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Report: Texas Fails To Supervise Jails

By KRWG News

Texas – As repeated efforts to regulate local jails across Texas fail, inmates in more than 370 city and town jails go unsupervised despite ongoing reports of inmate suicides, unsafe conditions, according to a published report.

Suspects in some local lockups are left handcuffed to benches for hours with little or no supervision, and a woman in one small-town jail was left with nothing more than a cell phone to use if she needed help, the Austin American-Statesman reported in Sunday's editions.

Adan Munoz Jr. heads the Texas Commission on Jail Standards that regulates county jails in Texas. But he says it wasn't unusual when he was a rookie Kingsville police officer 40 years ago to leave suspects alone for hours in the town's tiny jail.

Today, there's still no mechanism to enforce safe and healthy city jails.

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Information from: Austin American-Statesman, http://www.statesman.com

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.