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.