On January 13, 2026, Deon Henderson was found unresponsive inside the Connally Unit, a maximum-security prison in Kenedy, Texas. Henderson had a documented seizure condition. His mother says he was not getting his medication. By the time staff reached him, it was too late.
Three days later, on January 16, Jared James Dicus was found dead at the Wainwright Unit. His death was classified as a suicide.
Two men, two units, three days apart. In a system that is functioning, these might be isolated tragedies. Inside the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, they are symptoms of a collapse that has been building for years and is now impossible to ignore.
The Sunset Report
A 189-page review by the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission laid bare what corrections officers across Texas’s 565 correctional facilities already knew: the staffing crisis inside TDCJ has reached catastrophic levels. At some prisons, up to 70 percent of guard positions sit unfilled. Systemwide, the turnover rate hovers around 26 percent, meaning TDCJ loses roughly one in four officers every year.
The math is brutal. When a housing unit designed for two officers is staffed by one — or none — everything breaks. Response times to medical emergencies stretch. Contraband flows unchecked. Violence between incarcerated people goes unwitnessed and unrecorded. And people like Deon Henderson, who need consistent medication management, fall through cracks that have widened into chasms.
More Than 100 Dead in 2025
TDCJ recorded more than 100 deaths in custody during 2025 alone. The causes span the full spectrum: natural causes, suicides, homicides, and suspected overdoses. But the true picture is murkier than even those grim numbers suggest, because TDCJ does not maintain a centralized public death database.
That is worth sitting with. The state agency responsible for the lives of over 100,000 incarcerated people does not offer a single, searchable record of how those people die. Families of the dead are left to piece together information from chaplains, other incarcerated people, and — if they are lucky — a returned phone call from a warden’s office.
The paper-based record system that persists inside TDCJ has already produced documented failures: 34 wrongful releases over the past decade, cases where people walked out of prison before their sentences were served because someone misread a file or lost a form. If the system cannot track who should be locked up, it is not tracking who is dying, either.
The Human Cost of Empty Guard Towers
For families trying to visit someone in prison, the staffing crisis is visible the moment they arrive. Visits get canceled because there are not enough officers to supervise the visiting room. Phone calls go unanswered. Grievances submitted by incarcerated people vanish into an understaffed bureaucracy and never resurface.
Understanding the difference between jail and prison matters here, because county jails — despite their own problems — generally maintain closer staffing ratios and more local oversight. State prisons operate at a scale that makes individual accountability nearly impossible, especially when the workforce has hollowed out.
At facilities like those in Harris County, where urban jails compete with private-sector employers for the same labor pool, recruitment has become a losing battle. TDCJ’s starting pay and working conditions simply cannot compete with jobs that do not require walking a tier alone at 2 a.m. in a facility built for a staffing model that no longer exists.
A Population That Will Not Stop Growing
The crisis would be dire enough if the prison population were stable. It is not. TDCJ’s population is growing and is expected to exceed bed capacity in the coming years. More people, fewer guards, aging infrastructure, and a record-keeping system that belongs in a museum — this is the trajectory Texas corrections is on, and there is no credible plan to reverse it.
Deon Henderson’s mother is still looking for answers about why her son did not get his medication. Jared James Dicus’s family is left with the particular agony of a death inside a system that was supposed to keep him alive long enough to serve his sentence. Across Texas, families wait by phones that do not ring, send letters to addresses that may or may not be checked, and hope that the person they love is not the next name on a list that the state does not bother to publish.
