Brittany Kelley
SAN MARCOS — Individuals deemed legally incompetent in the Hays County Jail will no longer face year-long wait times to receive the help they need, as the new Jail-Based Competency Restoration Program prepares to launch.
This initiative aims to take current competency cases and provide services to minimize the time they are on hold, while bringing resources to those in need.
Competency is whether or not a criminal defendant can participate in their own defense by understanding the charges against them, creating strategies, working with their attorney and more, said Landon Campbell, chief of the Misdemeanor and Specialty Courts Division at the Hays County Criminal District Attorney’s Office. It is when this competency is questioned by a member within the courtroom that the judge will order an evaluation that finds the defendant competent or incompetent. If labeled incompetent, there will be an additional classification that states whether they are “likely to restore” — in an inpatient or outpatient facility — or “unlikely to restore.” The latter would require finding outside placement for the defendant, while the likely to restore status would pivot a defendant to Hays County Judge Elaine Brown’s Assisted Outpatient Treatment program or to the now-established Jail-Based Competency Restoration Program, which is considered an inpatient option.
According to Campbell, these restoration programs are relatively new in the criminal justice world, with nearby Comal County beginning its only a few years ago. The idea for Hays County’s began after the state hospital waitlist reached 400 days during COVID-19.
The chief noted that these wait times were preventing incompetent defendants from getting the help that they needed. So, the DA’s Office began working with Hill Country MHDD to create the initiative, which aims to lower these wait times significantly.
Statutorily, Campbell stated, Hill Country MHDD has to run the project, as it's required that embedded competency programs in jails must be provided through the local mental health authority, but this doesn’t lessen the impact that the organization has had on the project.
“If they don’t have the right programs or they don’t have the right willingness to allocate resources, then it can bind the county. There’s other counties across the state, where their local mental health authority either doesn’t have the resources or doesn’t have the bandwidth to be working with their individual counties on it. So, partnering with Hill Country [MHDD] — even though they’re the only actor in town to be able to do it — they still have been a great partner in working on it with the resources they have,” he emphasized.
The resources, he continued, manifest in a miniature state hospital within the jail. A combination of mental health curriculum, along with information regarding their case — including who the judge is and who their defense attorney is — medication use — whether through convincing an individual to try it or by a court order — group activities and educational materials are used to bring defendants up to the level of competence in order to be in a courtroom, the chief said.
In addition to Hill Country MHDD, several other members of the county have been crucial to the plan’s development. For example, the Hays County Sheriff’s Office has had to plan for security concerns, since there is a risk when non-law enforcement personnel enter a secured space, like a jail, the county and district judges had to agree to utilize the initiative moving forward and the jail’s medical services provider, Wellpath, staff has sat through numerous meetings to ensure that all agencies are on the same page, explained Campbell.
Defendants are able to be referred to the competency restoration program by the mental health attorney, who joined the office in summer of 2025 and keeps a pulse on potential competency concern cases, he said.
After reaching the required level of competency, Campbell emphasized that the defendant now has the “buffet of options” that would typically be available: “It’s not something where the second that they regain competency, we stick them on a jury trial docket to get a conviction. A lot of the modernization and reforms that we’ve been able to have recently, like our Mental Health Court [and] our pretrial services, requires a participant to enter into it voluntarily. They can’t enter into any of those resources voluntarily until they’re competent to do so,” stressed Campbell.
For example, he said that some of the community members that will benefit the most from this project are those that have mental health crises and are unhoused.
“[They] will regularly only pick up Class B and Class A misdemeanors. So, you may have people who are also unhoused, they have severe mental health issues and they just continually pick up criminal trespass cases because they go to locations they’re not supposed to,” said the chief. “Because [of the charge], they can only stay in the jail statutorily for 180 days to 365 days because those are the max terms for the individual offenses themselves. Well, if you’ve got a waitlist to get into the state hospital that’s 300 days [and] these people are not competent, they’re in a Catch-22.”
With the new initiative aiming to take a maximum of 90 days, including the approximate month-long process to be evaluated and placed into the program, these people will actually receive the help they need to break the cycle, rather than timing out of the justice system and continuing.
Campbell stated that, previously, prosecutors were attempting to engineer solutions to either work with law enforcement to dismiss the charge or hope that a hospital would do an emergency detention.
“If we can break that [cycle] with this competency restoration, get them into services — either through our Assisted Outpatient Treatment [program] or our Mental Health Court — I truly do not see any justice value in pursuing that criminal trespass. If they’ve been able to break the cycle, have a life where they’re able to reenter society and be a functioning member of society again and not in that circle of crisis, then I’m more than happy to let that case go,” he said.
Not only were these wait times negatively affecting the defendants, but also, in cases of assault, the victims were confused as to why the charge was never making it to court, Campbell said. Now, these cases can move forward to a trial, which he stated is beneficial both to the victim and the defendant, as they are able to begin their defense within months, rather than years.
He also shared that providing a solution to competency cases will allow the DA’s Office to move on to its next project, whatever it may be, by giving bandwidth to defendants, defense attorneys, prosecutors and more.
Ultimately, Campbell stated that the Jail-Based Competency Restoration Program is an integral step in the right direction.
“It’s important to be able to come up with our own solutions because we’re dealing with statewide systems that all too often are letting us down and not providing the right solutions,” he stressed. “We are actually moving forward and being able to provide care that used to take 300 days to a year and we’re able to provide that care right here in our community, right now … It’s a key part of breaking the cycle for a huge number of our neighbors and anytime that we can do that, if I can get one person to be able to live a fulfilling life that didn’t have that chance before, that’s worth it for me,” he stressed.
The Jail-Based Competency Restoration Program will officially launch within the next two months. To learn more information on competency restoration programs, visit bit.ly/3ZaQ5vw.
