By Graham Lee Brewer
The Oklahoman
OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — The Oklahoma County jail will not have enough money to sustain operations, unless a change is made in state Corrections Department policy, Sheriff John Whetsel said.
Department Director Robert Patton in April began pulling thousands of state inmates out of county jails throughout Oklahoma and moving them to state facilities. The state’s prison system has been close to maximum capacity for years, and inmates routinely are held in county jails after they are sentenced, awaiting an open bed in a state prison.
The number of state inmates awaiting an open prison bed was down to 186, Corrections Department spokesman Jerry Massie said Thursday.
Whetsel said the reimbursement Oklahoma County receives to house those offenders is revenue he counts on. Losing that income has forced some tough budget decisions.
“It looks like our loss from the DOC will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 million (annually),” Whetsel said. “I don’t know how we’re going to make that up.”
Whetsel said he has close to 50 open jobs, but has left them vacant in an attempt to save money. The Oklahoma County jail is budgeted for 520 employees and processes 40,000 to 45,000 inmates per year.
Whetsel readily admits it isn’t ideal to rely on state Corrections Department reimbursements to pay the bills, but the county needs time to adjust the jail’s budget before the state inmates are pulled out.
He hopes to strike a deal with corrections officials to keep state offenders for a month before moving them to a prison. That way they don’t stay in his facility too long, but he has the opportunity to collect revenue for housing them.
“At least work with the sheriffs and let them stay 30 days,” Whetsel said. “We’re going to have budget problems, we know, come April.”
Ray McNair, executive director of the Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association, said Whetsel is in the majority. His association polled 65 of the state’s 77 county sheriffs during the legislative session, and 45 reported the loss of state inmates was a concern.
“The fact is, for years and years and years you’ve figured those inmates into your budget, and then all of sudden in 30 days they’re completely pulled out of your system, in the middle of a budget year, and you’re at a loss,” McNair said.
He said sheriffs don’t feel the state Corrections Department owes it to them to house inmates in their jails, but without the time to plan for the loss in revenue, other county functions will suffer.
“You have to understand that the funding of the county jail is required by the (state) constitution,” McNair said. “So, therefore, the county officials in charge of the budget have to fund that jail before they do anything else.
“If they have to put additional money into that jail because of the loss from the Department of Corrections, roads and bridges and things like that don’t get fixed.”
The Oklahoma County jail typically depends on housing close to 250 backlogged state inmates, but Thursday that number was down to 46. The jail also contracts with the state Corrections Department to house about 300 inmates for their full sentence. That number has dropped to 176.
Corrections officials are in discussions with Whetsel and eventually would like to increase the number of offenders it contracts to house there, Patton said.
Those numbers have decreased recently for good reason.
“Here’s the bottom line: construction problems at the county jail,” Patton said. “We do plan on taking his numbers back up, but he’s got to fix problems at the jail first. I don’t feel comfortable putting any more inmates in now until those problems, like the kitchen, are addressed.”
The jail’s kitchen has been inoperable since June 19 because of a collapsed sewer line under the facility. As a result, inmates received cold meals for nearly two weeks, violating state jails standards, and plumbing problems have plagued the building for years. Staffers now feed the nearly 2,500 inmates in custody at the jail using a portable kitchen set up in the loading dock.
Patton said he is working with sheriffs to address their concerns and is willing to find a middle ground, but pulling inmates out of county jails across the state has the potential to save his department several million dollars annually.
“At the end of the day it has to make sense to the taxpayers,” Patton said. “I can’t agree to anything that is going to cost me more than I’m spending now.”