Harris County Jail Population

Here is a tabulation of Harris County's jail population as of September 20, 2007. There are 10,000+ inmates in the Harris County jails. The largest single group, by far, is pretrial detainees on felony charges: 4,367 (including people held on dual charges and people held on state jail felony charges). By contrast, 411 people are in the Harris County jails while awaiting trial on misdemeanors only (there is probably very high turnover among this group). The group of people convicted of state jail felonies and sentenced to county jail is big: 1,371 people. 1,555 are serving county time on misdemeanor convictions. 578 of the inmates are waiting to be taken to prison. 39 people are detained in Harris County Jail by order of the civil district courts, and 39 are federal prisoners. I'm surprised that both of these numbers are so high. I've got no real point here; I just found the numbers interesting, and thought someone else might be able to make something of them.