Jaleen Anderson’s mom is on a quest for details about her son’s death in a Louisiana prison that houses hundreds of Harris County inmates awaiting trial.
Sarah Knight cries at the gravesite of her son at the Paradise Funeral Home and Cemetery North on May 13, 2024, in Houston. Her son, Jaleen Anderson, died while being held in LaSalle Correctional Center in Louisiana.We’re testing using AI-powered tools to provide an audio version of this story. While this audio recording is machine-generated, the story was written by human journalists.
On April 3, Anderson was among hundreds of Texans accused of crimes — and still legally presumed innocent — sitting behind bars in other states. As an increasing number of Texas, more and more people with criminal charges are being shuffled to other lock-ups while they await the resolution of their cases.
A Harris County spokesperson said the investigation into Anderson’s death is ongoing, the autopsy is not complete and the medical examiner has not yet determined the cause of death.that Louisiana officials requested found there is no oversight mechanism for the state’s minimum jail standards, which lack detail and aren’t regularly updated. Louisiana does not require facilities to report deaths in custody to the state’s attorney general, unlike in Texas.
In October 2023, he was arrested and charged with a second-degree felony for possession of 9.2 grams of methamphetamine. Knight paid a bail bond company to keep him out of jail. But then he was re-arrested in March 2024 for possessing an unspecified amount between 4 and 200 grams of methamphetamine. This time, a judge denied Anderson bail.
Instead, Anderson was pronounced dead at 8:59 p.m. on April 3 at the Hardtner Medical Center Emergency Room. That hospital sits less than a mile from LaSalle Correctional Center, the northeast Louisiana facility that houses up to 650 Harris County jail inmates. Harris County’s contract with LaSalle stipulates that the Louisiana prison must have on-site medical and health care coverage available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Health care providers must be CPR certified, and the facility has to have external defibrillators, devices that can be used to treat a person whose heart has stopped working.
Just weeks after her son died — and on the same day he had been slated to appear before a judge on his criminal charges — Knight stood before the Harris County Commissioners Court. Her voice trembled as she described her pain and the little she had gathered about Anderson’s death.“I really don’t think we should be OK with these deaths,” said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, a Democrat who presides over the commissioners court. “Committing a crime pretrial is not a death sentence.
Families of nine people who died in Harris County Jail are suing local officials there. The FBI is also conductingHarris County has been sending inmates to Louisiana off and on since at least 2008 and now spends upwards of $50 million a year on outsourcing. The vast majority of its inmates are awaiting trial and are legally presumed innocent.
The TCJS also does not count out-of-state deaths in their jail deaths database, said Krish Gundu, co-founder of the Texas Jail Project, which advocates for jail inmates. For three years, Gundu says, she has been trying to convince the commission to name out-of-state jail deaths on their monthly report.
Texas Politics Texas Policy Texas Government Criminal Justice Health Care Commission On Jail Standards Harris County
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