‘The guards wouldn’t do anything:’ Houston families outraged over death of loved ones in jail

In 2019, a historic federal class-action lawsuit ended the use of cash bail for nonviolent misdemeanors in the Houston area.

Legal experts say it made the criminal justice system more fair. People who couldn’t afford bail no longer have to spend days or weeks in jail awaiting trial. But it hasn’t made Houston’s jail complex any safer.

“It's an irony,” says Sandra Guerra Thompson, a law professor and deputy monitor of the 2019 federal consent decree that enforced the changes. “We've said for a long time that if we had bail reform, we would get all the people out of jail who don't need to be there and we would make more room for the people who do. And I think in some ways that's what we've done. Not only is the jail more full, it’s a much more dangerous place to be.”

Even though violent crime has fallen in Harris County, officials there say more people have been charged with serious felonies in recent years. That’s driving jail populations higher.

Meanwhile, more than 90 people have died in custody over the last five years.

‘He was somebody’

Bryan Marquis Johnson, 34, was one of them.

“He was somebody,” says Johnson’s mother, Amanda Harris. She still has the wrinkled front page of the Houston Chronicle from Feb. 2023 when the newspaper ran a photo of her son’s body at his funeral. “Hadn’t had a chance to have children or get married,” she adds. 

In the summer of 2022, Johnson fled from police with a gun in the car. It wasn’t his first time in trouble. There was an assault on his record and a few drug charges, according to court records.

“He was no angel,” Harris says. “He used to get in trouble. He’s been to jail before.”

But Harris says her son loved his family and did not deserve to die in jail while awaiting trial on felony charges.

A few weeks after his arrest, Harris says Johnson started complaining that he was short of breath. As he got worse, she got desperate. When she called jail officials to try to get him help, she’d get passed around to different people “just like a roller coaster,” she says. 

“The guards wouldn't do anything,” she explains, adding that when he begged to go to the hospital, “They wouldn't do it.”

Then on Oct. 1, Harris got a voicemail on her cellphone. It was the jail chaplain saying that her son had suffered a medical emergency.

“When I called her back all hell broke loose for me, and my life has never been the same. It never will be,” Harris says. “All my life the only thing that I ever asked of God was not to take any of my children. Because I knew I wasn't going to be able to handle that. And I was angry with God for a long time because I just could not understand why my baby had to pass away.”

Harris says her son’s official cause of death was an inflammatory disease called IgG4, treatable with steroids.

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office declined Here & Now’s request for an interview. But in a statement, the department said Johnson visited the jail’s medical clinic on three separate days in August.

“All of his requests for medical services had been resolved,” the statement says.

That has not satisfied Amanda Harris.

“God help you if your loved one is arrested and having to be housed in the Harris County Jail,” says civil rights attorney Ben Crump. He is representing Harris and the families of more than a dozen people who’ve died awaiting trial in recent years.

Several other lawsuits are pending in federal court, including a case filed by a 23-year-old woman who had a miscarriage earlier this year after she was allegedly beaten by a detention officer and other prisoners while in custody. The cases all have one throughline; They all accuse Harris County Jail officials of perpetuating a culture of abuse and neglect within the complex.

According to advocates like Krish Gundu of the Texas Jail Project, this alleged culture and chronic understaffing has been directly responsible for the growing in-custody death toll in Harris County.

“If you don't have enough people to supervise, you’ll have people not being able to get access to medical care at the right time — people dying in custody,” Gundu says.

So far this year, at least seven people have died in custody.

Many causes for jail overcrowding

Back in 2017, Hurricane Harvey caused severe flooding in the Houston area. It closed the criminal courthouse and caused a massive court backlog that would eventually surpass 100,000 pending cases.

Eventually, the pandemic made it worse.

“Everything stopped and then once everything was reopened, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I have now an extra 1,000 of cases to do DNA testing for or ballistics testing for,” says Natalia Cornelio, a judge presiding over the 351st District Court in Harris County. “There's more autopsies to perform. There's more drugs to test.”

As the cases continued to pile up, so did the number of days people waited behind bars to appear in court. Detainees are held in the Harris County Jail for an average of 180 days, nearly six times longer than the national average.

‘Out of state, out of mind’

For nearly two years, the Harris County Jail had failed several safety inspections conducted by the state of Texas, mainly due to persistent understaffing. This led county officials to approve multi-million-dollar contracts with private prisons to send thousands of prisoners outside of Harris County, some to facilities outside of the state.

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office has repeatedly said that outsourcing prisoners was not their preferred solution. Back in May, Jason Spencer, the chief of staff for the sheriff’s office, told Houston Public Media that he believed the private facilities weren’t up to their standards.

“We feel like the service that we provide in the Harris County Jail, in our facility, is ideal — that people who are in jail awaiting trial on charges that they haven't been convicted of are better off close to home,” Spencer says. “Our goal is to end outsourcing.”

However, Harris County has actually expanded out-of-state contracts over the last few years.

“The mantra seems to be out of state, out of mind,” says Corene Kendrick, the deputy director of the ACLU National Prison Project. “They're sent hundreds or thousands of miles away, and it makes it incredibly difficult for their family members and loved ones, as well as their attorneys, to have any sort of meaningful contact with them.”

Kendrick says the two private companies that operate these out-of-state prisons — CoreCivic and LaSalle — are “both notorious operators” that are “well known to advocates as companies that profit off of human misery and incarceration.”

Over the years, CoreCivic been accused of improperly reporting inmate deaths, mishandling sexual abuse claims and falsifying nearly 5,000 hours of staffing records, which resulted in a $1 million payout as part of a settlement with the state of Idaho.

Similar allegations have been aimed at LaSalle, along with claims of medical neglect.

According to CoreCivic spokesperson Brian Todd, the company has been “delivering a high standard of care” since they began working with Harris County last year. Todd added that the facility is subjected to “regular audits” by Harris County.

LaSalle did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The emotional cost of outsourcing

Sarah Knight brushed her hand over the grass atop her son’s grave. The clouds hung heavily in the sky as tears welled in her eyes.

It was Sep. 3: exactly five months after her son, 29-year-old Jaleen Anderson, died in a private prison in Louisiana, hundreds of miles away from his family in Harris County.

“They have no idea what they took away,” Knight says. “My son was a poet. He was a hero. He was a protector. He was a great father.”

Knight was joined by Anderson’s girlfriend and one of his sisters.

His 10-month old daughter, Xiomara, was there too. This was the baby’s first visit to her father’s grave since he was buried in May.

According to Knight, her son had no major medical issues prior to being booked in Harris County on a drug charge in March. A few weeks later, after he was transferred to the LaSalle Correctional Center, Anderson suffered from six seizures, according to his mother. He died just 12 days after arriving in Louisiana.

Much like Amanda Harris, Knight remembers getting the news of her son’s sudden death. Knight immediately drove to Louisiana and, hours later, finally saw her son’s body.

“I opened up the whole body bag and I checked his hands. I checked his arms. I checked his body to make sure nobody hurt him,” Knight says through tears. “As his mom, that was one of the hardest things I ever done. But it made me feel like he was coming out of my body, like he was a newborn baby, like I just birthed him.”

Who will take responsibility? 

An autopsy report from Louisiana says Anderson died from a seizure disorder in combination with a cardiovascular disease. Still, Knight questions what exactly led up to her son’s death and has demanded answers at several public meetings in Harris County and at the state capitol.

But the question of responsibility is complicated.

The state can't condemn Harris County for Anderson's death even though he was still in the county's custody. They also can't penalize LaSalle.

“Due to the fact that the individual is no longer confined within the state of Texas, then we view our authority and ability to address that specific inmate as basically ending at the state line,” says Brandon Wood, the executive director of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.

Knight has refused to accept this. She wants her son's death to change how Texas responds to jail deaths in and outside of the state.

“I'm fighting Harris County because they refuse responsibility. The state of Texas refuses the responsibility. They don't want to be held accountable for Jaleen's death,” Knight says. “They want Jaleen's death to be swept under the rug.”

Last month, the Harris County Jail finally passed a state safety inspection, albeit with “technical assistance” from inspectors in certain areas that’ll need to be addressed at a later time. In a statement, the Harris County Sheriff's Office said it is working with local officials and others in the criminal justice system to expedite court cases and eliminate the need for jail outsourcing.

“Ensuring the health and safety of the people who live and work in the Harris County Jail is our top priority,” the statement read. “We know we are ultimately responsible for everyone in our custody, regardless of where they are housed.”

Before leaving her son's grave, Knight lay face down on the grass, played one of her favorite songs and spoke to her son, a ritual that she's repeated dozens of times now.

She promised to take care of the five children that Anderson left behind, including another baby girl who's expected to arrive in October.

The baby's name will be Jaleen.

This reporting was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Peter O'Dowd and  Lucio Vasquez produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Ciku Theuri. O'Dowd and Vasquez also adapted it for the web.

Wilder Fleming contributed to this report.