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Annette Price, assistant director of Austin mass incarceration organization Grassroots Leadership, called on Travis County commissioners to vote against building a new women’s prison on June 7th. (Olivia Aldridge / Community Impact Newspaper)
Ahead of a planned vote by Travis County commissioners to secure design services for a new $ 80 million women’s prison, a coalition of grassroots groups and community leaders gathered on June 7 to protest the plan and alternative investments, including diversion programs , to promote.
The Women’s Prison is a proposed project under the 2016 Travis County Master Plan, a 20-year blueprint to modernize Travis County’s prison facilities, including a new central accounting facility in downtown Austin. Overall, the first phase of the plan has an estimated price of $ 240.5 million.
County officials and officials from the Sheriff’s Office say the project, called the Travis County Trauma Informed Women’s Facility, is needed to provide female inmates with equal access to health services and gender-based programs, as well as safe housing with appropriate segregation from male inmates. Currently, women detained in the county jail are being divided into four separate facilities that also house men, with varying degrees of access to mental and physical health services, including OB / GYN services.
In 2018, commissioners delayed the start of planning and building a new correctional facility for women in Del Valle near the existing Travis County Adult Correctional Complex to investigate the possibility of establishing more prison diversion programs. In December 2019, however, the commissioners authorized the district employees to start contract negotiations with HDR Architecture for the construction of the new women’s prison. A vote to approve a $ 4.3 million contract with HDR Architecture is scheduled for a commission court session on June 8th.
“The final campus configuration will offer more flexible, efficient, modern and updated accommodations and programs. The 20-year plan provides the opportunity to build trauma-informed housing and services to better serve incarcerated people and increase the efficiency of the complex, ”said Christy Moffett, chief executive officer for economic and strategic planning for the county, in a presentation on May 27 to the Travis County Commissioner Court.
Critics of the project include groups like Grassroots Leadership, Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, and the Texas Fair Defense Project. At a press conference on June 7, a coalition of these organizations called for a “moratorium on the construction and expansion of all prisons” and called for investment in community resources for the poor and needy. A letter to the commissioners also included a call for the county to replace its 2016 master plan with a new equity reinvestment plan that outlines community-based alternatives to incarceration.
“It doesn’t matter what name you give it; [jail] is a dehumanizing place to accommodate people, ”said Annette Price, Co-Executive Director of Grassroots Leadership. “In building this prison, you are sending a message that incarceration is better than providing needed resources [for] our community to thrive. “
Travis County Judge Andy Brown said he was also against the construction of the women’s prison as well as all other new correctional facilities.
“We need to revise the way we look at the criminal justice system and look at how $ 80 million can better serve the community itself,” Brown said in a June 3 tweet. “One way to do this is to invest in more mental investments [health], Behavioral health and off-prison detox services that address the needs of black and brown communities. “
Brown previously served on the board of directors for one such distraction source, the Sobering Center, a facility that allows intoxicated individuals to stay until they are sober and receive referrals to additional resources. Since it was founded in 2018, it has taken in around 3,900 people.
However, Jeff Travillion, commissioner for Travis County Precinct 1, said diverting the $ 80 million planned for the prison was not an easy proposition. The project would not be financed from the total budget of the district, but through letters of commitment, a bond especially for stationary projects.
“I think the difficulty is that there are no or very few alternatives outside of prison when you take away the treatment that is provided for poor populations out of the prison system,” Travillion told Community Impact Newspaper. “This is worrying, but if you give me a choice between some services and no services, I will choose some services every time.”
Critics have also noted that the number of people incarcerated in Travis County’s correctional facilities has declined sharply since the Master Plan was first drafted in 2016. Travis County’s correctional facilities now house around 1,400 inmates, up from 2,651 in 2016, with coronavirus-related diversion policies in part responsible for that decline. About 153 of these inmates are women.
However, representatives from the Travis County Sheriff’s Office said in a presentation May 27 that many of the county’s remaining incarcerated people have mental or physical health needs that are not adequately addressed by the county’s existing prison infrastructure. According to Travillion, building more clinical space to meet these needs is a top priority for him and other commissioners.
“The reason we postponed it in the first place … was because we didn’t have enough clinical space [planned]. My goal was not just to remove women from institutions that include men; It was also about getting them into a state-of-the-art clinical facility because we’ve learned so much more about healthcare over the past 25 or 30 years, ”he said.
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