SAN ANTONIO – The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office’s jail administrator expects to continue dealing with capacity issues by sending some inmates to other counties for roughly another two years.
Since July 2024, the Kerr and Burnet County jails have housed a combined monthly average of 207 Bexar County inmates, according to BCSO statistics. Most of the inmates, BCSO Assistant Chief Deputy Joel Janssen says, are awaiting transfer to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice system.
Janssen, the jail administrator, said a mixture of seasonal increases in the jail population and a “little bit of a slowdown with the courts” was initially causing capacity issues.
The courts have picked up, but the jail currently has high numbers of gang members and inmates with mental health issues, he said, who can’t be filled into a unit up to full capacity.
It also still has a “large population of felons that are still waiting to be indicted,” Janssen said. “But that’s something that always goes through the process and has to be adjudicated."
The department also recently began a two-year “electronics project” that shuts down entire units while they’re being refitted.
While that’s ongoing, Janssen said the jail will need to be able to keep agreements with the other counties to house Bexar County inmates “unless we have have a drastic decrease in population.”
Looking beyond that, “we’re going to have to do a study and see how the jail growth has been going. And basically, going at our capacities at 5,075. I mean, eventually we are going to have look at other alternatives to it, yes,” Janssen said, listing possibilities like building another facility or a diversion program.
Housing inmates outside of the jail could be getting more expensive, though, and county officials appear to be pushing back on how it is being handled.
Bexar County Commissioners voted Tuesday unanimously to table a vote on a contract with Kerr County that would reflect an increase in the daily cost of housing an inmate from $65 to $85.
The vote would have included transferring more than $1.9 million within the budget.
Bexar County Precinct 3 Commissioner Grant Moody said the jail population is currently closer to 4,600, and there are questions about what the county actually needs for jail projects and what’s required for housing inmates “out.”
“We can’t continue to just write blank checks when it comes to these items, right?” Moody told KSAT about it after the meeting. “We need a case from the sheriff and from the jail to understand exactly how those beds are being utilized and why the county needs to incur that cost.”
Moody said during the meeting the county needs a “holistic analysis of the criminal justice system” and told County Manager David Smith he was getting “unanimous and clear direction from this court about bringing a broader item back to talk about diversion, jail facilities, mental health beds for April 28th."
Moody acknowledged after the meeting that, in the short term, Bexar County probably doesn’t have much of a choice on keeping agreements with the other counties to house its inmates.
“But how we set those contracts up can reduce the burden on Bexar County and maximize flexibility,” he said. “And I don’t have a ton of confidence that that all those things are being done today.”
A BCSO spokeswoman said Kerr County has consistently maintained 70 inmates, while Burnet’s numbers have fluctuated.
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