Jim Wells County weighs jail expansion as overcrowding persists

Jim Wells County leaders are facing a blunt choice: pay to expand the old jail in Alice or build a new one, while the costs of doing neither keep mounting in real time. The county’s 100-year-old jail at 300 N. Almond can hold only about 80 inmates, roughly half the number the county needs to keep locally, and that shortfall has already forced the sheriff’s department to send prisoners elsewhere.

That pressure has come with a price tag the county cannot ignore. One report said Jim Wells County owes nearly $1 million in unpaid inmate-housing bills, a bill tied directly to the jail’s limited capacity. In February 2024, the county entered an interlocal agreement to house inmates at the Zapata County jail after the local facility reached capacity, a sign that the overcrowding problem had moved beyond inconvenience and into routine operations.

The county’s own 2024 inmate-healthcare request for proposals said the jail’s average daily population over the previous 12 months was 80. That figure matters because it shows the facility was already operating at the edge of its limit, housing both male and female inmates in a building that no longer matches the county’s needs.

The debate lands in a county of 38,804 people, according to the July 1, 2025 census estimate, spread across 865.2 square miles. Jim Wells County had 38,891 residents in the 2020 Census, so the population has stayed roughly steady even as the jail debate has sharpened. Residents are now being asked, in effect, whether the county should keep paying outside facilities year after year or commit to a major capital project that could reshape public safety spending for decades.

The jail’s physical condition and recent compliance problems have only added urgency. In February 2026, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards cited the Jim Wells County jail for missing cell-check logs, another warning that the aging facility is straining under the demands placed on it. Marcus Ramirez, appointed jail administrator in 2025, brought 22 years of jailer experience into the job as county officials continued looking for ways to manage the facility’s limits.

For Jim Wells County, the decision is no longer abstract. Every inmate sent out of county, every unpaid housing bill and every citation tied to the old jail turns the same question back on local taxpayers: expand the building that exists, or replace it with one that can actually hold the county’s inmate population.