Edric Wilson spent 18 years awaiting a murder trial that would never come. From September 2006 until his release earlier this year, he split his time between the Harris County Jail and state psychiatric hospitals, with little or no hope of release. For 12 years, he was denied bail completely. Eventually, a judge set his bail at $850,000, which his family couldn’t afford. So he kept waiting.
Texas jails around 70,000 people at any one time, and more than half are awaiting trial, per the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. A third of jail admissions nationwide are for misdemeanors, and nine out of the 10 most common charges are nonviolent, including drug offenses and failure to appear in court, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
Texas jails are so overcrowded—partly because they’re often a county’s largest mental health facility—that some counties ship people awaiting trials to distant jails, sometimes out of state. In 2024, officials reported 135 deaths in county jails, according to the Texas Jail Project (TJP). “We’ve addressed a public health issue in the most punitive fashion possible,” said TJP cofounder Krish Gundu at a March press conference.
Yet Governor Greg Abbott and top Republican lawmakers are pushing for bail reforms that would make it harder for people to get released from jail while they’re awaiting adjudication. Abbott declared bail reform an “emergency item” for this legislative session, saying in his February State of the State Address that judges should deny bail for people charged with violent crimes, and that undocumented immigrants arrested for a crime “should be considered a flight risk, denied bail, and turned over to ICE.”
Since his victory in passing school choice legislation earlier in April, Abbott has turned his primary focus to his proposed bail crackdown. In his messaging, he has highlighted cases in which someone committed another crime while out on bail, including the 2022 shooting death of Harris County Deputy Constable Omar Ursin. Two men arrested in connection with Ursin’s fatal shooting were each out on bond for prior murders when he was killed. “We will put an end to easy bail policies that let dangerous criminals back on our streets,” Abbott posted to X on April 22. “It’s time to protect our communities and keep criminals behind bars.”
Bexar County jail (Michael Barajas)
In a speech Wednesday at the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition conference in Austin, the governor told the gathered law enforcement officials that Texas “must fix a deadly and broken bail system.” He said the default should be that people are denied bail for violent crimes unless there is “clear and convincing evidence” that they’re not a danger. He also put the onus on judges to explain their bail decisions publicly.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who presides over the Texas Senate, also has promised to “play hardball” on bail reform. The upper chamber has already passed multiple priority bail bills and has threatened to essentially force a special session if the Texas House doesn’t pass the legislation by the end of the regular session.
The Texas Code of Criminal Procedure specifies that magistrate judges should impose the least restrictive possible bail conditions. But Edric Wilson was denied bail by a judge upon his arraignment, which is allowed under Texas law under limited circumstances, including for people charged with capital crimes, multiple felonies, or people who pose a flight risk. The GOP-backed legislation under consideration would make it easier to deny bail.
For Wilson, as the jail population fluctuated and as he got moved around, his living conditions changed. He sometimes shared tanks with 24 or even 58 other people, at times separated by bars into smaller groups. The beds were close enough together that people could reach over and touch the person in the next bunk, even through the bars.
He’d often wake up at 2 a.m. for breakfast and would help hand out trays. He’d read his Bible, work out, and study for his commercial driver’s license exam. He printed out the handbook and passed time with a guidebook he bought. Once everyone was awake, around lunch time, he would retire to his bunk and try to avoid trouble.
Most people spend only days in jail. “That’s what was so depressing,” he told the Texas Observer in a phone interview “You see everybody leave and come back. … The hard part is knowing everybody’s going home to their family.”
County officials discovered how long Wilson’s case had been languishing when they analyzed the jail population last year. Wilson was one of 230 people who had been in Harris County jail for more than three years without receiving a trial, according to the Houston Chronicle. The Harris County District Attorney’s office ended up dismissing Wilson’s murder charge, and he pled guilty to a separate aggravated assault charge, which had been pending for nearly two decades.
Wilson was released to a halfway house in February. He recently started working as a peer support specialist at the Houston Recovery Center, counseling others getting out of jail, particularly those struggling with drug addiction.
He had lost contact with his family while inside. He said his kids don’t talk to him. His dad died of cancer while Wilson was in jail, and he wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral.
There have been growing pains since his release on parole in February. He spoke to the Observer while he was taking the METRO to different tech shops in Houston looking for affordable wireless internet. Someone had gifted him a laptop, but he couldn’t afford to use it.
“The criminal justice system must find an effective way to distinguish between individuals who pose a real, immediate threat to community safety and those who do not.”
GOP state Senator Joan Huffman has deep roots in the Texas legal system. She worked as a prosecutor for Harris County and then was twice elected as a district court judge. She’s been in the Texas Senate since 2008 and has won reelection five times, most recently in November. Huffman touts herself as “tough on crime” and has campaigned as an advocate for border security.
This session, Huffman has taken the lead on bail as the author of a slate of bills—including two proposed constitutional amendments—aimed at keeping people in jail pretrial. In a statement in February, she said she was “fed up with violent, repeat offenders being released into our communities by judges that are more concerned about their own political agenda than the safety and security of law-abiding Texans.” The legislation to restrict bail access—Senate Bills 9 and 40 and Senate Joint Resolutions 1 and 5—all passed through the Senate back in February. The House companion bills were given public hearings on March 18 but are all still pending in committee.
Senate Bill 9, which, among other things, expands the list of instances in which judges must deny bail, was flagged as a priority by Patrick. Magistrates would be prohibited from offering bail to someone who is charged with a new felony while on parole, as well as anyone charged with murder, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated assault, and aggravated sexual assault. The bill also would expand the list of charges that would require cash bail, rather than releasing people on personal bonds, which have no cost and are generally used for nonviolent or misdemeanor offenses.
SB 9 would also allow prosecutors to appeal bail decisions, which could significantly delay people getting out of jail even after bail has been set. It also limits which judges can make certain bail decisions.
The Bail Project, a national criminal justice reform nonprofit that opposes Huffman’s bills, says SB 9 “ties judges’ hands by forcing them to jail Texans if they have been accused, but not yet convicted, of certain offenses.” Huffman argues that the bill puts more power in the hands of elected county and district judges.
Senate Bill 40 directly confronts organizations like The Bail Project which provide financial assistance to people who can’t afford to pay their own bail. In a February Senate hearing, Huffman accused The Bail Project of using public money to post bail for people in Texas, which would be banned under SB 40. That claim has been denied by the nonprofit, which says lawmakers misunderstood reports that showed bail payments being refunded to the nonprofit by public agencies.
The first of two related constitutional amendments, Senate Joint Resolution 1, has been dubbed “Jocelyn’s Law,” after 12-year-old Houstonian Jocelyn Nungaray, who was killed in Texas by two Venezuelan-born immigrants in 2024. Alexis Nungaray, Jocelyn’s mother, has advocated for more border security after U.S. officials confirmed the accused killers entered the country illegally.
SJR 1 would amend the Texas Constitution to deny bail for all undocumented immigrants charged with a felony. The measure passed overwhelmingly in the Texas Senate, with just two of the 11 Democratic senators voting against it.
Madeline Bailey, advocacy manager for the Vera Institute of Justice, said the proposed resolution conflicts with the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection. She said the Supreme Court’s 1987 ruling in United States v. Salerno held that pretrial detention should “never be the norm, but rather be a very carefully limited exception.”
A law making pretrial detention automatic for such a broad group of people would almost certainly be challenged in court, she said.
Senate Joint Resolution 5, the other proposed constitutional amendment, would expand judges’ authority to deny bail for more felony charges than currently allowed by law, including violent crimes and some sex crimes. Bailey said the bill is too broad and lacks due process protections. Because there often aren’t effective ways for judges to determine whether someone poses an actual risk to public safety, she said, people who are generally harmless or falsely accused could end up sitting in jail for months or years, waiting for their case to move.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare highlighted similar concerns in a letter to Huffman in February. He wrote that while he supports judges being able to deny bail for “violent offenders … in appropriate cases,” SJR 5 lacks appropriate risk assessment tools.
“When it comes to Texas bail laws, the criminal justice system must find an effective way to distinguish between individuals who pose a real, immediate threat to community safety and those who do not,” he wrote.
Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales, a Democrat first elected as a reformer in 2018, supported SJR 5 in a press release addressing Texas Congressman Chip Roy, who had accused the South Texas prosecutor of being too lenient on bail. Gonzales said that in his six years as DA, “Our bond recommendations on violent crimes have been consistently high.” He said he agrees, though, that the “current Texas bail bond system is in dire need of reform.”
Some argue that Republicans have swung the pendulum too far the other way in response to advocates who have filed federal lawsuits and pushed for cash bail reform in Texas, where if you’re poor, there’s no guarantee of having a lawyer at a bail hearing while the wealthy can pay for their freedom. That means that many Texans historically have been locked away and forced to wait to get a lawyer who can argue for their release even if they face only a minor misdemeanor charge or have a solid innocence claim.
Nicole Zayas Manzano, deputy director of policy at The Bail Project, said the only thing both sides agree on is that the pretrial system needs change. “What the disagreement has been about is how best to fix it,” Manzano said.
“I kept saying, ‘I didn’t do this. I don’t have anything to do with this.”
RoShawn C. Evans, co-founder of the reform organization Pure Justice, was able to post bail in 2022, when he was arrested on a trip to Austin, where he’d gone to organize on behalf of someone who had been in jail pretrial for nine years.
Evans was arrested for public intoxication—although he said he hadn’t had a drop to drink, and officers didn’t perform any field sobriety tests. He was also charged with resisting arrest and taken to the Travis County Jail. A magistrate judge set bail at $5,000, which his family and friends were able to post. It took Travis County prosecutors nearly three years to dismiss the case—years he would have spent in jail if his bond had been higher or his family unable to put together the funds.
“There’s people signing plea deals every single day right now, not because they are guilty of what they are accused of, but because they want to just go home,” Evans said. “And that starts a cycle for many people … a never-ending cycle of the system. They just can’t break free because it’s so hard to manage to get off.”
Spending even a day in jail is extremely destabilizing, experts say. People can lose their jobs, custody of their children, and be evicted from homes. And the pressures of pretrial detention makes people more likely to plead guilty. It also leads to longer sentences, according to research from various sources including the Prison Policy Initiative.
Laquita Garcia, policy coordinator with the Texas Organizing Project in San Antonio, was in jail for a year in the 1990s because she couldn’t afford bail and refused to plead guilty.
In 1991, while at a Dallas Walmart with friends, a woman Garcia was with split away from the group, went to the baby department, and slipped a pair of baby moccasins for her daughter in her purse. Garcia was pushing the cart when they were stopped and taken to a backroom.
Her friend explained she had taken the shoes because she couldn’t afford them—Garcia remembers the price as about $12. The police ran the women’s backgrounds. The woman who had taken the shoes was given a ticket and let go. But Garcia had a prior theft charge. She was charged with a state jail felony and given a $30,000 bond, which she couldn’t afford.
“I kept saying, ‘I didn’t do this. I don’t have anything to do with this,’” Garcia told the Observer. “I kept thinking and saying and saying … but that didn’t matter. All they cared about is that I was pushing the cart, I had priors, and I was going to jail.”
Garcia’s teenage children were forced to live without their mother for a year, cared for by Garcia’s sister and her then-partner. Her 17-year-old daughter had to apply for food stamps. Garcia lost her job as a cashier at a gas station.
She didn’t have a lawyer when a judge set her bail. She was eventually appointed an attorney, who told her she could get a two-year sentence if she pleaded guilty. She refused, so she waited about eight months for a court date. After a trial that lasted only 10 minutes, a judge found her not guilty, and she was released the next day.
This all happened more than 30 years ago, but nothing much has changed in Texas. “It’s exactly the same,” she said.
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