Story conflates jails, prisons to misrepresent scope of unemployment 'fraud'

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A TV news report out of Houston blares with the headline, "Prisoners collecting millions in unemployment while behind bars," but that claim obscures more truth than it illuminates. The story opened:

Unemployment benefits are supposed to be life lines to out-of-work Texans.

But the KHOU 11 News I-Team uncovered millions of dollars in unemployment payments are flowing into jails and prisons across Texas.

All of it comes as the Texas Workforce Commission insists that fighting fraud is one of the agency’s top priorities.

But after we found more than 1,700 cases of inmates collecting unemployment, some want to know if anyone is really watching the system?

Grits replied in the comments, though, that, "If someone is convicted and sent to prison, they shouldn't receive benefits. But most people in jail have been convicted of nothing yet and still enjoy the presumption of innocence. Their benefits should not be terminated. This article lumps those categories together in a way that's fundamentally misleading and borders on demagoguery. Please give the break out for how many of those 1,700 were in jail vs. prison." I'm betting that, if we ever see that data, most of the 1,700 people mentioned were in fact eligible and did not  engage in "fraud" at all.