Overcrowding in the Potter County Jail was front and center again at the Monday morning regular meeting of the Potter County Commissioners’ Court.
Potter County Sheriff Brian Thomas spoke again to the commissioners Aug. 10 about the desperate situation, as he asked them to approve three jail contracts, one with Haskell County for 50 beds to handle some of the overflow of prisoners in the Potter County Jail, along with two others for Hemphill and Wichita counties.
Thomas gave them packets to explain the situation — what they had paid so far in 2025-26, which totaled $1.3 million for 2025. “I had another additional $144,000 just for overtime and transportation,” Thomas said. He added that amount didn’t count for the expenses at a speciality hospital, but that the situation there had been resolved.
Thomas told the court that Chief Deputy Scott Giles put together a jail population report, showing data from May 2026 to August 2026. He reminded them that the overcrowding led them to first fail their jail inspection, which dropped them down to 80% capacity. “If you look at that graph, we would not even come close to 80% since May,” Thomas said.
Thomas acknowledged the Haskell County contract was expensive, but that they were running out of places to go. “We are at the point now where we’re having to go at least seven or eight hours away to find beds, so that’s a lot of overtime, and if it is an 8-hour day, we’re going to have to spend the night somewhere,” adding to the expense and manpower issues.
He said his contact at Haskell County had agreed to the shorter, six-month plan — granted that would include inmates mostly that would go to the Texas Department of Corrections. “This morning, we had 34 inmates to go to TDC, so that doesn’t really make it fair, right,” he added. “But (Haskell) will take some of our regular inmates as well.” Thomas said that Haskell County would provide the transportation down to TDC, and they would come to Potter County and pick them up. However, if they end up sending some of their regular inmates there, Potter County would have to go to Haskell and pick them up for court dates.
“We’re at a point where the jails are getting full, and the ones up here in the Panhandle are all full,” he emphasized, saying that they took seven inmates to Childress — only to be told they had some plumbing issues there, and Potter County had to take the inmates already at the Childress jail back with them.
Thomas said that at Hemphill County, they only had space for a few inmates, and they wouldn’t let any in with medical or mental health issues. He said Wichita Falls had a fairly new facility, but he didn’t know how many inmates they could hold.
The three available closest jails were Haskell, Wichita and Hemphill County, Thomas said. The largest cost would be for Haskell County, which is over $1 million for six months.
Problems of running out of space, vs. running out of funding
Commissioner John Cofffee asked about approving the two less expensive jail contracts.
He said they were still looking at building a new jail facility at some point. He noted that main issue was that the contracts, especially Haskell, were going to cost just south of a million dollars, and his fear was that once the contracts start, they wouldn’t be able to stop it, and they’d still be dealing with the problem of running out of space.
Thomas reminded them of the costs needed of going to get them back and taking them to TDC, where they have to run a bus and get a regular government contract fee for travel — adding another $900,000 in six months. They have a list of all the jails in the state with available space, but most of them were at least an 8-hour drive distance, one way.
Coffee asked Thomas if he could look for more options and find out how many inmates Wichita Falls could take.
“You can kick it (the issue) down the road and I’ll go back and dig some more and see what I can find, sir,” Thomas said. “All I’m doing is bringing you the problem that we’re having — we cannot keep all these people in our jail. And we’re having trouble up here trying to find spaces; that’s the only one (Haskell) that’s offered us 50 beds.”
Coffee said he wasn’t trying to kick the issue down the road, but he didn’t want to tie them in a six-month contract that they couldn’t afford. He reiterated that it was not sustainable.
Thomas said that the problem wasn’t new and had been an ongoing issue for years.
Commissioner Warren Coble asked Thomas to have someone reach out to Wichita County to see if they could get more detailed numbers, which he agreed to.
Looking at the numbers, they need to find beds for 119 inmates to be legally compliant with the jail’s current capacity, as of today, Commissioner Blair Schaffer noted. He said they would need more than 59 cells just to get to 90%, and then 60 more to reach the 80% mark.
“We’ve got to find a way to get into compliance. I like following the law, I like following the rules,” he said, noting Haskell would only give them 50 of those.
Thomas then said Wichita Falls could hold 20 and Hemphill 10, but maybe less than that.
Judge Nancy Tanner noted that “We have to do something. We can’t just let this go by again today.” Tanner then asked Thomas if they wanted all three contracts, and he replied he’s just looking for beds. He said he also expects jail standards to make another visit for inspection next month.
Coffee said that if they were going to make those contracts, they need to have it in a tax increase.
Tanner agreed, saying, “It’s not going to be my budget, thank God, but still.” She asked if a new jail was still in the works and if Thomas still wanted that.
Thomas said that adding on to the old prison didn’t make sense, and that finding parts for the old, decaying structure was becoming next to impossible due to its age. He said they recently had to go to New Hampshire to find a part for the old air conditioning system. Tanner agreed on the facility aging, noting she had heard the concrete under the foundation was crumbling, as did others.
County Auditor Brandon Boston said if the jail overcrowding was a temporary issue, they could take the $1.1 million amount out of the fund balance with a budget amendment for the portion that would be in this fiscal year. But, they’d have to allocate some expenditure for next year. He advised the commissioners “it’s not sustainable long-term, to continue to take this out of fund balance.”
Long-term, he said that they would need to have it included in the budget, or they’d drain the fund balance pretty quickly.
Coffee asked if they could put it in the budget. Boston replied they would need to have an amendment to include it.
“I’m encouraging the court that if you’re are seriously going to consider this, you need to make sure you include some allocation for it and make a long-term projection on whether you’re going to need this for a full year,” he said of the estimated $1.8 million annual expense.
“There’s just no way around it,” Boston said.
Space available at other jails changes on day-to-day basis
Chief Giles reported that Wichita County as of that day was offering 20 beds, but that is on a day-to-day basis. The other contracts would also be based on availabity from week to week, as the jail populations fluctuate. He said a difference with Haskell’s contract would allow Potter County to send TDC paper-ready inmates to their facility and they’d provide transportation, and those inmates would be released from there to the TDC facility. Giles said they expect the TDC inmate numbers to go up again in the near future.
Giles then said that the numbers they’re seeing are returning to pre-Covid numbers. “2018-2019, our jail population was getting very high, and then we had COVID. And that lasted for two to three years, and what we saw were artifically low jail numbers.” He said in that first inspection, they had too many inmates, and that was a violation of the law. After failing the inspection, they had to submit a plan to the jail commission to avoid that happening again. If they are not at 80%, they can’t handle the normal seasonal spikes in the jail population, going well above 100% — being at 90% isn’t low enough.
“We need more beds; that’s the reason for these additional contracts that are before you today,” he said, noting they don’t expect too many beds in other counties to be available. “We’re trying to prepare for the worst, which may or may not occur. … What we can say is, with the best objective evidence that we have, what we’re going to need in the near future is what we needed in the recent past. And we need more beds.”
Giles said the new state law, denying bond for inmates accused of violent crimes, is adding to their numbers, with, 73 to 77 of those inmates staying in the Potter County Jail. Some of them would have bonded out, while certain violent offenders would not. He said the trend for these incarcerations was only going to keep going up, as the District Attorney had projected at the previous meeting.
Coffee asked the auditor what kind of increase they were looking at to cover this, and Boston said they would have to have a tax rate increase of at least 6.3% to support it, versus the 3.1% increase they had been looking at before.
“If we decide to build a jail in the future, we’ve talked about a quarter of billion dollars with annual payment of $13 million,” Coffee asked of the county auditor, which he confirmed, over a 30-year period, based on a ballpark figure from financial advisors who did a tax rate impact study.
Schaffer said he wanted to look at Haskell to come out of the fund balance for the six months.
Boston said because it was the end of the fiscal year, he could bring back a budget amendment to move stuff around to cover the small portion of $251,000. “Then we could put in the budget the remaining $635,000 to come out of the fund balance.” But Boston warned that, if they came back to him in six months with a jail contract extension, he wouldn’t have anywhere to pull from to cover that expense in the middle of the year.
Commissioner Coffee then made a motion to authorize the contracts for Hemphill County and Wichita County, which was approved unanimously.
Coffee asked the judge about the Haskell contract and making an amendment to the budget, and she said she would consider it after Wednesday’s budget workshop and didn’t want to make a decision on it yet. Coffee said Haskell could then be put back on the agenda for consideration, after that discussion.
The court then went to the other agenda items, had public comments and then adjourned.
Nell Williams is a staff writer covering trends and other news for the Amarillo Globe-News. Have a story idea? Email her at nwilliams@usatodayco.com .
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Critical jail overpopulation forces Potter County to consider tax hike
Reporting by Nell Williams, Amarillo Globe-News / Amarillo Globe-News
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By Nell Williams, Amarillo Globe-News | USA TODAY Network
