The Harris County Sheriff’s Office is in discussions about converting a floor of the Harris County Jail into a medical wing to provide additional health services to inmates.
The revelation comes weeks after the jail was found to be out of compliance with the state’s minimum jail standards, in part because of issues with providing timely medical services to inmates. In response to the state’s compliance order, 10 officers were assigned to work as medical officers to ensure inmates are getting transported to medical appointments as soon as possible, said Jason Spencer, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office.
Twenty inmates died in the Harris County Jail’s custody last year, and several were flagged for mental health concerns, according to a review of court records.
Representatives of the sheriff’s office, which operates the jail, appeared before the Texas Commission on Jail Standards in Austin on Thursday. They told state commissioners they plan to create a medical division for the first time in the jail’s history.
“We want to have officers and professional staff in this new division to help us continue to exceed with our medical and mental health delivery,” Assistant Chief Phillip Bosquez said. “We’re also redesigning an entire floor in the 1200 (Baker Street) facility to create a hospital floor, that would be able to help us address over 1,000 inmate patients.”
Officials plan to work with medical and mental health providers to concentrate more services to be readily available at the jail.
The space would be located on the sixth floor of the downtown Houston jail and would not take away from any of the available capacity to house inmates, Spencer said. The floor is used to house an old legal library and unused meeting spaces.
The sheriff’s office’s discussion with Harris Health, the county’s healthcare system, is still in the early stages. The project would not include a significant financial investment, Spencer said.
RELATED: Harris County commissioners direct jail leaders to bolster mental health diversion programs
Harris County commissioners last week directed some of the county's top criminal justice officials to work on bolstered initiatives to divert more defendants away from jail and into mental health treatment programs. Seventy-three percent of inmates in the jail are currently taking psychotropic medication, county data shows, while 77% have been flagged with mental health indicators.
On Thursday, Bosquez said the jail already exceeds the community standards for healthcare.
“We always just want to keep going above whatever the minimum standard is,” he said.
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