But while no one claimed responsibility for the mailer, it mirrored the language that Garza’s opponents have long used to say his reforms ushered in a period of lawlessness, despite data showing crime is on the decline.

Sylestine claimed that Garza painted a “political bullseye” on police officers, and aired an ad accusing him of being “lenient” on child sexual assault. The local police union similarly accused Garza of “targeting” cops for “political gain,” or giving a “sweetheart deal to a child predator.” The head of the local GOP called for his criminal prosecution and said that Garza has “declared war” on the police. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused him of caring more about “the radical agenda of dangerous Antifa and BLM mobs than justice.” And they all routinely singled out the support he received in 2020 from a PAC associated with George Soros, the billionaire who has supported progressive causes and emerged as a leading foil for the right. 

On Tuesday, Garza easily beat back his opposition, prevailing over the well-funded Sylestine in the Democratic primary.

As of publication, Garza leads Sylestine 66 to 34 percent. Garza will be heavily favored in November against Republican Daniel Betts, in this staunchly blue county. 

Bob Libal, a Garza supporter and Austin-based reform advocate, said he was inundated toward the end of the campaign by “extreme fearmongering rhetoric,” text messages and images that falsely portrayed Austin as a “dystopic, crime-ridden place” with criminals “roaming the streets.” 

Libal told Bolts that Garza’s win “speaks to the broad popularity of progressive criminal legal reforms in Travis County, even up against an extremely well-funded campaign operating from the playbook of fear.” 

Over in Houston, Harris County DA Kim Ogg has employed a similar playbook during her tenure in office, long accusing proponents of criminal justice reform of filling the streets with violence.

On Tuesday, she lost overwhelmingly in the Democratic primary to challenger Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in her office. She trails 78 to 22 percent as of publication.

While Ogg won her first term in 2016 on promises of reform, she then became one of the leading antagonists of Harris County’s landmark bail reform, which expanded pretrial release for people accused of low-level offenses. “We see judges right now letting dangerous misdemeanor offenders out,” Ogg complained in 2019. After voters elected some progressive county officials in 2018, she frequently battled with them. Ogg painted the frightening picture of a “new battleground for public safety” that pitted her staff against local Democratic judges, whom she blamed for letting violent defendants walk. (The Harris County jail has remained overcrowded and in violation of minimum safety standards.) 

“When you have murderers running around on multiple bonds… it’s a scary time,” she said.

Again this year, Ogg went after her challenger, Teare, for being “Soros-funded”—ironically, since her first win in 2016 was fueled by more than half-a-million dollars in spending from a PAC with ties to the billionaire. While benefiting herself from heavy financial support from the bail industry, Ogg claimed that Soros backed Teare because she “did not toe the line on bail and did not agree to open the doors of the jail to violent offenders.” 

Teare told Bolts last month that Ogg spread a “culture of fear” in her office. He says the DA has caused line prosecutors to overcharge some cases, be too aggressive in plea offers, and resist pretrial detention, for fear of backlash over a specific case of recidivism. “That’s the way you don’t get in trouble,” he said. 

Teare has said he supports the misdemeanor bail reform and he pledged not to take campaign donations from the bail industry. His website features a study that showed the increase in pretrial releases did not increase crime.

In his victory speech on Tuesday, Teare thanked the Texas Organizing Project, a progressive organization that has backed local reforms, including an initiative to drive people out of jail, and that endorsed him this year. 

“When they put their mind to a race, they go all in,” Teare said. “Jumping in behind me is something that I’ll remember forever.”

Still, Teare has also carved out an overall moderate persona compared to Ogg’s unsuccessful challengers four years ago. For instance, he declined during the campaign to criticize Ogg over the death penalty, saying he agreed with an incumbent who has sought capital punishment many times. As a former prosecutor, Teare brought a different background to the race than Garza, a former public defender and labor lawyer, did in Austin. 

In the general election, Teare will face another former prosecutor, Republican Dan Simons. He will be favored in a county that leans Democratic, though not as heavily as Travis.

He benefited during the primary from the erosion of Ogg’s relationship with the Democratic Party. As Bolts wrote last month, nearly 200 local precinct chairs adopted a party resolution in December that said Ogg had “abused the power of her office to pursue personal vendettas against her political opponents, sided with Republicans to advance their extremist agenda, and stood in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system.”

Daniel Cohen, who heads the group Indivisible Houston, helped organize the resolution against Ogg. “This is a new model of accountability within the party, within the community,” he told Bolts. He said that most of the resolution’s proponents were motivated by reading coverage of how Ogg was “weaponizing” the power of her office against adversaries like County Judge Lina Hidalgo, former judge Franklin Bynum, whom Ogg petitioned to remove from the bench, and County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who repeatedly opposed budget increases that Ogg requested.

For Cohen, the throughline between the various Democrats whom Ogg has targeted is that they supported the county’s misdemeanor bail reform. “It’s a pretty clear pattern in terms of the people who she fights.” 

And Ogg kept attacking former allies during the primary campaign, for instance telling Texas Monthly that the Houston LGBTQ+ Political Caucus, which had endorsed her in the past and endorsed Teare this time, does not represent “truly gay people.”

In Austin, Garza maintained a far more harmonious relationship to his own party—benefiting for instance from the endorsements of the two Democrats who represent Travis County in Congress, Lloyd Doggett and Greg Casar. 

But he has a far more hostile relationship with Republicans—and while that’s unlikely to cost him his job in the general election, Garza’s critics are plotting to get him out through other means.

Garza has piloted a swath of reforms over his first term, including ramping up restorative justice and pretrial diversion programs to reduce the number of people with criminal convictions. In 2022, his pledge, alongside some other DAs to not prosecute abortion cases drew ire from Texas Republicans, who last year passed a law that authorized courts to remove prosecutors for declining to prosecute certain cases. Garza is now facing a legal petition to remove him under the new law.

Local police groups have also signaled support for such efforts after Garza filed charges against more than a dozen officers for using excessive force; Garza dropped the cases in December but told Bolts he still intends to continue pressing for “systemic change” in policing.

That threat of removal will loom large over the rest of the year, and Garza’s likely second term.

On Tuesday night, though, Garza started off by celebrating his victory. He told his cheering supporters, “Tonight, we scored a major victory for our progressive movement and for criminal justice reform.”

The post “Playbook of Fear” Fails to Sway Voters in Austin and Houston DA Races appeared first on Bolts.

In public forums and letters to the local newspaper, Uvalde County residents have called on Nolasco to resign and refrain from running for office. But Nolasco is pressing ahead, and he faces three opponents in the Republican primary on March 5; one of them, Otto Arnim, has highlighted the sheriff’s role in the failed response to the massacre. 

But Uvalde County DA Christina Mitchell is running unopposed in her own Republican primary on the same day, despite complaints that she has helped shield local cops from consequences for their failures during the shooting. She’ll also face no Democrat in the general election, as none filed to run against her by the December deadline. 

And so it goes across the state: Hundreds of local elections will shape the future of law enforcement this year, but whether they lead to any change or accountability of course depends on who actually is running. 

Sheriffs who run some of Texas’ largest lockups and have long faced scandals over deaths and abuses behind bars are now asking voters for another term, with some facing competitive races. But of the 14 counties whose jails are on notice with the state jail commission for violating minimum safety standards as of February 2024, seven are overseen by incumbent sheriffs who are running unopposed this year.

District attorney races may also shift the policy landscape in some of Texas’ largest cities, with disagreements over prosecution practices shaping contests in Harris County (Houston) and Travis County (Austin) in particular. But in large swaths of the state, these elections have already been decided: Only 28 percent of the state’s DA races this year drew multiple candidates by the December deadline, leaving dozens of incumbents like Mitchell virtually certain to secure another term.

This includes populous areas that have not seen a contested election in years. In Montgomery County, a county of nearly 650,000 north of Houston, Republican DA Brett Ligon is running with no primary or general election challenger for the third consecutive cycle.

Still, there’s plenty to watch in politics around criminal justice in Texas this year. With a recent state law granting local law enforcement new powers to arrest people whom they suspect are undocumented, sheriffs face mounting questions over how they’ll choose to cooperate with the state’s crackdown on immigrants; some are racing to bolster the law, while candidates in more Democratic counties like El Paso are promising to resist it.

Far-right officials and activists are also going after justices on the all-Republican Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in this year’s GOP primary—an intra-party grudge match that, as Bolts has reported, stems from the court’s 2021 ruling that limited Attorney General Ken Paxton’s authority over voter fraud prosecutions in the state. Meanwhile, organizers in the High Plains city of Lubbock are petitioning for a local ballot measure to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana, even as Paxton sues to block similar ordinances that voters recently passed in several other Texas cities. 

To kick off our coverage of elections that will shape policing and criminal punishment in Texas this year, below is Bolts’ guide to some important storylines to start watching in the run-up to the March 5 primaries.

Deadly jails, and sheriffs that run them 

Jail deaths have surged across the country in recent years, including in many of Texas’ largest counties. This year, with all of the state’s sheriff’s offices on the ballot, some are seeking re-election amid criticism over spiking deaths on their watch. 

In Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, jail deaths have risen dramatically under Sheriff Bill Waybourn, a Republican who first entered office in 2017 and is seeking re-election this year. At least 60 people have died in Tarrant County jail custody since Waybourn took over, compared to 25 in-custody deaths during the 8-year period that preceded him, according to state records and data compiled by nonprofit oversight group Texas Justice Initiative. 

Waybourn, who is unopposed in the Republican primary next month but will face a Democratic challenger in November, has become a sort of national right-wing celebrity for his anti-immigrant rhetoric and efforts to police elections in Tarrant County. But at home, criticism has mounted over the rise in deaths and other scandals on his watch—including allegations of a cover-up following one particularly questionable jail death; a pregnant woman with severe mental illness who delivered her baby alone inside her cell (the child later died); and a disabled woman who left the jail comatose and covered in bruises. Last year, a group of Tarrant County activists working with the civil rights clinic at Texas A&M University’s law school filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice seeking an investigation into the local jail. 

“The Tarrant County Jail has failed the community at every turn,” the letter stated. “It has failed to provide medical care, to protect incarcerated people from risks associated with poor mental health, to perform checks, and to protect individuals from harm from jail staff and others in the jail.”

Both of Waybourn’s Democratic challengers—Patrick Moses, a retired federal officer, and Indya Murray, a local police officer—have cited problems at the jail as a reason for running. Voters will choose which of them moves to November’s general election against Waybourn on March 5.

In a recent forum local officials organized to discuss problems at the jail, Waybourn defended his running of the facility and downplayed the scandals on his watch, blaming the deaths on drug addiction and other health problems that he said were outside the control of his staff—like “excited delirium,” a supposed condition that medical associations have long rejected but which cops still cite to explain in-custody deaths. 

Other sheriffs who oversee large scandal-plagued lockups in Texas are also on the ballot this year, including Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat first elected to the post in 2016, and Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar, another Democrat first elected that same year. As Bolts has reported, Harris County’s jail system, the largest in the state, has struggled with overcrowding and violence in recent years. The Bexar County jail has also seen a rise in deaths in recent years and a high suicide rate, a persistent problem at the jail for more than a decade. 

As of publication, Harris County is one of the 14 counties with jails currently flagged by state authorities as non-compliant with minimum safety standards. Besides Gonzalez, the other sheriffs who are facing competition in these counties are all Republicans in rural areas like Newton County, which like Harris County is shipping people out-of-state as a solution to its jail overcrowding.

Boss Ogg fights her own party 

When she won the Harris County DA race in 2016, Kim Ogg became the first Democrat to run Texas’ largest prosecutor’s shop in 40 years. She promised a vision of change that seemed to distance the office from its tough-on-crime heyday, focusing on reforms aimed at diverting people accused of low-level crimes, like marijuana possession, from jail. 

The county has kept morphing politically since her first win, including electing other reform-minded Democrats to key offices as part of a blue wave in 2018, and adopting bail reform for misdemeanor cases in the aftermath of a lawsuit and federal ruling striking down the county’s previous practice of routinely detaining people with petty charges who couldn’t afford to pay for their pretrial freedom. 

But during that time, Ogg has largely parted ways with this broader movement to reform Harris County’s criminal legal system, in part by fiercely resisting the efforts at bail reform. Now Ogg is running for a third term—this time with a much more sour relationship to many in her party. She first faces a challenge from a former staffer in the March 5 Democratic primary. 

In recent years, reform-minded local officials who have butted heads with Ogg have found themselves in the crosshairs of her powerful office. Under Ogg, the DA’s office filed complaints with the state in an attempt to unseat a Democratic criminal court judge who was vocally critical of the DA. Her office attempted to prosecute another Democratic judge who had publicly sparred with her over bail reforms. Ogg’s office is also currently prosecuting former aides of Democratic Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county executive who has repeatedly clashed with the DA over criminal justice policy, over alleged improprieties involving a county contract. 

Pushback from Ogg’s own party reached a boiling point late last year when Harris County Democrats officially admonished the DA. Local party precinct chairs voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution stating that Ogg has “abused the power of her office to pursue personal vendettas against her political opponents, sided with Republicans to advance their extremist agenda, and stood in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system.” 

Ogg has dismissed the intra-party fight as “political drama” and argues she helped steer the office through Hurricane Harvey and the COVID-19 pandemic, crises that wreaked havoc on the local criminal legal system. (Ogg’s office and campaign didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment for this story.) 

Ogg’s critics say her charging decisions have contributed to the deadly crisis at the local jail. Defense attorneys and former prosecutors have accused her of mismanagement and bungling some of the office’s core functions, such as screening charges filed by police. According to a recent investigation by the Houston Chronicle, cases prosecuted by the DA’s office that judges later tossed for lack of probable cause have skyrocketed under Ogg after she changed how the office reviews charges, resulting in more and more Houstonians jailed without a firm legal basis. 

Sean Teare, a former prosecutor who is challenging Ogg in the Democratic primary, told Bolts that problems with the DA’s intake division reflect a larger “culture of fear” that she has fostered in the office. He claims that prosecutors are reluctant to dismiss weak cases, or allow for pretrial release or plead down charges when appropriate, for fear that a case might later generate critical headlines. Teare argues that the environment has compounded the looming backlog in criminal cases facing the office. 

“You can make the recommendation for plea bargains at the highest level possible, just never move off of it, and the case will never plea,” he said. “It will pend for three and a half years and someone else will have to try it—even if we know we can’t make the case or that’s not the right recommendation, because that’s the way you don’t get in trouble.” 

While Democrats have come to dominate countywide elections in Harris County, the primary winner will face Dan Simons, a local Republican lawyer, in the general election.

Austin’s election unfolds under a removal threat

Just a month before a Minneapolis officer murdered George Floyd and sparked a national uprising, Austin cops had killed Mike Ramos, another unarmed Black man whose name, along with Floyd’s, eventually became a rallying cry during the seismic protests that hit Texas’ capital city that summer. Austin police only reinforced their reputation for violence during the 2020 protests, shooting crowd-control munitions like “bean bag” rounds at unarmed protesters, resulting in numerous severe injuries. 

José Garza, a former public defender and labor rights organizer, successfully ran for Travis County DA that year, vowing to hold police accountable. Within months, prosecutions against abusive cops started to rise. In early 2022, about a year after taking over, Garza announced charges against more than a dozen Austin officers accused of assault and deadly conduct during the 2020 protests. 

Garza’s first term has been a lesson in what kind of policy changes local reform-minded DAs can enact—from prosecuting police to improving the office’s historically harmful treatment of sex assault survivors and piloting a restorative justice program. Garza says the office has also dramatically expanded access to pretrial diversion programs, so that most people charged with non-violent offenses are now connected with some kind of service, whether job training or treatment, instead of being convicted. In an interview with Bolts, Garza pointed to a recent case, a single father charged with cocaine possession, as an example: diversion meant prosecutors sending the man to the local carpenters union for a training program and dismissing the charge when he completed it.

“The carpenters told us he was their best student, and so he ended his contact with our criminal legal system in Travis County, not as a convicted felon but as a carpenter’s apprentice,” Garza said. 

But as he stepped up police prosecutions and other reforms, Garza has drawn the hostility of law enforcement unions and their allies, a familiar pattern to other progressives in his office. And as he now seeks a second term, Garza first faces a March 5 Democratic primary against Jeremy Sylestine, a former prosecutor who has accused him of painting a “political bullseye” on APD officers.

Sylestine has also aired campaign ads accusing the DA of being too lenient on plea deals (Sylestine’s campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story). Daniel Betts, the only GOP candidate, has encouraged Republican voters to cross party lines to vote in the Democratic primary against Garza, which is allowed under Texas’ open primary system. 

In their efforts against Garza, police groups are also looking beyond elections. Last year, Republicans in the Texas legislature rewrote state law to allow for courts to remove local DAs who choose not to pursue certain types of crimes. Aimed at a handful of ”rogue prosecutors” who, like Garza, had promised not to prosecute people for abortion, the new law also threatens to undermine local attempts to decriminalize marijuana possession. 

Law enforcement groups launched a website to collect complaints against Garza the week the new prosecutor-removal law took effect last September. In December, the GOP candidate who lost to Garza in the 2020 general election helped file a petition to remove him from office, citing the new law. 

Garza in December ended up dismissing the criminal charges against most of the Austin police officers his office was prosecuting for excessive force during the 2020 protests. Garza says those cases were derailed late last year when APD sent his office an internal review showing that police officials knew ahead of the protests that the department’s crowd-control munitions were dangerous and could maim people. Garza also says police conveniently did not investigate or disclose those facts until the three-year statute of limitations had passed for any potential indictments against higher-ups. 

Garza insists that police prosecutions are among the most difficult cases his office handles but he says he’s using his perch to push for police oversight and accountability in ways that go beyond prosecuting cases. In December, even as he dropped the charges against officers who injured protesters in 2020, Garza says he asked Austin’s mayor to join him in calling for a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into APD’s use of force and crowd-control tactics during the 2020 protest.

“I’m really more convinced than ever that there really needs to be deep, systemic change in the Austin Police Department,” Garza said. 

The post The Texas Elections That Will Shape Policing and Punishment This Year appeared first on Bolts.

Evan Lee had trouble getting the medication he needed for mental illness and other health issues after being booked into the Harris County jail, just three days from Christmas in 2021. As a result, Lee’s family says he deteriorated during his time inside the hulking lockup in downtown Houston, until March 9, 2022, when he was badly beaten and injured by another inmate.

According to a lawsuit Lee’s family filed against the county earlier this summer, it took two days for jail officials to give him any medical care despite visible injuries like facial bruising. Even then, according to the lawsuit, jail medical staff “simply looked at Mr. Lee and sent him back to his cell without any treatment, observation or further diagnostic testing.” On March 18, more than a week after the fight, jail staff finally sent Lee to a hospital because of how disoriented he was. Doctors found serious head injuries, including two areas of bleeding in his brain, and pronounced him brain-dead two days later. 

Lee, 31, was one of at least 28 people who died after being in Harris County jail custody in 2022, when Texas’ largest jail system saw a record wave of deaths. Alongside other mourning parents, his mother Jacilet Griffin-Lee now religiously attends meetings held by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, a state regulatory agency. For more than a year at these hearings, Harris County has been called to the carpet for violating minimum safety standards, including for lapses in medical care and monitoring of people in custody. Griffin-Lee and other family members drove the 160-mile trip from Houston to Austin for the jail commission’s last hearing on Nov. 2 and stood at the back of the room, holding poster-sized photos of loved ones lost to the jail as an entourage of Harris County officials testified about efforts to improve conditions. 

After Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez left the hearing room, Griffin-Lee peppered him with questions in the basement level of the Texas capitol building. “It’s a horrible facility, it just hurts for people to get the death penalty while they’re waiting for their case,” she said as other grieving mothers circled the sheriff. “We should not be getting the kind of letters we’re getting from inmates that are there and what they’re witnessing.” 

Harris County officials have largely blamed the jail crisis on overcrowding and short staffing; as of the November hearing, more than 9,000 people were detained inside a Harris County jail system that had more than 200 vacant jailer positions. And yet they haven’t announced major new efforts to shrink the population they wish to jail. Instead, in response to the jail commission’s escalating pressure, they’ve started shipping even more people in their custody to for-profit lockups far from Harris County. 

Last month, after the state jail commission threatened to reduce Harris County’s jail capacity if it didn’t comply with minimum standards, the county’s governing body—its five-person commissioners court—unanimously approved a $11.3 million contract to send up to 360 people to a private prison in Mississippi. That’s on top of the roughly 1,300 people whose detention the sheriff’s office already outsources to other private lockups outside the county. 

Any pretrial detention, which accounts for more than 70 percent of the county’s jail population, separates families; it also makes mounting a defense more difficult, putting pressure on people to plead guilty. But those challenges multiply when people are sent hundreds of miles away. It may even compound the backlog in criminal cases that has contributed to the overcrowding crisis. According to county data, people now spend on average nearly 200 days in Harris County jail custody, most waiting for their case to be processed, which is far greater than the national average jail stay of 33 days. Defense attorneys say more outsourcing could add to delays in cases as more people must be transported back to the county for court hearings.

“It’s hugely expensive, it draws things out, and it destroys relationships between clients and lawyers and clients and their families,” Alex Bunin, Harris County’s chief public defender, told me. “It creates just all kinds of anxieties that can play out later and affect things like recidivism and getting a job and getting back into society.”

The outsourcing, ostensibly a response to dangerous jail conditions in Harris County, will put even more people in the hands of private prison companies with their own histories of abuse. 

CoreCivic, the private prison giant that inked the new contract with Harris County last month to detain people in one of its Mississippi lockups, has long been accused of short staffing, excessive force, and poor treatment at its facilities. Another company Harris County contracts with to house up to 500 people in one of its Louisiana prisons, LaSalle Corrections, has a similarly troubled track record; in 2020, the company lost its contract to run a bi-state jail on the Texas-Arkansas border following years of lawsuits over deaths on its watch. 

Harris County detainees shipped to the LaSalle Corrections Center in northwest Louisiana, nearly 300 miles from home, have already warned of dangerous conditions. Rahan Atia, a Houston defense attorney, told me that he started hearing complaints of extortion and threats of violence after he took over the cases of several defendants held there. 

In September, Atia asked a Harris County judge on one of his cases to prevent the sheriff’s office from sending a client back to LaSalle after he’d been brought to Harris County for a hearing. (Atia asked that his client not be named to protect his privacy.) The request prompted a hearing over whether to keep the defendant in Harris County. 

Lawyers for the county opposed the motion. “The same people that are out there are here,” said Graylon Wells, a lawyer with the Harris County Attorney’s Office, according to a transcript I obtained of the hearing. 

Wells said that the jails managed by the county also present dangers, questioning whether the defendant would be any safer staying in Harris County. “My confusion here is inmates rotate from LaSalle to here, so why is he safer here than he is in LaSalle?” Wells asked. Victoria Jimenez, a lawyer with the sheriff’s office, told the judge, “It is nearly impossible to prevent any type of extortion from happening … What if something happens to him here?” 

“Is something going to happen to him here?” the judge, Natalia Cornelio, asked. “God forbid, no. Hopefully not,” Jimenez replied, then added, “Things happen every day in that jail.” 

Atia told me the hearing felt like a troubling admission by the county that it couldn’t ensure safety for anyone in its custody, whether in the facilities they run directly or elsewhere. He credited Cornelio for taking the matter seriously and granting his request to keep the defendant in Harris County after the extortion attempts, but he added that other judges refused to even hear similar complaints. “Other judges went, ‘Well you know, it’s just the culture,’” he said. “No, it’s not just the culture. We need to stop this.” 

Neither the sheriff’s office or LaSalle representatives responded to my requests for comment or questions sent by email for this story. 

The outsourcing also decreases oversight of the conditions under which people are detained. Jails inside the state fall under the regulation of the Texas jail commission and are required to hold independent law enforcement investigations into each death in custody and report them to the state attorney general. (As I wrote earlier this year, some Texas sheriffs have tried to undermine these requirements.) 

But those requirements stop at the state line. 

Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who works with her students to compile information about deaths in custody across Louisiana, says that her state has comparably weak jail regulations and oversight. She pointed to the case of Billie Davis, a 35-year-old man who died after Harris County sent him to the LaSalle Correctional Center last year. Had he died in Texas, Davis’ death would have triggered a report to the Texas AG as well as an independent police investigation. After Davis died in Louisiana, Texas jail reform activists struggled for months to find out what happened to him. This year, activists finally tracked down a coroner’s report, which concluded that Davis died from the result of “multiple blunt force traumatic injuries during a fight in custody” and ruled his death a homicide. 

Armstrong said Louisiana law doesn’t require any particular investigation into deaths in custody other than by a coroner, so it’s unclear what, if any, other inquiry occurred into Davis’ death. (Sheriff’s officials in LaSalle Parish, where the facility is located, didn’t respond to my questions for this story.) “In our work documenting deaths in Louisiana prisons and jails, one of the most difficult facilities to obtain information from is privately operated facilities,” Armstrong told me. “My students often end up in extended conversations with legal counsel. It’s a difficult undertaking.” 

Brandon Wood, executive director of the Texas jail commission, acknowledged the outsourcing of detainees may decrease oversight of the conditions in which they’re detained. “I don’t know if I want to use the term, ‘black hole,’” he told me, “but it is one of those things where once they are no longer within the state of Texas, we lose a lot of our authority regarding those inmates.” 

Advocates for jail reform in Harris County have urged local officials to prioritize reducing the jail population over more outsourcing. Krishnaveni Gundu, executive director of the Texas Jail Project, which monitors jail conditions and advocates for incarcerated people and their families, says there have long been other options. 

For instance, she pointed to a 2020 consulting report commissioned by the county that recommended prosecutors dismiss all non-violent felony cases older than nine months in order to cut the county’s case backlog—especially since more than half of those cases eventually wound up dropped or deferred anyway.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg has balked at such recommendations, calling them unrealistic. Ogg, who faces a heated primary challenge to keep her seat next year, was also admonished by her own party earlier this month, with Harris County Democratic Party precinct chairs voting overwhelmingly to pass a resolution that condemns her for, among other things, “[standing] in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system.” Ogg has also clashed with local judges who have supported bail reform and pursued efforts to relieve the local jail.

Gonzalez, the local sheriff, has said that outsourcing is “not a preferred solution” and has made halting efforts to release people—including flagging people in his jail system who present no public safety risk for consideration by the DA’s office and judges. “We incarcerate way too many people,” the sheriff told the grieving families who had gathered in November to confront him. “Right now, law enforcement is on the front lines of three things in this country: mental health, addiction and poverty,” he said. “We should not be on the front lines, we should find other alternatives to that, instead of people ending up incarcerated.”

Even with such rhetoric from officials, Harris County continues to double down on jail-based solutions to the crisis. In addition to the increased outsourcing, the county earlier this year approved an additional $645,000 to expand services for people in the jail who have been found incompetent to stand trial—a program that county administrators have proposed expanding even further. Gonzalez himself has suggested that the county should seriously consider new jail construction. 

All five members of Harris County’s governing body, even those who have clashed with the DA, approved the new outsourcing contract last month. County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who leads the county government and supported the contract, told Houston Landing that it “breaks my heart” and that she wants to be “figuring out a solution.” But, she added, “I don’t have it yet. It’s a little scary to say I’m working on one and I don’t know if we’re going to find one.” (Hidalgo’s office didn’t respond to my questions for this story.)

But Gundu insists there are many alternative policies for the county to pursue. “Instead of lining the pockets of private prison companies, we could be investing those taxpayer dollars in robust evidence-based solutions that actually promote public safety,” she told me. “Such as access to affordable and stable housing, crisis respite centers, psychiatric ERs, community based mental health care, guaranteed income programs, equitable access to healthcare—any of these solutions is guaranteed to keep our communities safer than a jail.” 

Meanwhile, families of people who died in Harris County jail custody say they will continue to pressure officials for accountability, including by attending the next state jail commission hearing. “I want to let the commissioners know that we’re watching and we care about our loved ones, even when they are in their worst state,” Lee-Griffin said after the last commission hearing. As it approaches two years since her son’s death, Lee-Griffin told me she tries to focus on good memories of him, like his love for sports and for his community. 

For others at last month’s jail commission hearing, the pain of losing a child to jail still felt fresh. Dianne Bailey Rijsenburg showed me photos of her 30-year-old son, Ramon Thomas, who died after being incarcerated at the jail this summer. Tears welled in her eyes as recalled praying to herself and pacing around her house after she got the call that he had died this summer, as if trying to stabilize herself with movement and faith.

“How can those people come and rip your children from you like that, like they’re nobody?” she asked, holding a photo of her son bordered by blue flowers. 

The post Out of Sight appeared first on Bolts.

Whitmire, a fixture of Democratic politics in Texas and state lawmaker for half a century, has made the story central to his campaign for mayor of Houston this year, weaving it between calls to jail more people, aggressively hire more police, and deploy hundreds of state troopers to patrol the city. “When I watch the crime that’s in Houston, it alarms me,” he said in a recent campaign ad where he talks about the robbery three decades ago. “You know, I was robbed at gunpoint in my garage, and I definitely thought he was going to kill me, my wife and my 9 year old daughter. And it just changes your life forever.”

Whitmire finished on top of a crowded field of 17 other candidates in the Nov. 7 election, winning 42.5 percent of the vote. He now faces a Dec. 9 runoff against Sheila Jackson Lee, the longest serving member of Houston’s congressional delegation and another towering figure in Democratic politics in the state, who came in second last week with 35.6 percent.

The mayor’s race has spotlighted the tough-on-crime politics that still dominate debate around public safety in the nation’s fourth largest city. Police in Houston have a long history of brutality and impunity, while Harris County, where the city is located, was until recently known as the death penalty capital of the world for how many people it has sent away for execution. 

In recent years, local debates and policies around criminal punishment started to shift as Democrats solidified control of the county government and as activists pushed for reforms. Throughout the two terms of Mayor Sylvester Turner, who could not run for reelection this year due to term limits, advocates lobbied him to implement police reforms, with mixed results: Turner updated policies to increase access to officer body camera footage and promised greater police oversight but he also balked at other requests. He resisted demands that the city make its contract negotiations with the Houston police union, which determine many oversight and discipline policies, a public process, as it is in other major Texas cities like San Antonio and Austin.

Heading into the city’s municipal elections this fall, advocates for police reform tried to turn the mayoral race into an opportunity for broader discussion around public safety and changes they want the city’s next mayor to prioritize. Under Houston’s “strong mayor” form of government, the mayor wields enormous power over city policy by appointing each department head, overseeing all administrative work, and setting the city council’s agenda. 

A coalition of community and civil rights groups, which called themselves RISE Houston (or “Reimagining Safety for Everyone in Houston”), developed three demands for candidates: reducing minor traffic stops that disproportionately target Black drivers, ending a controversial multi million dollar police surveillance contract that has proven ineffective, and freezing the city’s police budget. 

But when the coalition tried surveying each candidate on those issues, few responded or took any concrete positions. Neither Whitmire or Jackson Lee, the political juggernauts in the race, even attended a forum on public safety policies that the coalition held in early October—although Jackson Lee, who was in Washington D.C. at the time, spoke to the crowd virtually later in the event. 

RoShawn C. Evans, one of the activists who helped form the coalition, said the local criminal justice reform group that he co-founded in 2015, Pure Justice, had considered making endorsements for the first time this year but eventually decided against it.

“We chose not to because of the narrative around public safety,” Evans told Bolts. “It’s very bothersome that I’m watching all these candidates run to represent the city of Houston and the platform that they’re running on is a platform that is around the narrative of mass incarceration. Every dollar we put into law enforcement, every dollar we put into building a new court or hiring more DAs, it opens the floodgates to mass incarceration even wider than what it already is.” 

Whitmire, who has led in both polling and campaign funding throughout the race, helped set the terms of debate during the race with his promise to be “tough and smart on crime.” Like in cities across the country, violent crime rose in Texas’ largest city during the pandemic and remained a top concern for Houstonians surveyed before this year’s election, even as crime rates have started to fall. 

Whitmire is a rare Democrat with any semblance of power in the GOP-dominated Texas legislature. As chair of the Senate’s criminal justice committee since 1993, a position he has retained since the Republican Party solidified control of the chamber later in the 1990s, he has sat at the center of the state’s policies around criminal punishment for decades. In the 1990s, Whitmire was an architect of policies that scaled up incarceration in Texas, helping pass a legislative package that increased prison time for serious offenses and pumping $1 billion into an unprecedented prison-building boom. Later, in the 2000s, he helped expand diversion programs that reversed the trend and staved off even more prison building. 

In more recent legislative sessions, advocates have criticized Whitmire for being a barrier to change, saying the senate criminal justice committee has become a killing field for reform legislation under his leadership. He has refused to consider reforms the Texas House has passed, such as legislation raising the age of criminal responsibility to 18 (Texas is one of only three states that charges 17 year olds as adults) and efforts to install air conditioning in the state’s dangerously hot prisons. Even reforms he claims to support, like “second chance” legislation to allow reconsideration for people sentenced to life in prison as children, have derailed in the committee on his watch. 

Whitmire, who didn’t respond to questions for this story, has defended his legislative record and insisted reform advocates have unrealistic expectations, telling the Houston Chronicle recently, “I don’t think any criticism has an appreciation for the difficulty in Austin of doing criminal justice reform at any time in the 30 years that I’ve been chair.” 

Civil rights advocates in Houston are particularly worried about one of Whitmire’s core campaign proposals, to bring in more state troopers from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to help patrol the city, warning that it will worsen racial disparities in policing in Houston. The actions of the state agency, which is far whiter and less diverse than Houston’s police force, have raised concerns about racial profiling and police brutality when troopers have been deployed to patrol other cities and along the border with Mexico. 

When Austin city leaders tried the approach earlier this year, troopers primarily arrested people of color before officials called off the partnership. When Dallas brought in DPS troopers in 2019, some local leaders criticized the agency for acting like “an occupying force.” Christopher Rivera, an outreach coordinator in Houston for the Texas Civil Rights Project’s criminal injustice program, pointed to a report the group put out earlier this year showing minor traffic enforcement already disproportionately targets Black drivers in Houston. While activists have asked for an ordinance limiting traffic stops and police encounters for non-moving violations, like expired registration, they now worry Whitmire’s proposal for DPS patrols could exacerbate the problem. 

“Probably the most concerning thing that has come up in the race has been the DPS issue,” Rivera told Bolts. “When we bring more police into the city of Houston, they just end up over policing more neighborhoods of color and low income communities.”

Rivera said local activists hope that a change to municipal government that voters adopted last week will open the door to more reform discussions at city hall, regardless of who’s in the mayor’s office. More than 80 percent of voters approved Proposition A, which gives city council members more power to force the council to take up issues even without the mayor’s approval; beginning next year, any three of Houston’s 16 city council members can join together to put items on the council’s agenda.

Progressive advocates in Houston are hopeful that they’ve retained some footholds in municipal government in this fall’s elections. Council Member Tarsha Jackson, who was formerly a top staffer with the Texas Organizing Project (TOP), which has become a driving force in left politics in the state, won reelection last week. Council Member Letitia Plummer, who has advocated for changing how the city spends money on public safety, faces a runoff against challenger Roy Morales.

While Whitmire has the backing of local and state police groups in his run for mayor, Jackson Lee has garnered endorsements by more outwardly progressive organizations and leaders, like TOP and also Lina Hidalgo, Harris County government’s chief executive, who has supported bail reform and pushed back against some of the district attorney’s funding requests. While Jackson Lee has used a different tone from Whitmire when talking about crime, she has done little to carve out a competing vision around public safety and has offered few specific policy priorities on the campaign trail. 

Jackson Lee, who did not respond to questions for this story, expressed some caution about Whitmire’s plan to deploy state troopers during one of the final televised debates in the race last month. 

“I give them credit for their investigative skills, they will be used for that, but not patrolling our neighborhoods where our families are looking to those they know and those who know them,” she said, promising instead to “expand” the presence of local police.

On election night, Jackson Lee thanked her supporters and spoke in broad terms about combating gun violence, increasing mental health services, and “making sure that every corner of this city will be represented at the table of empowerment.” Across town, as he addressed his supporters, Whitmire again returned to his own brush with crime three decades ago. 

“Let anyone who can hear my voice: I don’t apologize for being tough on crime,” he said. “I’ve had to beg for my life and my wife and my nine year old daughter in our garage. That person put a gun in my face and I thought I was finished. I was worried about my daughter and my wife. But God had a plan for me.”

Correction (Nov. 17): An earlier version of this article misstated the result for one of Houston’s council seats; Letitia Plummer and Roy Morales will face off in a runoff.

The post Promises to Scale Up Policing Stir Houston’s Mayoral Race appeared first on Bolts.

Brown explained that eligible voters in the jail could request and mail ballots, since confinement in jail is one the few situations that allow people to vote absentee in Texas. “Some people would have you think that we’re not allowing people to vote,” the Democratic sheriff continued. “Such is not the case. They are voting. It’s just that they’re not doing so at a polling station.” 

A few months after Brown’s video, in the November midterms, just one person voted from jail via an absentee ballot, according to county data obtained by Bolts, which is in keeping with the historical trends. Roughly 6,000 people are held inside the massive jail on the edge of downtown Dallas. The vast majority are incarcerated pretrial and many are likely eligible to vote, but few actually do. Only two people voted by mail from the jail in the 2016 presidential election. That number rose in the 2020 presidential election but remained a tiny share of the jail population, with 34 people returning a mail ballot.

Dallas activists had asked for a polling place to be installed at the jail for last year’s midterm elections, but faced pushback from some officials, including a county commissioner who called the issue “less than last on my list.” In her message posted to social media last summer, Brown questioned the feasibility of a polling place at the jail and claimed that adding one could compound short staffing at her lockup. 

But activists got their wish this past spring, when officials quietly approved a jail polling place for the May 6 municipal elections. “This is something we have actively been working on for some time,” Brown said in another post. “We are pleased to be able to expand voting for our inmates in Dallas County Jail.”

Twenty people voted in person at this new polling place on May 6. An additional ten returned an absentee ballot from the jail. While an increase from November, especially for generally low-turnout local elections, the numbers are still pale compared to the county’s immense jail population. Brown said in her announcement that her office would use the spring’s low-profile elections to iron out any logistical issues. “The municipal elections afford us the opportunity to do a trial run to fill these gaps,” she said. 

As far back as 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed voting rights for people held in pretrial detention who, unlike people in state prisons, haven’t been convicted of a crime. But whether people in local lockups can actually exercise that right often depends on county sheriffs, who run the majority of county jails. 

Nearly all jails make incarcerated people who want to vote request an absentee ballot through the mail and then send it back, which can be tricky given tight deadlines and mail delays. This system also misses people who enter the jail after the deadline to apply for an absentee ballot. In 2020, for instance, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Ohio officials were not required to help eligible voters incarcerated after this deadline, even though election officials provide voting options for people hospitalized after that deadline. 

“There are a lot of issues with absentee ballots as the primary means for ballot access in custody,” Nicole Porter, senior director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project, told Bolts. “People in mailrooms don’t know how to treat ballots properly… And the jail facility itself lacks training and accountability.”

Activists have played a vital role expanding voting access behind bars by visiting local jails to register eligible voters and provide election day information. But in recent years they have also started pushing for election-day polling sites in lockups.

 In 2020, the Cook County jail in Chicago became the first jail system in the country to install a polling place for eligible voters incarcerated on election day, and voting there continues to rise, with turnout at the jail surpassing the citywide turnout in the June 2022 primaries. The Harris County jail in Houston, the largest in Texas, followed suit with an election day polling place in 2021 after a long campaign from local activists to expand ballot access to eligible voters detained there. Dallas this spring became the second jail in Texas with an election day polling place. 

Still, emails from the Texas Secretary of State’s Office obtained by Bolts under an open records request show how jail and elections staff across the state often question how and even whether to let people vote from jail, a dynamic Bolts has covered elsewhere in the country. The state discouraged at least one large urban county from setting up a jail polling place after Harris County established one; when a county attorney in Bexar County, home to San Antonio, reached out for guidance last summer, an attorney with the secretary of state’s office wrote them back saying, “a jail would not be a permissible polling location.” 

This year, Texas Republicans, ever hostile to expanding ballot access, filed a bill to prohibit polling places in a jail or any other detention facility, but it never advanced. Voting rights activists say changes to voting laws that Texas lawmakers already passed in recent years could compound the problems people face trying to vote from jail, pointing to new absentee voting rules that resulted in more than 20,000 rejected mail ballots during the 2022 midterm primary elections. 

Alex Birnel, advocacy director with MOVE Texas, a voting rights group that pushed for a polling place at the Dallas County jail, told Bolts that, in addition to working with the county sheriff, activists also had to persuade other county officials. “While sheriffs deal with the logistics, you’ve got to be in conversations,” Birnel said. “It cannot be done solo. You need the commissioners’ court and county institutions to be involved.”

Dallas’ Democratic county executive, County Judge Clay Jenkins, eventually backed the idea, and last year he started pushing other county leaders to support putting a polling place inside the jail for the November 2022 midterm elections. “Most Texans agree that voting should be safe, easy, and accessible to all, and while Dallas County has taken several steps to ensure access to the ballot box, there is, unfortunately, one group of eligible voters who have been denied their right to vote for far too long: the over 5,000 pretrial inmates at our Dallas County jail,” Jenkins wrote in an op-ed last September. “Denying thousands of Dallas County voters the opportunity to cast their ballot, as we have done for so long, is wrong, and we need to fix it.” 

A coalition of advocacy groups, including the ACLU of Texas and the Texas Civil Rights Project, kept up the pressure, writing a joint letter to the sheriff after she publicly dismissed the possibility of election-day voting at the jail. “Despite your claim that people in the Dallas County Jail already vote by mail, voting by mail on its own is insufficient to provide people in jail with the opportunity to vote,” the groups wrote in a Sept. 27, 2022 letter. 

“Because people of color are disproportionately incarcerated, denying ballot access to people in jail disproportionately disenfranchises Dallas County’s voters of color,” the groups argued, writing that failing to facilitate election day voting for eligible detainees “may give rise to liability under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.” The letter also pointed to the county’s continued reliance on cash bail for determining who is jailed pretrial and said, “because many pretrial detainees are incarcerated solely because they cannot afford to pay bail, there is effectively a poll tax—wherein they must pay bail to vote.” 

While they resisted the idea before the midterms, Brown and other county officials ultimately agreed to election day voting at the jail by the time they were determining polling locations ahead of this year’s municipal elections. When asked if the jail will continue to host a polling place in future elections, the sheriff’s office told Bolts, “Yes, the plan is to continue having a polling location at the Dallas County Jail for inmates and one outside for the public as we did in May.”

As Dallas shifts on the issue, and while Republican lawmakers in Texas continue to create barriers to voting, Porter urged other local officials to prioritize expanding ballot access where they can. “Democracy should be a priority for everybody and access to the ballot should be a priority for anyone who has influence and concern for liberty,” Porter said. “It should be a priority for sheriffs and county officials to guarantee ballot access for people to be eligible to vote during custody. They are humans and eligible.”

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Trudy Hancock became the first elections administrator in Robertson County, a rural area northwest of Houston, after the county ditched their old model of running elections in 2005. 

Until then, a county clerk was in charge of the voting process and a tax assessor-collector was responsible for voter registration; officials then unified those duties under an elections office managed by someone they would appoint—eventually Hancock, a longtime elections worker. Officials in nearby Brazos County, home to one of the nation’s largest universities, plucked Hancock to run their new elections office in 2016, after they too switched to the new unified system.

Hancock, who still runs elections in Brazos County and is now president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators, says voters were sometimes confused by the old split system. “If you were a county clerk and their question had to do with voter registration, then you had to send them somewhere else, and lots of times those offices aren’t even in the same buildings,” Hancock told Bolts. 

Counties across Texas, including most of the state’s largest urban centers, have adopted that new unified model for running elections over the past two decades as a way to streamline operations and better serve voters. Besides increasing efficiency, some local officials say this also erases a relic of the Jim Crow era; Texas tax assessors took on voter registration in the early 20th century because they also collected poll taxes. In 2020, Harris County, the state’s most populous and home to Houston, also switched to that unified system for running elections.

But Republicans pushed a bill through the legislature last week that will force Harris County to turn back to the old model for running elections. Senate Bill 1750, which abolishes the Harris County elections administrator position and returns those responsibilities to the county clerk and tax assessor-collector, is one of two bills specifically targeting election administration in Harris County that passed the GOP-dominated legislature and are now heading to Governor Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign them. 

The second bill, SB 1933, grants the secretary of state’s office new powers to investigate complaints of “irregularities” in Harris County elections, and ultimately to petition to remove the local officials overseeing elections.

The two bills are an escalation in GOP attacks on election administration in Texas’ largest county, which has become an increasingly reliable Democratic bulwark against a deep-red state government. During the last session, in 2021, the legislature passed a sweeping set of restrictions aimed at some of the boldest initiatives that Harris County elections officials implemented to expand safe voting options during the pandemic, like drive-thru and around-the-clock voting, which are now banned under state law. 

The bills that passed this session, however, differ from the last in that they explicitly target Harris County: The measure forcing a return to the split system for running elections only applies there, as does the bill granting the secretary of state new investigatory powers. While neither bill specifically names Harris County, SB 1750 and SB 1933 were tailored to only apply to counties of more than 3.5 million and 4 million residents, respectively, a threshold that only Harris County meets.

Bolts reported after last year’s midterm elections that Texas Republicans had seized on ballot shortages Harris County voters encountered at a handful of polling places to push for state intervention and more policing of elections. Nearly two dozen Harris County GOP candidates have pointed to those problems to challenge their losses, claiming the ballot shortages led to thousands of voters being turned away in Republican-leaning precincts. Reporting by the Houston Chronicle, however, has largely debunked that narrative, showing that the ballot shortages weren’t widespread (affecting about 20 of 782 polling places in the county) and impacted Democratic and Republican areas evenly. 

Harris County elections administrator Cliff Tatum, whom the county hired barely two months before early voting started in the November election, issued a report in January saying the problems during the midterms pointed to the “immediate need of upgrades or replacements” in the elections office. Tatum has said his office implemented several changes after the midterms to respond to those problems, from hiring more helpline operators to respond to problems at polling places to implementing a new system for tracking requests from election judges. 

In a statement to Bolts, Tatum stressed how the new legislation would reshuffle elections administration ahead of another important election; Democrats tried but failed to get Republicans to amend the effective date for SB 1750 until after Nov. 7, when Houston will elect its next mayor. Tatum said the law is now set to force changes to election administration on Sept. 1, 39 days ahead of the voter registration deadline and 52 days out from the first day of early voting. “We fear this time frame will not be adequate for such a substantial change in administration, and that Harris County voters and election workers may be the ones to pay the price,” Tatum said. 

Voting rights advocates worry that the bills targeting Harris County will set up whoever runs elections there next to fail, or at least trigger the new oversight powers by the state established under SB 1933. Harris County also saw problems under its earlier split system of administering elections, with past clerks accused of bungling elections and tax assessor-collectors wrongly suspending voter registrations. The oversight bill, which allows for the secretary of state’s office to investigate and petition to remove election officials, would also go into effect in September if signed. 

Katya Ehresman, voting rights program director with Common Cause Texas, said that both Harris County election bills “create a feedback loop of problems down the road.” 

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable that we can expect a huge turnout this November because of the multi millions of dollars that are probably going to be spent in this mayoral race, and the conditions for the elections are completely changing right before it,” Ehresman told Bolts. “That’s something that lawmakers were cognizant of, because they used that as a reason to blame the elections administrator for the problems we saw during the last election. And yet now the legislature is just replicating those conditions, and they will be uniquely to blame for any problems voters encounter because of it.” 

Harris County officials have already vowed to fight the bills in court. Harris County’s clerk and tax-assessor collector, both elected Democrats, declined to comment on any plans to reassume election duties, with representatives of both offices telling Bolts they’d issue statements if and when Abbott signs the legislation. 

Hancock told Bolts she worries that, even if the bill expanding investigations is limited to Harris County, it could erode the relationship between the office and local elections workers. Currently, the secretary of state is largely an advisory role to assist local election officials. “If you’re having a problem, you’ll be less likely to call and talk to someone about that problem if you’re worried they’re going to come back and later feel the need to assert their role as oversight,” Hancock said. 

“We’re worried it will have a chilling effect with the relationship that we currently have with the SOS,” she added. 

Republicans have also targeted election administrators in other parts of the state, most notably by ramping up policing around elections in Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth and the Texas GOP’s last urban stronghold; their actions led the county’s election administrator to resign in April. 

Ehresman warns that the GOP meddling won’t stop there. She pointed to a host of other proposals—from ending countywide polling to giving the secretary of state even greater oversight powers—that failed in this year’s regular session but right-wing officials are already trying to revive. 

“This was an unprecedented move by the legislature to use the entire weight of their branch of government to eliminate an office, effectively fire one man, and target one specific county,” Ehresman said. “So I don’t think it’s unreasonable now that the legislature has gone this far for one county, that they won’t do it for other large urban counties.”

The post Republicans Escalate Attacks on Election Administration in Texas’ Largest County appeared first on Bolts.

In 2018, Kahan joined Crime Stoppers of Houston, a nonprofit organization that since 1980 has sponsored an anonymous tip line that paid out rewards of up to $5,000 for information that helped solve cases. Soon after Kahan joined, Crime Stoppers took a more aggressive stance and began targeting a new crop of Democratic, reform-minded judges, eventually blaming them for a 2020 spike in murders that was seen across the country. Kahan even started co-hosting a regular segment with the local Fox affiliate called “Breaking Bond” to shame and blame individual judges for crimes committed by defendants out on bail. 

Kahan may soon gain more power to go after Texas judges. Governor Greg Abbott nominated him last month as a “citizen member” to the state’s commission on judicial conduct, an oversight body that hears complaints about local judges and whose recommendations can lead to sanctions or even suspension. 

Kahan acknowledged that his nomination might be controversial in a social media post celebrating the news last month, writing, “I get that ‘some naysayers’ are none too happy about this but I’ve always adhered to the philosophy that when you advocate on behalf of one faction, you generally infuriate the other faction.” 

Some Houston lawyers questioned whether Kahan could fairly field complaints against judges given his track record of going after them. 

“If you’re in my shoes and you’ve watched this guy sit here and unfairly scapegoat judges for following the law for the past few years, and all of a sudden you’re moving him to a position where he could literally have the ability to influence whether or not good and fair judges keep being judges, that becomes terrifying,” said Murray Newman, the incoming president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association. 

Asked by Bolts whether he would bow out of cases that involve judges that he has campaigned against or criticized, Kahan said the commission has a recusal process that he will abide by “if a conflict of interest is determined on a case by case scenario.”

Kahan’s nomination, which is subject to confirmation by the GOP-run state Senate, highlights an increasingly harsh approach to the criminal legal system under Abbott. The governor and other state Republicans have dialed up crackdowns on local officials who have proposed reforms like detaining fewer people in jail pretrial or reducing the scale of prosecutions. In 2021, the governor successfully pushed the Texas legislature to pass a law setting limits on judges’ ability to reduce bail. This year, after years of attacking local Democratic prosecutors’ decisions to downplay charges for certain low-level offenses, Republicans have introduced legislation to circumvent or preempt the authority of local DAs. 

Abbott is also likely to push for new bail legislation as state lawmakers convene this month; Kahan, who supported Abbott’s bail bill last session, has joined police and prosecutors in urging lawmakers to initiate a process to amend the state’s constitution to allow judges to deny bail in more cases, which Abbott prioritized last legislative session. 

Krishnaveni Gundu, co-founder and executive director of the Texas Jail Project, which monitors conditions in local jails and advocates for better conditions, said Kahan’s nomination captures Abbott’s punitive approach to pretrial policy. “It’s clear that the governor has no interest in meaningful bail reform,” Gundu told Bolts. “Meanwhile people with mental illness and disabilities are dying in overcrowded jails while being detained pretrial.”  

Kahan has become a celebrity of sorts among Texas Republicans and other tough-on-crime politicians for helping fuel the backlash to landmark bail reforms that Harris County judges implemented in recent years to reduce the number of poor people stuck in jail on low-level charges. A Democratic sweep in the 2018 midterms shook up the Harris County judiciary and added some judges who sided with civil rights organizations that were suing the county over its bail system. Those new judges agreed to settle the lawsuit and implement changes to reduce the number of people in jail over a misdemeanor charge, as well as pushing for other reforms like no longer jailing defendants for being late to court or testing positive for marijuana. 

While Kahan has in the past voiced support for those changes, on TV he often insinuates that those reforms have led to more crime—despite years of reports and studies showing Harris County’s misdemeanor bail reforms have improved public safety. 

“If we sit back in silence, we’re just as guilty as those who are actually promoting this type of criminal justice reform or collateral damage that we’re seeing from this,” Kahan said in a video that Crime Stoppers posted to Facebook last year responding to criticism that the organization had become too active in judicial elections.

While barred from participating in political campaigns, the nonprofit Kahan works for depends on financial support from politicians like Abbott. An investigation last year by the Marshall Project and the New York Times showed that Crime Stoppers of Houston, the largest nonprofit of its kind in the country, has received millions of dollars in grants from Abbott’s office, which helped it weather financial stress in recent years. The investigation also revealed that the changes implemented by many of the Democratic judges that Crime Stoppers and Kahan have publicly criticized have hurt the organization’s bottom line; some local judges are no longer making defendants pay a $50 fee that had once contributed to a large part of its budget. (It’s common around the country for courts to require defendants to pay fees to private organizations.) 

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, a conservative Democrat who ran Crime Stoppers of Houston about a decade before Kahan joined and gave the group $500,000 in 2021, has not faced criticism by the organization or Kahan, even though some local lawyers blame her office for not making more formal requests to increase bonds. Ogg, like Crime Stoppers, has targeted judges who supported reforms in Harris County, and her office has filed complaints to the state judicial commission to which Kahan was just appointed.

Throughout 2020, Ogg’s top lieutenant, first assistant DA David Mitcham, filed several reports with the commission against Franklin Bynum, a former public defender and reform-minded judge elected to the bench in 2018 who has frequently clashed with Ogg. Mitcham complained that Bynum had released too many defendants, reduced too many sentences, and displayed “an unprofessional and irredeemable bias against the State of Texas and its prosecutors.” Elements of the complaints were personal and inflammatory: “His erratic behavior and demeanor have deteriorated to such an extent that he may be suffering from some sort of mental impairment of undetermined cause,” Mitcham wrote to the commission on Sept. 25, 2020. 

Ogg’s office attached to its complaint a photo of Bynum wearing a “Defund Chicago Police” T-shirt, which the Houston police union shared on social media. The judicial commission held a hearing about the complaints last April, a month after Bynum had already lost his primary election to a prosecutor in Ogg’s office. At the time, six of the commission’s 13 members were judges appointed by the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, five were non-attorney “citizen members” appointed by Abbott, the Republican governor, and two were lawyers appointed by the state bar.

Members of the judicial commission lingered on the photo of Bynum in the “defund” shirt. “Violence in general has increased in the cities because the police have been maligned and degraded and disparaged, and violence against them has increased,” Janis Holt, an Abbott appointee and vice chair of the commission, told Bynum before saying her son is a cop. “When I see someone who wears ‘defund the police,’ it tells me that you don’t care about my son and his family and my granddaughter.” 

The judicial commission recommended in July that Bynum be suspended, and even though he left office anyway at the end of 2022, that recommendation is still pending before the state supreme court. Bynum, who is fielding yet another complaint filed against him by another judge on his way out of office, says he’s concerned about Kahan’s involvement in any of his future hearings. 

“I do remember once that he basically accused me of being responsible for murders in the county,” Bynum said, referring to Kahan’s statements while at Crime Stoppers. “I don’t think anybody who uses that kind of language with me should ever sit on a commission that’s deciding my fate professionally, and yet now I’m looking at a situation where I may not even have a way to challenge him doing that.” 

Kahan told Bolts that he has not made public comments about Bynum. “Not sure where he is coming from,” Kahan said.

Houston lawyers say Kahan, Ogg and Abbott are reacting to a local judiciary that has started to finally incorporate more than just career prosecutors. “Before, Andy wasn’t an advocate who really had a nemesis, because he liked the DA, he liked all the judges, because they were all former prosecutors and he didn’t really have a lot to complain about,” Newman told Bolts. “It’s just a much more defendant- and constitutional rights-friendly atmosphere now than it was in the 1990s and early 2000s.” 

Newman called Kahan’s selection for a watchdog role over judges an attempt “to turn back the clock.”

“Really, in a nutshell, we’ve got judges who are not soft on crime, they’re just fucking fair,” Newman said. “And the DA’s office is so used to having that extra prosecutor sitting on a bench in a robe that they think fairness is biased against them.” 

Ogg and Kahan both testified at the legislature in favor of the restrictions on pretrial releases that passed last year, and which appear to have compounded deadly and dehumanizing conditions inside local jails. The director of a state commission tasked with oversight of county lockups in Texas warned in a meeting last November that the rise in county jail populations across the state, from 62,000 jail inmates in October 2021 to 70,000 last October, “should be raising red flags for everyone.” More people experiencing homelessness and mental health episodes are now getting stuck in jail on low-level charges like criminal trespass, one sheriff testified at the meeting. 

Kahan has dismissed the notion that new restrictions are straining local jails that already struggled to meet the state’s baseline standards for treatment—including the Harris County lockup, which saw a record number of deaths last year. “Wow—what a disingenuous stretch to blame legislation meant to keep defendants charged with certain violent crimes from getting a get out of jail free card with the amount of deaths at the Harris County Jail,” he wrote on Facebook in reaction to local media coverage. The county’s top jail official resigned earlier this month as deaths, overcrowding and staffing problems continue to plague the lockup. 

“Andy Kahan has been a voice consistently disrupting the idea that people are innocent until proven guilty,” said Jay Jenkins, an attorney with the Texas Center for Justice and Equity, which has advocated for bail reform in Harris County. Jenkins co-authored a 2021 report documenting media bias and misinformation around bail reform in Houston, which cited rhetoric by Kahan. 

“The impact of publicly disseminating views that undermine confidence in the principle of innocent-til-proven-guilty is that you get a lot of people locked up for stuff that they didn’t do,” Jenkins told Bolts. “This notion that people are guilty upon arrest, which is now even more represented on the statewide judicial council, is also at the heart of our jail overcrowding issue,” 

Kahan isn’t the only noteworthy tough-on-crime persona Abbott recently appointed to a state commission tasked with oversight of the criminal legal system. Last summer, Abbott appointed Austin police officer Justin Berry to a state police commission following his indictment on charges of assaulting protesters during the demonstrations that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020.  

Kahan’s appointment will be taken up by the Senate’s nominations committee, a body that typically does not hold Abbott’s appointees to hard scrutiny. The committee has yet to hold a hearing for Kahan as of publication. 

Last November, he appeared on a Houston TV show to discuss a 30-year-old murder that he said helped launch his career advocating for victims of violent crime. He had been working in the parole division of the Texas prison system in 1990 when a Houston police officer named James Irby was shot and killed during a traffic stop. After seeing news of the murder, Kahan said he pulled his department’s file on the suspect, Carl Buntion, and saw that Buntion had recently been released on parole after serving only 13 months of a 15-year prison sentence for sexual assault of a child. Kahan said the discovery spurred him to meet with the officer’s widow and help her advocate for fewer parole releases and more prisons to hold people. 

The tragedy helped drive media coverage that eventually bubbled into public outcry over prison releases, spurring Texas lawmakers to rewrite sentencing laws to require prisoners to serve more time and paving the way for the state’s dramatic prison buildup at the turn of the century. 

“You hate to say, but you know something positive did happen as a result of Jim’s death,” Kahan told a host for the Houston station KPRC last year, months after Buntion was executed for the murder. “It spurred a movement. It put me on the road to doing what I’m still doing some 30 odd years later.”

The article was updated on Jan. 27 with additional comment from Kahan.

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At issue were the problems that voters experienced in Texas’s largest county last week. At least one polling place opened late, and some ran out of ballot paper. It remains unclear how widespread the problems were, but the Houston Chronicle reported that roughly three percent of the county’s 782 polling places experienced ballot paper shortages last week. 

Those problems followed others that occurred during the March primaries and ultimately forced the resignation of Harris County’s previous elections administrator and fueled baseless conservative conspiracies about voter fraud. Last week’s Election Day glitches have further inflamed bogus claims of stolen elections while also exacerbating an ongoing feud between state GOP leaders and Texas’ largest and increasingly left-leaning county. 

On Monday, local Republican party officials sued Harris County Elections Administrator Cliff Tatum, whom the county hired barely two months before early voting started for the November election, accusing him of violating election laws. The GOP chairman of the Texas House elections committee has called for Tatum to be prosecuted and jailed. Republican Governor Greg Abbott has issued a statement calling for a state investigation of elections in Harris County—a county that, thanks to a sweeping voting law that Abbott signed just last year, was already subject to a full post-election state audit. Local DA Kim Ogg, a Democrat who frequently clashes with county commission members from her own party, has reportedly now opened a criminal investigation. 

In a brief presentation during Tuesday’s commission meeting, Tatum acknowledged problems with paper shortages at some polling places and the delayed opening of one vote center. He also told commissioners his office is currently speaking with the election judges overseeing each of the nearly 800 polling places to deliver a full report to county officials, and said that Election Day underscored the “dire need” for some improvements, like a system for tracking and monitoring requests for voting machine maintenance at polling places. 

“We are a transparent organization, there is nothing for us to hide,” Tatum told commissioners.

Voting rights advocates in Texas believe the GOP is misdirecting attention. “I can save a lot of taxpayer dollars from being wasted on this sham investigation by telling you now that these problems were a result of Republican politicians refusing for decades to properly invest in our state’s election infrastructure,” Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, told Bolts. 

“There seem to have been some mistakes made but all these investigations and legal challenges are more about manufacturing justifications for new voting restrictions, not about trying to make sure everyone is able to vote in the future,” he said. 

There is recent history for Texas Republicans fanning the flames of controversy against Harris County to tighten its election procedures. In 2021, the GOP’s election omnibus law banned innovations that Harris County implemented during the 2020 election to try and increase voting access during the pandemic, including 24-hour voting locations and drive-thru polling places. 

Republicans retained control of the legislature last week, and Texas is now on the eve of a new state legislative session that could bring yet more changes to state election laws targeting Harris County. Among the election bills that lawmakers have already filed ahead of the new session, which starts in January, is proposed legislation from Houston-area Republicans that would direct the secretary of state to appoint state police officers as “election marshals” to investigate voting during elections. 

State Senator Paul Bettencourt, a Republican who filed the legislation earlier this week, pointed to the problems in Harris County last week in a statement touting the bill, saying, “What happened in the November 8th election in Harris County is absolutely abominable and can NEVER happen again.” But Gutierrez called it “disingenuous at best” to frame the bill as a response to the issues that Houston voters experienced last week. “Are these election marshals going to manufacture paper when poll sites run out?” he said. “The obvious answer to prevent this from happening again is for the state to adequately fund our election infrastructure, not create some new army of election police.”

The proposal is part of a broader trend by conservatives in Texas and across the country to police elections and voting. Last year, after the state’s new election law emboldened partisan poll watchers, Harris County GOP officials started building what they’ve called an “army” to monitor busy urban vote centers in Houston. Election deniers in Texas have also worked with Republican officials to raise money to hire private cops to monitor voting, though such efforts have proven disastrous in the past. Among the protesters at the Harris County meeting on Tuesday was Steven Hotze, a far-right Houston activist who was criminally indicted earlier this year for his role in a bizarre voter fraud investigation that ended in an innocent person being run off the road and held at gunpoint. 

Hotze, who rallied protesters outside the county government building on Tuesday, also spoke at the commission meeting, claiming without providing evidence that his “computer experts” had discovered thousands of voters who were ineligible to cast ballots. “The Eighth Commandment says thou shall not steal,” Hotze said. “We have no other choice but to believe this election was severely undermined if not stolen by those who are in charge of the election.” 

Heading into Election Day, Republicans were hopeful that they would ride a red wave to wrestle back more control of the local government in Harris County, which has drifted blue over the past decade. They spent millions trying to defeat County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county’s chief executive, but Hidalgo prevailed against her GOP challenger last week. Democrats also flipped a seat on the five-member county commission.

Tom Ramsey, who will be the only remaining Republican on the court, called for intervention into Harris County elections by state GOP leaders. “We are a subpart of the state, and when we don’t do our business correctly, whether it’s run elections or the many other things that we do as a county, then the state gets to come in and play,” Ramsey said during the meeting. “I suspect the state’s gonna come in and play and deal with it and that’s what they should do.”

Hidalgo, meanwhile, begged GOP politicians to turn down their rhetoric around voter fraud and wait for a full accounting of whatever problems voters experienced last week. “We know that these claims and these issues are explosive,” she said at the meeting. “We know that people can be driven by false allegations to storm the Capitol of the United States, to hang a noose for the vice president, certainly they can be driven to do I-don’t-know-what kind of behavior here.”

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As Houston officials prepped their annual budget two years ago, a staffer for city council member Abbie Kamin was taken aback while examining a contract the city was on the verge of approving. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) had submitted a $4.2 million bid for a contract to repair tire treading on city trucks, a price some $750,000 below the competing bid. Kamin says her staffer broke down just how exactly TDCJ could float such a low price: with unpaid labor from incarcerated people forced to work inside a prison that also happened to be named after a slaveholder. 

Kamin, who was then in her first year in office, was alarmed enough to pull in another freshman council member, Carolyn Evans-Shabazz. The two met with TDCJ representatives to learn more about work programs inside Texas’ sprawling prison system before deciding on the contract. Kamin says the conversation inflamed rather than eased their concerns. She was appalled after realizing that Texas prisoners can face harsh punishment for refusing work assignments and that, along with being unpaid, many of them live and labor inside facilities without air conditioning in a state that regularly experiences triple-digit heat.

After their meeting, the council members quietly convinced Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner to post a new request for bids for tire retreading, this time with added language requiring worker compensation in line with industry standards. The state’s prison system didn’t even reapply and the contract went to a private company, albeit at a higher price. 

“We were not comfortable with these practices,” Kamin told Bolts. “Bottom line, the conditions are awful, the practice is terrible, and we’re one of only a handful of states left that even continue this practice. It’s just flat out wrong.”

Texas is one of seven states, all in the South, that force people in prison to work but pay them nothing for almost all jobs. (The others are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina.) Most other states only pay out pennies compared to what that labor would cost on the outside, according to a report published this week by the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School and the American Civil Liberties Union that catalogs prison work practices and profits across the country. 

The report estimates that around 800,000 people confined to U.S. prisons perform labor during incarceration, and that most say they are forced to work or else face additional punishment, such as solitary confinement or loss of family visits. Citing prison records, court documents and surveys with incarcerated workers, the report found that even prisoners who receive some pay for their work still mostly cannot afford basic necessities like soap thanks to exorbitant commissary prices and court costs, restitution and even “room and board” fees that garnish their meager wages. 

Jennifer Turner, a human rights researcher for the ACLU and lead author of the new report, says that incarcerated labor is inherently exploitative and dangerous, with people not only forced and coerced into prison jobs but also largely excluded from workplace safety protections. 

“Most of this labor is happening in a sort of black box where there’s no outside oversight, and basic protections for safety and training simply don’t apply,” Turner told Bolts, pointing to instances of people maimed or killed on the job—incarcerated workers in North Carolina who received only diaper rash cream after suffering chemical burns, a kitchen worker in a Georgia prison who had his leg amputated due to improper medical care for a wound he suffered from slipping and falling at work, a prison sawmill operator in Colorado who was nearly decapitated after a supervisor ordered her to dislodge a piece of wood blocking a conveyor belt. According to written surveys that Turner and other researchers conducted for the report, most prisoners cite hazardous job conditions and little to no formal training, even when tasked with work involving heavy machinery. 

“People are not given personal protective equipment and other types of standard safety equipment, like machine-guarding mechanisms when you’re dealing with sharp objects,” Turner said. “It’s very different from workplaces outside of prisons, because on the outside, people supervising you usually have some experience, they’re more likely to give proper job training on dangerous equipment or have some kind of oversight. That’s just not the case in prison.”

The beneficiaries of all this coerced and dangerous labor are primarily state governments. Prisons are propped up by incarcerated people forced to help operate and maintain their own systems of confinement—the most common prison jobs, according to Turner’s report, range from laundry and grounds maintenance to kitchen and building repairs. 

And as the Houston example indicates, prison systems also rake in profits by monetizing the products and work produced by the people they detain. 

Texas Corrections Industries (TCI), a division of the state prison agency, sold nearly $77 million prisoner-made goods and services in 2019 to a broad range of government agencies as well as “public schools, public and private institutions of higher education, public hospitals and political subdivisions.” According to the new report, commodities and services sold outside prisons make up a significant share of prison labor and have risen in tandem with mass incarceration, from around $650 million in sales in the early 20th century to more than $2 billion in 2021.

And other government agencies can and often do benefit from this captive labor pool to secure far cheaper contracts than they otherwise could. Data obtained from TCI show an array of municipalities, counties, local school districts, universities and medical systems across the state buying everything from cheap chairs and desks and other office equipment to aprons, lab coats, and even ornamental plaques for awards produced with forced and unpaid prison labor. 

TCI also publishes the prison iteration of an IKEA catalog to advertise its goods and services, and it operates showrooms in south Austin and Huntsville, about an hour’s drive north of Houston where the state prison system is headquartered. Lawmakers in Texas, who are permitted to benefit from low-cost prison-made goods, have in the past purchased furniture and other trinkets adorned with the state seal and flag to adorn their homes or gift to top campaign donors. 

“What really made an impression was to see how just the vast majority of work performed by people who are incarcerated is for the benefit of the prisons and state and local governments,” Turner said. “I think sometimes there’s a real misunderstanding that it’s largely for the benefit of private corporations.”

Prison agencies justify their reliance on forced and unpaid, or underpaid, labor by claiming they’re providing benefits beyond money, like keeping people busy in lockup or teaching them job skills to help them succeed after release. The cover of TCI’s products and services catalog declares, “Rehabilitation through real world job skills and training.” TDCJ responded to the recent report and claims that unpaid prison labor is inherently exploitative with a statement saying, “While inmates are not paid, they can acquire marketable job skills which could lead to meaningful employment upon their release.” However most incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated workers, and advocates for people in prison vehemently dispute such claims. 

“They force you to work, you’re guaranteed to have a shitty job and it’s guaranteed to be work that is tortuous,” David Johnson, an activist and organizer in Texas who did time in the state’s prisons, including stints where he was forced to work on a prison farm, told Bolts. “You are guaranteed to have a job that comes with no privileges and all downside, you are forced to work in the fields in the sweltering heat and deep cold. …It is tortuous, physically and emotionally and psychologically.” 

Low to non-existent wages for imprisoned workers also mean that their loved ones on the outside, who may already be struggling because of their incarceration and loss of earnings, must bear the full weight of supporting their survival in prison. The families of incarcerated people shell out billions every year on exorbitant commissary costs and phone calls, often forced into debt just to keep in contact with a family member or help them with basic necessities not provided by the prison system. 

“Incarceration puts an incredible monetary strain on family members,” said Savannah Eldrige, who has family inside Texas prisons and advocates for better conditions and treatment for incarcerated people. “The experience of supporting a loved one behind bars can be financially overwhelming because of all the expenses they have inside, from hygiene to health care, and the fact that they are no longer wage earners—I mean, where’s the money gonna come from? It’s gonna come from family.” 

Eldridge and Johnson are part of a growing national movement that seeks to abolish forced labor and servitude behind bars. They stress that much of the country’s modern prison archipeligo evolved from slavery, with convict-leasing and prison farms and laws that criminalized newly emancipated people replacing slave plantations after the Civil War. Johnson, who is Black, says he often thought of that history when he was forced to work the fields while incarcerated.

“It was always clear that there was a parallel between working in those fields and slavery,” Johnson said. “We had open conversations out there about how those conditions, how those armed men on horses guarding us evoked that history.” 

Johnson and Elridge are part of Abolish Slavery National Network, a coalition pushing for state and federal legislation to close a loophole in the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which was passed during Reconstruction and banned slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime.

Advocates in many states are pushing for anti-slavery language in their state constitutions. Voters in Nebraska, Utah and Colorado have all passed anti-slavery amendments in recent years, and similar measures will go to voters this year in Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont. According to the coalition, there are also active efforts in Florida and South Carolina. Citing the new ban on involuntary servitude, people incarcerated in Colorado have sued the state seeking better wages and treatment and alleging the state is ignoring the will of voters by continuing to coerce prison work under the threat of punishment. 

Texas lawmakers have largely ignored the issue, in keeping with how they’ve ignored other crises inside state lockups. But discussions of prisoner pay and forced labor have started to circulate inside the state capitol. The state House held a hearing in 2019 on a bill to pay people incarcerated in Texas prisons $1 a day for their work. “The penal system today is slavery,” Alma Allen, a state representative from Houston, said during the hearing. “It is a legal way to enslave people.” The committee never voted on the bill. Legislative proposals to pay incarcerated people somewhat higher wages has stalled in other states like New York, too.

Even with the lack of movement on the state level in Texas, Kamin, the Houston council member, says that local government officials have a role to play in ending exploitative prison labor. She says the awareness of a city staffer and their willingness to research what looked like a routine contract for truck repairs became a wakeup call about local government’s role in a system that many equate to modern day slave labor. “This could have totally flown under the radar,” Kamin told Bolts.

Kamin says her office got a flood of messages from incarcerated people after Houston turned away from TDCJ’s bid. “I cannot tell you the number of letters that I received from inmates thanking us for the stand we took,” she said. “So many people reached out to say how they feel about the work programs in prison and how bad they are. It was mostly just a plea for help.”

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Except Lopez wasn’t being robbed. He had instead stumbled into the crosshairs of local conservatives hunting for voter fraud ahead of the 2020 presidential election. 

When actual police officers later questioned the man who allegedly held Lopez at gunpoint, former Houston police captain Mark Aguirre, he said his crew had been monitoring Lopez around-the-clock for days and accused the repairman of harboring 750,000 fraudulent mail ballots. According to the lawsuit, Aguirre told police that Lopez had been “using Hispanic children to sign the ballots because the children’s fingerprints would not appear in any database.” Aguirre, who was fired from the Houston Police Department in 2003 over a botched raid, according to the Houston Chronicle, was eventually indicted for a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon two months after crashing into Lopez and holding him at gunpoint. 

Aguirre wasn’t acting alone, but rather as part of a broader effort by the right in Texas to set up and finance private election police. When it indicted Aguirre, the Harris County DA’s office alleged that he received wire transfers of over $250,000 from the Liberty Center for God and Country, a nonprofit run by notorious conservative activist Steven Hotze. Lopez is now suing Hotze and his nonprofit for civil conspiracy and civil theft.

Hotze has kept up his efforts since 2020 and, despite this bungling tack record, some prominent Texas Republicans are supporting him.

On April 2, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton helped headline a “Freedom Gala” at a hotel in downtown Houston. The gala was a fundraiser organized by Hotze and his group to raise money to, among other goals, “hire private detectives to investigate, identify, and expose the criminal vote fraud scheme in Harris County and across Texas.” Speakers included Big Lie evangelist Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, as well as Harris County (Houston) Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel, who also sits on the county’s elections commission. 

Civil rights advocates warn that deploying police or police-like forces to monitor voting has chilling effects, and that it echoes a history of intimidation deployed against Black voters. Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, said Lopez’s experience highlights the dangers of hired-guns motivated by the Big Lie. “The possibilities are kind of endless for how that could go really badly,” Gutierrez said of Hotze’s plans to hire more voter-fraud detectives. 

Other Republican officials in Harris County, a diverse and increasingly blue area that is home to nearly 5 million residents, have built parallel efforts to monitor voting. Last year, as Republican lawmakers passed legislation emboldening partisan poll watchers, local officials started building what they’ve called an “army” to monitor busy urban polling places. In one presentation, party officials even pointed to Houston’s Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, a hub for civil rights activism that once hosted Martin Luther King Jr., as the kind of inner-city polling place conservatives need to more closely watch in the future. 

Christina Das, an attorney who leads the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s election protection work in Texas and South Carolina, says Texas’s new voting law, Senate Bill 1, already seems to be impacting local election systems. “Staffing shortages, poll sites closing… these happened in the March 1 election,” Das told Bolts, saying the threat of new penalties for election workers exacerbated those problems.

“It’s a 360-degree approach to criminalizing our elections so that people don’t turn out, they don’t show up, they don’t work the polls and they don’t get to the polls,” Das said. 

Private voter-fraud squads and S.B. 1 are part of a larger attempt to criminalize elections in Texas. Paxton, who aided in the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential race, has beefed up the voter fraud unit of his office in recent years in order to prosecute more election-related cases, the vast majority of which appear to target Black and Latinx people. And other states are following suit. Last year Georgia Republicans passed a law criminalizing volunteers who give free food, water, or other relief to voters waiting in long lines. Florida’s governor is expected to soon sign a law establishing a new state police force to investigate election-related crimes. Advocates for voting rights argue that these measures, coupled with high-profile prosecutions of Black voters who commit voting errors, seem designed to scare people away from the polls. 

Even if Paxton spoke at Hotze’s fundraiser for more private voter-fraud detectives, it’s unclear what other ties his office has to the group’s actual investigations. Conservative activists in Texas have in the past boasted about working with Paxton’s office to cook up criminal cases alleging election-related crimes. Lopez’s lawsuit against Hotze and his Liberty Center claims that Aguirre called a lieutenant in Paxton’s office to request that they conduct a traffic stop for his investigation three days before Lopez’s roadside assault in October 2020. The lieutenant told Aguirre he couldn’t assign police to make a stop for him, according to the lawsuit, but Aguirre kept calling Paxton’s office, including the morning he pulled a gun on Lopez. 

Paxton, who is up for re-election this year and faces a May 24 runoff against George P. Bush in the GOP primary, dedicated much of his speech at this month’s gala to attacking the all-Republican Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for a recent ruling that limits his authority to prosecute election-related crimes across the state, according to Quorum Report editor Scott Braddock, who attended and wrote about the event. Paxton has urged his supporters to pressure the high court judges to reverse their ruling restricting his authority to initiate voter fraud cases. A prosecutor challenging one of the judges who signed the ruling was endorsed by Hotze and his group but lost in the GOP primary on March 1.  

In Harris County, that March 1 primary was marred by mistakes by election officials, which conservatives have seized on with more unsubstantiated rhetoric about voter fraud. After delays in vote-counting and thousands of mail-in ballots that were accidentally left off the county’s initial vote tally, Harris County’s nonpartisan elections administrator Isabel Longoria announced she would step down this summer. Harris County’s election commission—comprised of three elected county officials and the local party chairs, including Siegel—met for the first time in more than a year last week to discuss a timeline and plan for replacing Longoria. During public comments, one conservative activist said Longoria “should probably be put in jail for her actions.” The commission adjourned without taking action after arguing over the proper way to move forward with Longoria’s replacement.

In a video announcing his recent fundraiser, Hotze called the mistakes made in Harris County during the primary “a prelude to what they will do to us in the general election if we don’t organize.” Hotze also referenced Lopez’s lawsuit. “I’ve already been sued over this whole issue of trying to stop and expose voter fraud by the Democrats,” he said. “I am going to stand, nobody’s going to back me down, I’m going to be the tip of the spear here in Harris County.”

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