Getting creative to increase capacity, talks underway about whether new Dallas County jail needed

DALLAS – Getting creative, to increase capacity.  

That’s the situation right now at the Dallas County Jail.  

After coming dangerously close to reaching capacity earlier this year, renovations are underway to increase bed space and prepare for challenges ahead.

“So we’re looking at a total of 288 bed space areas that would become available to us to avoid reaching our capacity and going beyond,” explains Dallas County Sheriff Marian Brown.

Sheriff Brown is turning an old infirmary into additional bed space and agrees that they are hardly posh accommodations: it’s the county jail.  Still, the space must be clean, secure and able to safely accommodate some 7,200 inmates.

“It’s not just a matter of accommodating the inmates that come to us from the various cities throughout the county,” explains Sheriff Brown. “But it’s all about keeping people safe while they are here. They are still people. So we need to make sure that we are taking care of them.”

And regardless of what you may have read on social media, police are not refusing to make arrests, because there’s no room at the jail.

“It used to bother me, but then I decided that regardless, there are going to be people who put out false narratives, you know?”

When asked about the challenges of running a big city, urban jail. Sheriff Brown mentioned two things: communicating accurate information to the public about what state law allows sheriffs to do– and the lack of sufficient resources for the mentally ill.

“It’s a huge challenge,” shares Sheriff Brown.  “It’s a huge challenge because unfortunately, oftentimes people come here and they come here because of an underlying mental health issue. And it’s not necessarily that they need to be in the county jail, but they need some mental health assistance.”

And too often, advocates say, community resources are no match for the growing demand.  And that’s not what jails were made to do. Unfortunately, experts say, county jail capacity challenges can often be linked to the number of beds devoted to what some critics have called the `warehousing’ of the mentally ill.

“It’s not something that the sheriff has any say in. The best thing that a sheriff can do is to make sure that they are getting assistance while they are here in our custody and that’s exactly what we do.”

The additional jail capacity should come online within next week or so.