A portal is being tested to replace email communication between the sheriff’s office and state.
By: Tracey McManus
Dallas Morning News
https://www.dallasnews.com/
Dallas County has struggled for years to release people from jail on time, leaving them behind bars for weeks and months past the end of their sentences. Texas is now testing a new technology aimed at fixing part of the problem.
Instead of emailing paperwork to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to initiate a person’s release from jail or transfer to a state facility, an electronic portal launched Friday allows the sheriff’s office to upload documents to a shared system and track the processing in real time.
The portal may help those whose release documents, called pen packets, get stuck in limbo after the sheriff’s office sends them to the state. But the technology won’t prevent overstays caused by operational problems within Dallas County that have led to people remaining behind bars well past their sentences.
On Feb. 12, Kenneth Offutt walked out of the Dallas County jail 108 days after he completed his sentence because the sheriff’s office failed to send his pen packet to the state months earlier. Sheriff spokesperson Doug Sisk said at the time the department’s “check and balance procedure did not occur and is being addressed.”
TDCJ spokesperson Amanda Hernandez confirmed the portal requires the sheriff’s office to take the first step of uploading a pen packet because that is how the state is alerted to act on a case. Sisk did not respond to questions on Wednesday asking what Sheriff Marian Brown is doing to prevent staff from failing to timely send documentation to the state.
Cases of overstays spiked after May 2023 when the county’s criminal courts began using case management software called Odyssey. Technical blunders prevented attorneys from accessing their clients’ cases. Court clerks couldn’t send critical paperwork to the jail. And people who were supposed to be free were stuck behind bars.
Attorney Jim Spangler, who has represented numerous clients in over-detention lawsuits against the county, said he has seen improvements at the district clerk’s office. He said he is reviewing 12 cases of people released weeks late from jail in 2026 and late 2025 – most of which, he said, were due to the sheriff’s office not sending pen packets to the state in time.
“I really find it just disappointing that the sheriff still hasn’t addressed this,” Spangler said. “If you had asked me a year ago if this still would be happening, I’d say no way.”
Since 2023, Dallas County has paid more than a quarter-million dollars to settle at least six jail over-detention claims. There are at least three federal lawsuits pending from four plaintiffs alleging they were held in jail 21, 30, 76 and 183 days too long.
In some of those lawsuits, plaintiffs alleged the district clerk failed to send court documents to the sheriff’s office so the jail could get the pen packet to the state.
After the criminal courts switched to the Odyssey software, the jail remained on its separate network called Adult Information Systems. The two systems cannot communicate, prompting the district clerk’s office to rely on hand-delivering paperwork to the sheriff’s office within the same building after a sentencing.
District Clerk Felicia Pitre said she’s working with the county IT to develop a way to move documents between the district clerk and sheriff’s offices electronically. She has said email proved unreliable, which is why she requires jail staff to sign off on receipt of the hand-deliveries.
Last fall, Brown, the sheriff, told the Commissioners Court she wanted to upgrade the jail’s current software rather than transition the jail to Odyssey after witnessing the painful rollout in the courts. But representatives of Odyssey’s vendor have told county officials its software won’t be compatible with the one preferred by the sheriff even after an upgrade.
In some cases, the state has returned pen packets to the county for corrections before a release could happen after clerks inserted errors on a judgment, such as the wrong degree of an offense or wrong penal code. In one pending lawsuit, a plaintiff alleges the district clerk’s office in 2023 miscalculated his time-served credit on a judgment, causing him to stay in jail six months too long.
District Attorney John Creuzot added safeguards to help prevent such processing delays.
In eight of the 17 felony courts, Creuzot said prosecutors instead of clerks are now creating judgment paperwork. He said that helps prevent errors and eliminates delays in getting the judge to sign the paperwork so it can be moved to the jail.
“What we’re trying to do is put our eyes on it and get it done correctly to give it to the judge to sign immediately,” Creuzot said.
But delays in the jail appear to continue, according to Dallas defense attorney Tom Cox.
Cox said a client was sentenced in October to five years in a state facility with two years of credit for time served. Instead of being transferred immediately, he remained in the Dallas County jail for six more months because the sheriff’s office did not send his pen packet to the state until late March, according to Cox.
A person becomes a candidate for parole from a state facility after serving ¼ of their sentence, meaning Cox’s client would have been eligible for release upon arriving in state custody. But because he was not picked up by TDCJ for six months, that process could not be initiated until he arrived at a state facility in April.
“His freedom was directly being restricted, hampered, reduced by this delay,” said Cox, noting he called the sheriff’s office a dozen times to inquire about the case with no response.
Hernandez, the spokesperson for TDCJ, said the portal will give counties and the state “full transparency” to track where each pen packet stands in the review and scheduling process.
She said attorneys will not have access to the portal, meaning representatives of incarcerated people still in jail past their sentence will not be able to tell what’s causing the delay after pen packets are transmitted.
After a 60-day trial, Hernandez said TDCJ plans to extend the tool to other counties currently using hand delivery, email or the postal service for sending paperwork to the state.
Dallas County Reporter
Tracey McManus joined The Dallas Morning News in October 2024 and covers Dallas County government. She previously spent nine years as a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times in Florida and five years as a reporter for The Augusta Chronicle in Georgia. Tracey is a 2010 graduate of the University of Florida with degrees in journalism and Spanish.
