting to know that jail standards has looked at the jail, and that it passed the standards that have been set. At least you know if it has been inspected and the life safety issues have been met, then it’s not going to be a legitimate complaint in most instances.”

Having spent so much time familiarizing themselves with the state’s jails, Cisneros and Johnson had some tips for making the standards easier to abide by.

For example, they said jails that make use of new video broadcasting technologies may have an easier time meeting standards when it comes to health services and visitation requirements.

They have also both become fans of direct supervision jail design, in which inmate’s cells are built in a circle, around a common room. Inmates are allowed all-day access to the common room, and officers stay in the room with them at all times. Both said that as jail staffers, they were cynical about direct supervision. Most jail detention officers just don’t see how the idea of being stationed in a room with a high inmate to officer ratio is a good one.

But the results over the last few years have shown that direct supervision jails have less tension between officers and inmates and are generally easier to manage, according to the jail inspectors.

“There are a whole lot less infractions at jails with direct supervision,” Johnson said. “They don’t have near the number of assaults as other jails.”

And in general, they said, creating a better method of communication is something many jail staffs could do better.

“If there is a lack of communication between shifts, it could lead to any sort of problems regarding rule enforcement,” Cisneros said. “Not all jails have this problem, but many jails have no consistency when it comes to communication.”

Practical Applications of Jail Standards

The purpose of jail inspections is to make sure each jail is complying with state and federal standards, and the main purpose of the jail standards is to ensure that both inmates and jail staff remain safe. That’s safe from fires, safe from the diseases that so easily permeate close quarters, and safe from each other.

“We are there to make it a safer place for the inmates, but on the other hand we are also trying to make it a safer place for jail staff,” Cisneros said. “As a corrections officer, I did not like going to work in a dirty place. It’s just a little more, it’s easier to go to work somewhere that’s clean, that doesn’t smell like dirty socks all the time.”

Inspectors work off a long checklist of items that must be reviewed during each inspection: construction, life safety equipment, emergency drill procedures, a random sampling of inmate files, the jail’s policies and records, classification and location of inmates, health services, staff certification and training records, personal hygiene procedures, sanitation facilities, kitchen areas and food, disciplinary actions, inmate complaints and grievances, exercise areas, educational materials and library schedules, inmate work assignments, telephone policies, correspondence policies, visitation policies, religious practices.

Rules for each item are found in the Texas Administrative Code.

“We inspect everything and anything to do with the jail, from the design and construction to the daily maintenance – the laundry, health services, recreation. You walk into a facility and number one, you have to see whether the construction is still good, whether you need maintenance,” said TCJS Executive Director Adan Munoz.

“The list of standards goes on and on, because they regard each and every thing. Is the right diet being maintained? They all have to submit plans for how they feed their prisoners, and we have to check to see if the cafeteria is clean. It’s an inspection of the whole gambit of living inside four walls.”

Checking the records is the most time-consuming part of the process, Johnson said. Records must be browsed to make sure inmates are being separated by the correct security classification, are getting the right amount of recreation time, are being properly cared for medically, contain all the necessary warrants and disciplinary files, among other items.

But checking to make sure everything in the jail is working properly can be quite the process, too, and doesn’t always go as smoothly as planned.

In general, older and smaller jails are more likely to have problems when it comes to maintenance and infrastructure, the inspectors said, adding that they know things inside a jail can break down at any time, so having some leniency is important.

“You can walk out of someplace from just fixing a toilet, and here we come in and the toilet isn’t working again,” Johnson said, adding that he’s had a lot go wrong during an inspection, like the one time when the battery to a generator blew up and pieces of it hit his back, and another time a sprinkler pipe burst and “we almost drowned.”

The county with the busted generator passed its inspection after someone ran to get another battery. The county with the busted pipe was cited since the problem couldn’t be immediately fixed.

“One mistake fails all,” Johnson said.

But usually, jails not receiving certification have more than just a case of missing one checkmark on the list. Many times, not meeting one standard makes it difficult to meet other standards.

For example, having an overcrowded jail may make it difficult to keep inmates separated according to their security classifications, and it may mean that the inmate to staff ratio isn’t where it should be, at one officer to 48 inmates.

Both Johnson and Cisneros said involvement from commissioners court members can help speed up the inspection process.

“No matter what, we always have to make an effort to contact somebody on the commissioners court when we are ready to brief out,” Cisneros said. “Some of them actually hang out for the inspection. I like it because that way they know what is going on. If we write a jail up for something, we can explain to them right then and there what the problem is.”

“The more they are there, the better educated they are,” Johnson added. “It’s better for the county.”

Egger, the Taylor County commissioner serving on the TCJS, agreed that the more involvement county officials have with their jail inspections, the easier it becomes to find the correct solution and to get the issues fixed.

“There are a lot of problems that are very complicated and take time,” Egger said. “Any construction or any hiring of new employees is definitely very costly to the citizens of that county, and doing those things is a fairly long process. First the inspectors have to work with the sheriff to explain why there is the need for either an expansion or more staff, and then the sheriff has an educational process to work through with his commissioners court, who have to fund any of those changes, and then the commissioners court has to explain those changes to their citizens, and that can be a long, drawn-out ordeal.”

For his part, Johnson said he does what he can to help a jail go through the inspection process and receive certification.

While some officials and jail staff may see them as the bad guys, or the guys coming by to get the jail in trouble, they said that’s not really their role at all.

“We’re just there to prevent problems,” Johnson said. “That’s what I like about my job, I get to help out a lot of counties that are in need, who may not have the resources to do training and inspect for problems themselves.”

In fact, it may be best to look at Johnson as one of the good guys, or at least as a scapegoat for whenever the jail needs to address a costly problem that commissioners would otherwise have a hard time asking taxpayers to pay for.

“When a lot of your life safety issues and overcrowding issues become glaring to the point that it’s just not safe to house inmates, then it’s time for the commission to come in and ask counties to place inmates in other counties,” Egger said, “which is very expensive.”