By Graham Lee Brewer
The Oklahoman
LEXINGTON — Faced with a lawsuit and the frustrated pleas of county sheriffs, the state Corrections Department this year attempted to significantly reduce the number of inmates awaiting transfer from county jails to state prisons.
Department officials said they discovered nearly 2,000 inmates waiting for transfer in jails across the state. Now, they say that number stands at less than 300.
“It’s a potential savings of millions of dollars,” Corrections Department Director Robert Patton told The Oklahoman in April when the department first took on the county jail backlog.
The savings would come through the elimination of payments to county jails that house state inmates and through potential reduced recidivism rates.
Financial concerns are part of what prompted a July 2013 lawsuit from Tulsa County Sheriff Stanley Glanz, who claimed his jail was bursting at the seams with Corrections Department inmates, causing him to make offenders sleep on cots in open areas of the jail and pushing his staff to their limits. The suit was dropped last week.
“You couldn’t just do what detention staff was used to doing,” said Sgt. Shannon Clark, a spokesman for the Tulsa County sheriff’s office.
“People were sleeping on the floors. If a fight broke out, multiple people were involved. Our staff couldn’t adequately monitor inmates.
“It was miserable.”
Clark said it cost the office more than $64 a day to house state inmates, and they were only being reimbursed $27 of that.
“So if we were a business, we would be bankrupt in no time at all,” Clark said.
The facility, with a capacity of about 1,700 offenders, was pushed past its limits, at one point reaching a total of 1,999 inmates, Clark said. Their jail, which held an average of about 250 Corrections Department inmates at any given time, is now down to just more than 30. Clark said two weeks ago they were down to one.
Processing and evaluations
When an inmate is sentenced to incarceration in Oklahoma, they are sent to a county jail to await transfer to a state prison. All male inmates are then sent to the Lexington Assessment and Reception Center, where they are given mental, criminal, educational and medical evaluations to determine what facility each offender should serve out their sentence at.
Before Patton’s initiative, staff at Lexington typically were processing about 35 inmates per day. At the height of the Corrections Department’s effort to thin county jail populations, prison workers were sending almost 100 per day. This required additional bunks to be placed in day rooms, staff to be pulled from other facilities to assist, and educational assessments to be contracted out.
At the time, staffing levels at the prison were about 49 percent, and officers there were and still are working 12-hour shifts.
Lexington Warden Jim Farris said the processing workload at the prison is starting to decrease, averaging between 40 and 50 inmates per day, and additional staff members have been sent back to the facilities where they normally work.
Sean Wallace is executive director of Oklahoma Corrections Professionals, a group that represents state corrections workers. Wallace said while things have started slowing down, staff at the Lexington facility still are dealing with a heavy workload.
“I think we see kind of a light at the end of the tunnel,” Wallace said. “So, we’re hoping that once they get the jails down to next to nothing, the reception load will go down and people will go to their normal hours. But, yeah, they’re tired.”
The state Corrections Department also has begun re-evaluating the cases of inmates who are up for release but are being held on infractions committed during incarceration.
Laura Pitman, deputy director of institutions for the department, told the state Board of Corrections at its May 1 meeting that 740 offenders were released as a result of the return of early release credits. Those credits were taken away for infractions, a power given to the department by statute.
“Is it worth keeping (an inmate) in prison, with the taxpayers’ dollars, to keep him further incarcerated for another three weeks because he wasn’t wearing his ID card?” Patton said in an June 6 interview with The Oklahoman. “And, common sense will tell you no.”
Above: Inmates wait for processing April 18 after arriving at the Lexington Assessment and Reception Center . David McDaniel - The Oklahoman
Unhappy with change
As of June 5, the state Corrections Department had 269 inmates awaiting transfer at a county jail. The dramatic drop in offenders caused Glanz to drop his lawsuit against the state Corrections Department. However, other sheriffs argue Glanz is in the minority, claiming the majority of counties rely on corrections inmates to survive financially.
Jackson County Sheriff Roger LeVick is among those who are unhappy with the change, saying Patton’s initiative is leaving too many of his cells empty.
“We’ve always depended on having 30 to 40 people waiting to go to the Department of Corrections at any given time,” LeVick said. “So they have been filled up, and that’s a big source of revenue for us.”
Jackson County is like many jails across the state, in that its budget was designed to depend on a per diem rate for housing corrections inmates. LeVick said regardless of where they are housed, inmates cost the taxpayer, so why not keep the money local to provide for other services?
“(Patton) made a statement he didn’t care about county budgets; he’s just worried about state tax dollars,” LeVick said. “Where in the heck do the state tax dollars come from? They come from the citizens of 77 different counties. If you can keep the money closer to home, closer to the local level, it can be used more wisely.”
LeVick said $450,000 of his annual $2.2 million in annual revenue comes from state Corrections Department’s reimbursements, and without them, he may soon be forced to lay off deputies.
“It’d be like it used to be when they called the sheriff’s office years ago,” LeVick said. “If they called after 10 o’clock at night, they’d say ‘Well, we haven’t got anybody on,’ and they might call the sheriff or the undersheriff and have them take the call.”
Said Patton: “If their business model depended on housing county jail backup, I can’t even comment on that.”
Patton argues that aside from the economic necessity of emptying county jails, the inmates serving out their prison sentences in those facilities are not getting access to the rehabilitative and educational programs that are shown to reduce recidivism.
“There’s not a sheriff out there that is running county jail backup that can account for appropriate programming,” Patton said.
“You know that they weren’t providing them GED programming, substance abuse programming, religious programming, all those re-entry things they are in need of that you’re well aware of, to make sure these guys and ladies don’t come back to prison.”
One jail that does offer those kinds of programs is the Oklahoma County jail. Sheriff John Whetsel said while he agrees with LeVick, he is still very hopeful a balance can be struck. Oklahoma County offers parenting, substance abuse and educational programs to inmates housed there.
Whetsel said counties like his, that have corrections per diem rates factored into their budgets, should be able to partner with the Corrections Department to find a way to keep state offenders for a few months at a time, as opposed to keeping them for years, which has been the case on several occasions, or transferring them in a matter of days.
Whetsel said he typically kept about 250 state offenders at once.
Friday, he had 43 state offenders awaiting transfer, as well as 183 inmates he has contracted to house for the remainder of their sentence, and anticipates the decrease to cost his agency anywhere from $2.5 million to $3.5 million annually.