“More people in Texas prisons have contracted COVID than in any other prison system in the United States,” said the report.

More Texas jail and prison inmates and staff have been infected and killed by COVID-19 than those of any other state’s criminal justice system, according to a university report released Monday.

Seventeen states have no rules or oversight mechanisms for local jails, according to Reuters research and a pending study by Michele Deitch, a corrections specialist at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. In five other low-population states, all detention facilities are run by state corrections agencies. The other 28 have some form of standards, such as assessing inmates’ health on arrival or checking on suicidal inmates at prescribed intervals. Yet those standards often are minimal, and in at least six of the states, the agencies that write them lack enforcement power or the authority to refer substandard jails for investigation.

The American Jail Association put forth recommendations written by Michele Deitch to help jails respond to the coronavirus threat.

Studies have shown that “noncompliance” is typically a developmentally appropriate behavior for school-aged children, said Alycia Welch, MPAff, MSSW and program administrator at the Texas Institute for Excellence in Mental Health at the University of Texas at Austin. She co-authored a report advising the then-independent ombudsman of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department on changing the ways it responds to youth in state secure facilities to reduce violence.

“Many of the women we serve leave prison or jail with a multitude of unaddressed needs, including physical and behavioral health care, that keep them cycling in and out of the criminal justice system. Many are also survivors of physical, sexual or emotional abuse,” said Alycia Welch, co-investigator and associate director of Angela House, one of the few such programs in the country and the only one in Houston. “Angela House is unique because it addresses those needs simultaneously in a supportive environment.”