Lock-up fails inspection; officials target issues

By THOMAS JENKINS     
Staff Writer
Howard County's jail woes may not have ended with the construction of a new facility, as sheriff's office officials reported Monday the jail failed to meet state requirements during a surprise inspection.

“Last Tuesday we had a surprise jail inspection by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards,” said Sheriff Stan Parker. “For the most part it went very well. We did have a few areas of deficiency that we're working on. As far as the building and the structure are concerned, we were in 100 percent compliance. However, we have some paperwork problems that we're going to have to address.”

Jail Administrator Mike Dawson began his presentation to the commissioners by discussing some of the areas in which the facility failed to meet state requirements, and ensured the court every effort is being made to correct the problems.

“The commission is required by legislative mandate to do a certain number of surprise inspections,” said Dawson. “On the day they appeared (at the county jail) — and I'm not making excuses — I had both of the front-end folks sick, so some of us had to take care of that while we were running around with the commission's inspector, Jimmy Barton.

“The first area of non-compliance had to do with the requirement the facility be inspected annually by a local fire official. On the day of inspection documentation could not be provided to show the fire hazard inspection checklist was evaluated no less than each calendar quarter. We had two fire extinguishers that didn't have tags on them. When the fire marshal went around, all of them had tags. At that time we made the decision not to take the tags and file them away, and instead left them on the fire extinguishers. I wouldn't doubt that one or two of the inmates took the tags off for one reason or another. So we have two of them missing now, and i will get that corrected. It also notes the fire inspection checklist needs to be evaluated no less than each calendar quarter, and that's a paperwork issue and we will address it.”

Another problem, according to Dawson, was making sure the inmates signed a receipt of the jail rules and regulations.

“The second problem is the requirement that upon intake, a file on each inmate must be established and the file shall include a list of 15 different things that have to be in the file,” said Dawson. “What the commission inspector does is pull 10 files, which he did, and he found several that did not have acknowledgement of the receipt of rules and regulations. The inmates have a set of rules when they come into our facility, and they are posted in each pod, so they are easily viewable ... but it is required they sign (the acknowledgment) when they come into the jail. That's our error. We're not getting signatures from all of the inmates as they come in, and we're working on that.”

And while human error was certainly part of the previous problems, Dawson said the next issue on the non-compliance list was strictly an issue with the jail's  SMART Public Safety software.

“On the day of inspection it was discovered that not all of the inmates were classified, or some of the classifications were being done incorrectly,” Dawson told the court. “That's basically keeping our serious offenders — what we call a maximum offender — from being housed with someone like a 17-year-old brought in on a minor traffic offense. We have a classification system. It's administered electronically with our software system, our SMART Public Safety software. To say the least, we've had issues with our jail management software. Sometimes the staff can enter all of the information in and nothing but zeroes are printed out on the classification page. Unfortunately, I believe four of the 10 he (the inspector) pulled were nothing but zeroes on the classification page.

“We've corrected that by following the recommendation of the jail inspector, which is to adopt what's called a decision tree. It's a paper form our staff is now doing. It goes very fast. You fill it out in ink, and we are basically going to do away with the classifications done by the SMART software. That way we'll have a classification sheet that's done by hand, by the staff, and will eliminate these errors in classification and we'll have the form in the file.”

According to Parker, issues with the classification print-outs isn't the only problems he and his staff have had with the software, which has cost the county slightly more than $172,000 from its $11.57 million bond-funded budget.

“You're going to run into problems and glitches no matter what software you go with,” said Parker. “We're working with SMART to resolve these problems. We called them immediately after the problems with the classifications was found, and they are working on it. However, I have to admit the software isn't living up to our expectations. It gets frustrating. We've depended on this software, probably more than we should have, and it bit us in the end.”

Contact Staff Writer Thomas Jenkins at 263-7331 ext. 232 or by e-mail at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it