Rising Costs, Population Shifts Highlight Need for Solid Strategic Plan
Since the last time I had the opportunity to reduce my thoughts and observations to writing a year ago, quite a bit has occurred with regard to our county jails. The shift that took place at the federal level has had an impact on our operations at the local level. The actions of our partners at the state level have had just as much, if not more, of an impact.
While we operate on a yearly cycle, the need to plan strategically and look at least five years out is more critical now than ever before. Once you fall behind the curve, the resources you will expend attempting to catch back up are almost guaranteed to be double what it would have cost if you had been planning ahead. When it comes to jails and ensuring you have sufficient beds to accommodate your current and projected inmate population, the cost is enough to cripple a county if it is not planned and budgeted for correctly. For a majority of Texas counties, population growth drives the discussion.
The Texas Triangle – Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio – continues to grow, but other parts of the state are losing population. While big cities appear to have plateaued in regard to growth, the surrounding suburban counties are growing, some at a phenomenal rate which reflects what we already know: people moving into nearby suburbs rather than the major cities. On the other hand, 95 counties either lost population or had zero growth from 2020 to 2023. While 159 counties are attempting to accommodate more residents and figure out how to pay for the services required, almost 100 counties are grappling with how to fund required services with a decreasing tax base.
Knowing what size your future inmate population is projected to be is critical to this planning effort. The Texas Commission on Jail Standards can assist you with this by providing a Facility Needs Analysis (FNA) at no charge. Using your historical inmate and county population data and comparing that to projected growth rates provided by the Census Bureau and Texas Demographic Center can lay the foundation for a sound plan that can help in your budgeting exercises. Any unnecessary delay will be expensive as costs have been increasing 8 percent annually.
Your FNA can also be used to reinforce existing efforts that safely manage your inmate population or help you begin that conversation with local stakeholders. Building more jail beds may be the easy path, but it is costly. Even after you have paid off the bond for construction, the costs associated with operating those additional beds and the additional staffing needed will continue. If you are not ensuring that every part of your local criminal justice system is operating as efficiently as possible, a bottleneck will occur at your jail, and you will be housing more inmates than necessary. At an average of $90 per day per inmate, it doesn’t take long to add up, and the cost savings that can be realized by reducing your average length of stay by just one day makes it worth the effort.
There are factors outside of your control, though. The average time for Paper Ready inmates to be picked up is now 30 days. So, even if you are ensuring your local courts are disposing of cases in a timely manner, it will be a minimum of 30 days before they are transferred. As for the wait time on a state hospital bed, it is still longer than anyone would like even as the number of inmates on the waitlist decreases, so we recommend that you seek out opportunities to use more local, jail-based restoration programs if any are in operation near you. And then there are the changes in bonding that have already taken effect or will be on the ballot in November. The full impact of these changes is hard to determine, but they will increase your inmate population. If you are not monitoring your daily population, you should be.
In closing, the state legislature continues to discuss ways to reduce revenue in all counties through revenue caps and now seeks to control spending as well. Reducing revenue caps at 3.5 percent has already had a negative impact throughout the state on county operations, disregarding the rising costs of county budgets including insurance, salaries, capital investments, and unfunded state mandates, forcing most counties to take on additional debt. If the legislature continues this trend, the ability to operate jails and manage the full scope of county government will be severely compromised. To say that planning for the future will be challenging is an understatement; time will make that reality clear.