Month: December 2024

In the past two years, TPI has been filing comment reports about PREA audits of individual facilities within the TDCJ system. Individual facilities are to be audited every three years. The agency as a whole is to be audited annually. TPI chose not to comment on the agency audit in 2023 because it involved a lot more work than we had time to do effectively. However, in 2024, we decided to put the effort into compiling at least some of the agencywide data that was necessary for an appropriate comment report. We also extended our auditor tool to provide agencywide data.

The result was better than expected, and we learned some surprising things that are already known issues published in TDCJ annual reports. We were able to compile some of this data to show that TDCJ acknowledges problems by providing data that any cursory review would identify as problematic, but which is not being addressed by TDCJ, even though that is a requirement under the PREA standards.

One item we have identified previously is the problem adequately staffing facilities, which the auditors all have ignored. This problem was highlighted by the Texas Sunset Commission in their recent audit of TDCJ, and their data well documented the problems that were known, if anecdotally. We could also show that even though TDCJ well knows housing people who are significantly older and larger than their cellmates leads to violence, including sexual violence, mishousing seems to be increasing, not decreasing (see Figures 2 and 3). Even though TDCJ gushes about their staff training related to sexual violence, staff have only identified 4 issues of potential sexual violence over eight years, compared to over 14,000 reports of the same by incarcerated persons (see Table 3). We found that nearly every measure of sexual violence in the system has increased based on available data (see Figure 4 and Table 7). And we found that claims of cameras being effectively used to curb sexual violence are not supported by data, which shows camera placement in areas of the highest incidence of sexual violence appears to have been deprioritized (see Figures 5 and 6).

These are just a few of the comments we had on the agency compliance with PREA standards. We hope that this report will be useful in drawing at least some attention to problems in the TDCJ system.

Content warning: Some of these letters describe threats and incidents of violence that may be disturbing. We will note whether each letter is considered a low, moderate, or high risk for being disturbing. We consider this letter to be moderate risk. We are making this assessment because we include quotes and examples of incidents of anti-trans and anti-queer violence throughout this comment letter to help illustrate our points.

TPI began looking at PREA audit reports for Texas Department of Criminal Justice prisons and commenting on what we view as deficiencies in the audits in March 2023. By October 2024, when we received our first meaningful response from the Department of Justice PREA Management Office/National PREA Resource Center (PMO/PRC) to these comments, we had submitted 19 audit comment letters.

The response identified seven concerns that TPI raised. This was only a small portion of the concerns we had actually raised, but at least it was a response.

We note that of the concerns that were identified in this response, one had been addressed somewhat, and one would be addressed soon. Concern 2 noted that auditors only defined populations at facilities as “male” or “female,” and that was in part due to restrictions in the auditor tool, which amazingly did not allow any entry except those two identities. This was addressed by an update to the auditor tool in late 2024. Concern 4 had to do with auditors only considering cross-gender viewing and searches relative to the gender of staff and the gender designated (“male” or “female”) of the facility. An update to the FAQ about Standard 115.15 noted that such a simplistic assessment “would not be compliant.”

The response to some of the concerns referenced training for auditors, but it was difficult to tell if this represented additional training or anything other than what has been insufficient to hold auditors accountable to date. There was also an absurd statement that our complaint that regardless of TDCJ policy, the agency practice is to house transgender persons by genital status: the PMO/PRC essentially made a circular argument that TDCJ could not have that practice because their policy says they do not.

The entire response letter is provided below.

TPI chose to respond by letter rather than by email, as the missing and overlooked issues were too many for comfortable email response. We explained in that response that we could not let the lack of response stand on so many issues because, as in the prison systems, a failure to continue to bring up issues not addressed by administrative responses is interpreted as acceptance of the response. We did not accept the PMO/PRC response.

On October 26, 2024, we sent that response to the PMO/PRC. We brought up specific texts in PMO/PRC documents contradicting the provided response, information from PREA audit reports that directly contradict PMO/PRC statements, how the response manipulates the gist of complaints, and provided a list of other issues not addressed in the response.

Our reply to the PMO/PRC is shown below:

Although TPI is pleased to see that our comments are being considered, we hope that the consideration in the future is more appropriate to the overall PREA goals of, as per the PREA Standards themselves, working toward “zero tolerance toward all forms of sexual abuse and sexual harassment” rather than rubber stamping audits in a show of progress.