Hays County Jail Officers Are the Most Violent in the State, Data Shows

The Hays County Jail (Photo by Jana Birchum)

We've been hearing reports of violence and inhumane treatment at the Hays County Jail for years. Now, the Houston Chronicle has data to back those stories up: Hays County's jail is far and away the most dangerous in the state for violence by jailers against inmates, according to their recent analysis.

In examining weekly reports from three dozen of the state's largest jails to the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, Houston Chronicle reporters Eric Dexheimer and Alexandra Kanik found that Hays County had 78 uses of force by officers per 1,000 inmates from 2017 to 2022 – significantly more than the second place finisher, Wichita County, with 61 incidents per 1,000. The rate of officer-on-inmate violence was twice as high as that in Harris County's jail, often cited as one of the most dangerous in the state.

The jail data is self-reported, so it's possible that Hays County is actually being more honest about its use of force than other facilities. But the high number of violent incidents comports with anecdotal evidence The Austin Chronicle has heard over the last year as we've researched the cases against Cyrus Gray, Devonte Amerson, Melvin Nicholas, and other incarcerated inmates.

Gray, whose capital murder charges were recently dropped, spent more than four years in the Hays County Jail. He said its culture of violence is not a matter of rogue officers but comes from the leaders of the jail and contributes to its chronic staff shortage. "They wonder why people don't want to work there – it's because it's a toxic environment," Gray told us. "The culture in the jail is not a mentally sane environment for anybody, whether it's an inmate or an employee. And the normal people who get a job there, they quickly leave. They show them that they're valued less than their peers, who are actively trying to cause problems."

Gray said that he saw officers during his time in jail who pulled inmates out of their cells to engage in fistfights. He has long accused former corrections officer Isaiah Garcia of engineering his beating by fellow inmates. (Garcia was fired in April after being indicted over the killing of emergency room patient and inmate Joshua Wright.) Gray said other officers used excessive force against inmates as they prepared to transport them to other jails.

"I tell people the scariest thing about going to jail is the people who run it," Gray said. "It's not the other people that you're in there with. It's the people who run it."