In the years since the pandemic, the Lew Sterrett Justice Center has attracted more attention for its failures and challenges than any triumphs and progress. The county jail, Texas’ second largest, neared 100 percent capacity last fall, requiring emergency beds to house the inmates. A botched transition to new court software in 2023 forced courthouse clerks to hand-carry files to the jail multiple times a day. County officials say they are short 187 jail guards. More people are dying behind bars now than in recent history. Others have languished even when their sentences were complete; the county faces four federal over-detention lawsuits and has paid out at least $220,000 to defendants in other cases.

Somehow, county commissioners say things could still be worse. Since 2023, a team has operated largely away from public view, performing manual work that is critical to keeping the jail from overflowing. This Jail Population Management team, or JPM, is a middle-man of sorts between the many levers of the criminal justice system. Its responsibilities sometimes even include alerting the jail’s administrators to court orders so they know who to release and when. The stakes are high, and costly: The jail generally costs taxpayers about $25 million to operate each month; jailing a single person is $95.58 a day. This team’s work helps the county avoid paying millions to an outside entity to hold inmates elsewhere, an act of last resort that recently cost Harris County $38 million.

By its very nature, the jail is in a difficult position. Dallas County doesn’t have authority over the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles—or the elected sheriff or top prosecutor or judges who run the courts. “Other than setting the budget,” says Commissioner John Wiley Price, “We’re pretty much at their peril.” 

The most the county can do, Price says, is keep tabs and nudge the assembly line forward. “This is not just an expensive $25 million gated community,” he says. “This is a small city that requires 24/7 management.”

The dozens of decision-makers in that small city log on at least once a month to a Microsoft Teams meeting. On a Friday morning in March, about 70 people watched LaShonda Jefferson, assistant director of the county’s criminal justice department, recite numbers that told the story of the jail. Dallas County’s average daily jail population: 7,088. Total beds: 7,499. Felony cases: 63 percent of those jailed. Misdemeanors: 4 percent. Those awaiting transfer: 33 percent. Average length of stay: 45 days. Cost to operate the jail in the shorter month of February, excluding medical services: $18,968,233. “We’re continuing to see an uptick in our book-ins coupled with slower release rates,” Jefferson said, then presented another series of datapoints, followed by another.

Attendees make up Dallas’ sprawling criminal justice apparatus: county commissioners, judges, prosecutors, sheriff’s deputies, corrections and parole officers, public defenders, hospital managers, pre-trial supervisors. All play a part in how the jail operates and whether there is enough space to hold the people who are arrested each day. Many of them—representing administrative, legislative, and judiciary powers—also operate independently. Jefferson is at the center of this web as the leader of the Jail Population Management team, a small group that works to break down silos, spot trends and unnecessary holdups in the jail, and improve communication between these stakeholders. 

The team—Jefferson, jail population coordinator Adrianna Lawson, data analyst Durga Mothiki, and two contract employees—has found that around 35 percent of people incarcerated in Dallas County are waiting for something to be done with their case. That could be a court setting, a move to a state facility, a grand jury hearing, a transfer of documents in one system that isn’t in others. These incarcerated people wait behind bars as the machine lurches forward. 

During 2023’s bungled switch to the new criminal court software, called Odyssey, the team became the jail’s de facto human safety net. They manually audited thousands of cases and nudged their partners in the justice system to ensure defendants weren’t held in jail beyond the date a judge ordered them to be released. Misdemeanor courts don’t always know when the felonies are resolved. Judges’ orders aren’t always processed. The team will email and call various officials when they see such bottlenecks. “We find that if we are not raising the awareness,” Jefferson says in an interview, “then it just kind of goes unnoticed because no one’s looking.”

Even with their efforts, Dallas County’s jail capacity teeters around 94 to 97 percent on any given day.

Issues in the jail have long been a matter of public record. In the early 2000s, at Price’s behest following years of the jail being out of compliance with state regulations, the county created a criminal justice department that assigned employees to review data and point toward solutions to bring it under compliance. Not everyone understood its purpose at first, says Charlene Randolph, who became Dallas County’s director of criminal justice in 2017. Randolph says she was warned by a predecessor that the judges initially suspected the department was spying for the commissioners.

JPM, which is housed in that department, began with a single employee. Jefferson moved in 2015 to Dallas from Denver. She worked in Colorado’s criminal justice system for two decades, which included helping people transition out of prison. When she became Dallas’ jail population manager, she realized how important it was to focus on the minutia of individual cases. She might email deputies to ask whether they were aware the state’s parole division had withdrawn a defendant’s warrant. If the withdrawal wasn’t reflected in the jail’s system, she’d race back to parole, requesting they resend it so the jail knew to release the inmate. 

The jail held around 5,000 people when she started in 2019, which has since increased by about 40 percent. At the end of that year, Dallas County judges eliminated the “felony writ list”—a process to release inmates whose felony cases weren’t filed within 30 days. Without that deadline, the jail’s population climbed, especially among defendants whose cases were awaiting lab results of a drug test. About 1,000 people were released the following year to manage overcrowding during the COVID-19 pandemic, but by the end of 2020, arrests resumed and court delays piled up. Jefferson didn’t have time to follow up on every problem she found. She needed more employees.

The job posting caught Adrianna Lawson’s eye. Originally from Cedar Hill, Lawson studied psychology and went to work as a mental health and homelessness case manager for the since-shuttered housing nonprofit CitySquare. Randolph transferred Mothiki, the data analyst, to help conduct JPM’s queries and produce Excel reports. The Jail Population Management team was made official in early 2023—less than four months before Odyssey went live. 

The program, implemented without training, couldn’t communicate court records with the software used by the jail. If a judge ordered an inmate’s release, the jail wasn’t notified, and court coordinators didn’t know how to update the new system. The technical gaffes left the county in a scary place, Randolph says, and staffers were overwhelmed. “Everything else broke, and it was one by one,” she says. “One by one emails to the courts to say, ‘You have somebody here, did you know? Did you know?’ And sometimes the answer was, ‘No, I didn’t.’”

Although the county has said the Odyssey transition is largely resolved, JPM still goes case by case to identify traffic jams. They also look at the data in totality. On Mondays, Lawson sends parole a list of people whose criminal cases are resolved and need a review or update on their parole holds. Tuesdays are for inmates with competency concerns returning from the state hospital. Wednesdays focus on people ordered to treatment programs. Her colleagues tackle their own reports: lists of 17 year olds, those who are ordered to state custody, defendants whose cases haven’t been set for court, and women. They set follow-up timeframes for each case.

Sometimes, attorneys and court coordinators file a burst of documents to set timelines for cases after receiving the team’s emails. They have spotted people held in jail on felonies for more than 90 days with unfiled cases and identified others in custody despite bonds as small as $1 or $10. They’ll urge defense attorneys to submit paperwork on behalf of their clients, or to see whether the person’s family can send in the dollar to secure their release. 

Since they began tracking in April 2023, JPM has researched 103,583 cases and sent 26,457 inquiries and 9,629 follow-ups. After their outreach, 16,200 people were released who could have otherwise spent unnecessary time in a jail struggling with its capacity, according to their data. Those people were behind bars an average of 91 days at the time the team intervened. After their inquiry, those inmates were released within about 42 days. The team doesn’t take credit for all those cases, but its members feel certain some would’ve stayed another week or month if not for their outreach.

“They don’t want to hear from us,” Jefferson says, “so they’ll try to do what they gotta do to make sure they’re not getting that inquiry.” 

They also calculate the difference in county dollars saved: $72,523,987 since 2023, which would have otherwise been spent jailing people who should not have remained there.

“They’re our canary in the mine,” Price says. “People don’t understand it’s not just jail. It’s not just court. It’s not just judges. This stuff requires management.”

And yet, inmates are still overstaying by days, weeks, or months. In February, the Dallas Morning News reported a man was held 108 days past his six-month sentence for a burglary charge because the sheriff’s department didn’t submit his paperwork to the state. The Texas Tribune reported this month on a woman kept in jail 49 days past the date she was eligible for release for a similar reason; she was unable to attend a job interview and lost her state-provided housing after she missed a filing deadline while incarcerated. (The Dallas County Sheriff’s Department did not respond to our requests for an interview.)

More than 900 people—about 12 percent of the jail’s average population in 2026—are currently awaiting transfer to a state facility, according to JPM. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice picks up about 80 people a week, Jefferson says, but is also responsible for picking up prisoners in each of Texas’ 254 counties. Before a transfer, the county is required to send penitentiary packets—“pen packets”—that must be approved by TDCJ. TDCJ is then required by statute to pick up that person within 45 days. (Counties and the state have at times disagreed on when that 45-day timer starts.)

Amanda Hernandez, a TDCJ spokesperson, says 358 people are currently “pen packet” certified and awaiting transfer, while 60 more are awaiting certification. Pen packets for 146 inmates were “returned to Dallas County for correction,” she says—a figure JPM disputes. “Dallas County does not agree with this total and has requested supporting documentation from the state,” Jefferson says.

The packets can only be submitted through mail, email, or delivered by hand. TDCJ this month plans to pilot a “pen packet portal” in Dallas to allow for instant document transfers between the county and state. Other problems remain. There aren’t enough hospital beds for people deemed incompetent to stand trial; parole is short on officers, which can slow their processing of people with parole violations; custody is designed for men, and the female population in the jail has increased over decades; and courtrooms don’t operate at the same levels of efficiency or cooperation. 

Dallas County Commissioner Andy Sommerman points to “a communication problem” between the sheriff, clerk, and judges. JPM, he says, is at the center, but doesn’t have power to force stakeholders’ hands. “You really have to get a concert going; you can’t just let everybody be playing their own tune,” he says. “The reason why we don’t go over the pressure valve, in part, is from JPM.”

JPM gets calls from families of inmates who say nobody else at the jail picked up the phone, Lawson says. She tries to assure them their loved one is OK, that she sent a note to check on the case. (“I love being the person that answers the phone,” she says.) State law does not track over-detentions or penalize counties when it happens. The county does what it can within its limited power. “Without us, I don’t know who,” Randolph says. “I just don’t know the answer.”

Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, says she hasn’t seen another jail-based group in Texas take such an individualized approach to cases. There is very little public oversight of jails, including levels of capacity and who’s incarcerated, she says. “This is a really smart, much needed approach,” Deitch says. “Without that, it is so hard to keep all the different players on track.” The impact goes beyond taxpayer dollars. “Peoples’ lives are deeply, deeply affected by the experience of incarceration,” she says. “Many of them experience trauma that ends up affecting their lives after release as well. And it actually sends a lot of people into poverty.”

She would like to see the strategy expanded so that a safety net mechanism exists in every agency that plays a role in the jail. “Every one of these stakeholders contributes to crowding in the jail,” she says, “and they all have a way that they can tweak what they do to help alleviate the problems.”

In February, an average of 170 people were booked each day into Lew Sterrett, and 166 were released. The county looks to JPM and other initiatives to keep the pressure valve from bursting. That includes deflection centers—intended to divert people facing low-level misdemeanors from jail; there are currently two in Dallas County—and TDCJ’s upcoming pen packet pilot portal. Sometimes, those efforts still aren’t enough. So Jefferson’s team does all it can, splicing data and pushing for progress in a system riddled with fractures outside of the group’s control.

All the while, since at least early February, JPM’s daily email blast of data has started with the same message in bold red 14-point font: “All hands-on deck! We remain in a state of emergency.  Please EXPEDITE the processing of all eligible jail releases without delay. Your swift action is critical and greatly appreciated.”

Kelli Smith is a staff writer for The Lab Report. [email protected].

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