Audit: Texas Jail Oversight System Has Major Reporting Flaws

The Texas agency that is responsible for overseeing county jails did not consistently investigate complaints, kept inaccurate records and did not complete and failed to conduct some limited investigations that are required under state law, a new audit concluded. 

The Texas Commission on Jail Standards is the body that’s responsible for overseeing the 237 jails that operated continuously for all of 2023 and 2024, conducting routine inspections and making sure that they comply with state regulations.

Between October 2022 and December 2024, the Texas State Auditor’s Office found problems that could “critically affect” the agency’s ability to monitor failures in jails and ensure that they meet the state’s standards, according to the audit.

Most critically, the commission failed to follow the state’s procedure for investigating complaints against the jails. In 95% of the 62 complaints that were formally lodged with the system during the roughly two-year period, the TCJS did not assign the complaint a severity level, which dictates how quickly jails must address the complaint.

There are three severity levels, per the report:

1. Life safety, requiring immediate action;
2. Overcrowding, classification and superversion, requiring action within five days; and
3. All other complaints, requiring action within 10 days.

The audit also found widespread problems within the agency’s complaint records. Almost half of the entries in the state’s complaint database — 44% — had at least one incorrect entry, such as the name of the complainant or investigator or the date the complaint was received.

And though the TCJS conducted all of the “comprehensive inspections” required under state law, it did not conduct mandatory “limited inspections” for five counties over that time span, including Austin’s Travis County. Andrews, Bexar, Navarro and Tom Green counties also did not receive limited inspections in that two-year period.

The TCJS wrote that it “agrees with the recommendations” and described changes in its data management to fix those lapses that it will implement by the end of next month. 

KUT News first reported on the substance of the audit on Tuesday.