Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has endorsed strict bail policies and legislation in recent years under the disingenuous title of “bail reform.” The governor has even called for a constitutional amendment that would prevent judges from setting any bail for certain offenses that the governor feels threaten public safety.
Unable to gain political traction for this course of action, Abbott spearheaded through the state Senate this past February a bill (Senate Bill 9) he called “bail reform” as part of a larger “tough-on-crime” package under Senate Joint Resolution known as “Jocelyn’s Law.” House Joint Resolution 15 has made it out of committee and has been placed on the Constitutional Amendment Calendar. Since the legislation would require amending the state constitution, it must now achieve a two/thirds vote, by both the Texas House and Senate, before it can be placed on the ballot, where it only needs a simple majority of the electorate to pass.
The legislation putsin place the following bail restrictions:
- Limit bail for offenders on parole, repeat felony offenders, and individuals detained with immigration holds.
- Add more crimes, including family violence, stalking, harassment, and terroristic threat charges, for which defendants would be prevented from receiving personal bail.
- Shift bail authority from magistrates to judges under the premise that judges can be held accountable by voters, and the judges must make detailed findings for setting bail amounts.
- Require charitable bail organizations to register with the state, including submitting monthly reports about the offenders they bail out of jail and those who do not show up for court hearings.
- Allow prosecutors to appeal bail decisions they feel are insufficient for particular offenders.
- Enhance victim notification about offenders released on bail.
However, Sarah Grunau revealed in a Houston Public Media article, “…opponents of sweeping bail reform bills say the legislation strips people of their constitutional rights and does little to improve public safety. American Civil Liberties Union advocates on Wednesday said it would allow Texas judges to deny bail for more defendants based on vague standards, and deepen the state’s reliance on money bail that punishes poverty.
‘This is not bail reform,” said Nick Hudson, a senior policy and advocacy strategist with the ACLU. “It’s a rollback of our rights and Texans should not be fooled.”
Another problem with these tough “bail reform” laws is that they are getting Texas inmates killed in Louisiana’s corrupt, violent prison system. An April 3, 2025, report in the Texas Tribune described how the Texas Legislature is “unlikely” to change the practice of local sheriffs farming out inmates to Louisiana’s private prison industry because they are facing jail overcrowding issues.
For example, Harris County has farmed out roughly 1,200 of its jail inmates to the Louisiana for-profit prison system, where more than 500 are housed in the LaSalle Correctional Cente. At this notoriously corrupt private prison facility, profit is placed before safe prison standards. Four other Texas counties—Sabine, Tyler, Newton, and Chambers—are also farming out their jail inmates to the Louisiana prison system.
At least two Harris County jail inmates, Jaleen Anderson and Erik Carlson, have died at the LaSalle Correctional Center over the past year alone. The exact number of Texas inmates who have died in the Louisiana prison system is not known because Texas law does not require out-of-state facilities to report or keep data on these deaths.
In effect, Texas sheriffs are sending their inmates into out-of-state penal facilities, which are mismanaged and violent, like the LaSalle Correctional Center, and surrendering accountability for the welfare of those put into their custody.
The LaSalle Correctional Center is owned by LaSalle Corrections, a family-owned private prison corporation, which has for years faced an onslaught of legal litigation and investigations into medical neglect, physical abuse of inmates, and deplorable living conditions.
For example, at least 51 inmates died in Louisiana penal facilities operated by LaSalle Corrections between 2014 and 2022, resulting in more than 100 lawsuits being filed in connection with those deaths.
This is not an analogy.
The entire Louisiana prison system has the nation’s highest rate of deaths of inmates in custody, with nearly 800 inmate deaths between 2015 and 2019, and that number increased from 2015 to 2021 to almost 1200 inmate deaths.
But it is the LaSalle Correctional Center, where the two Harris County inmates died, that is the worst death camp in the Louisiana prison system. Staffing shortages and lack of required supervision have been cited for the hundred of human rights abuses in the facility. Ironically, it is staffing shortages and swelling populations at the Harris County jail that are forcing Sheriff Gonzales to farm out his inmates to the LaSalle death camp.
Why are these travesties continuing to happen to Texas inmates housed in Louisiana prison facilities?
The Tribune explained it this way:
“[Jaleen Anderson] a Houston resident was arrested on drug possession charges in March 2024. He was denied bail, and Harris County officials sent him to a Louisiana prison annually paid millions of dollars to hold inmates Texas’ most populous county can’t accommodate. Although Harris County has the largest jail in the state, it faces a chronic staffing shortage that prevents them from using all of their jail beds.”
Many Harris County jail inmates, like Jaleen Anderson, are being held without bail or an exorbitant bail on relatively innocuous drug offenses or other lesser offenses that do not pose a meaningful threat to public safety because of Gov. Greg Abbott’s continuing “law-and-order” attempts to destroy the Texas bail system.
The result: these types of inmates, who are presumed innocent of the crimes of which they are charged, are being sent to Louisiana penal death camps where they are abused, neglected, and allowed to die without even a minimum of healthcare being shown to them.
The Tribune reports that Sen. Borris Miles (D-Houston) has filed Senate Bill 2289, which easily passed through the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, that would require Texas counties to keep track of how many inmates they have in out-of-state penal facilities and the total number of deaths that have occurred in these facilities.
But this measure is unlikely to receive legislative approval because of opposition forces led by Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and the transfers to Louisiana’s penal death camps will continue.
Of the 71,000 inmates in Texas jails—many of whom could be released on personal recognizance bonds without threat to public safety—the Tribune reports that 3,596 are currently housed in out-of-state jails or penal facilities. Some will not live to see their trials because of Gov. Abbott’s relentless war on bail.
Jaleen Anderson’s family has filed a lawsuit against Sheriff Gonzales, staff members at the LaSalle Correctional Center, and other Harris County officials. LaSalle Corporation will likely settle with the Anderson family, just as it settled for $7 million in 2023 for the 2019 death of a Texas female inmate under its care, to keep the sordid details out of the public record.
At the end of the day, Gov. Abbott is the liable culprit in this sordid practice because he wants the impoverished, people of color, and the marginalized to be housed without bail. Its big business.
