By Cary Aspinwall and Ziva Branstetter
Tulsa World
TULSA — No one would assume Robert Patton thinks his new job as director of Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections will be easy.
“There’s a lot of work to be done for sure,” Patton said. “We will work day and night to correct the issues.”
Patton was selected by the Oklahoma Board of Corrections this month to replace Justin Jones, who stepped down in 2013.
He will inherit a department with near-capacity prisons and not enough funding to fully staff them or implement changes required by a recent prison reform law. Reports of near-riots and safety violations at Oklahoma’s private prisons in the past few years have caused many to question the state’s oversight of private prison contractors.
ButOklahoma’sproblems aren’t radically different from what Patton faced in his years with the Arizona Department of Corrections. Arizona has nearly 15,000 more inmates in its prisons than Oklahoma, and also uses several private prison contractors to house them.
In 2010, while Patton was in charge of offender management for Arizona DOC, three convicted murderers escaped from a private prison in Kingman, Ariz. Three days after the escape, a vacationing couple from Oklahoma, Gary and Linda Haas, were shot to death after crossing the fugitives’ paths.
“The deaths of the Haas family was the most tragic day of my professional career,” Patton said.
A state review of the Arizona prison system’s oversight of the private prison found widespread problems at the facility. Alarms malfunctioned so often they were ignored by staff, guards were not properly trained and 80 percent of the staff was new or newly promoted, the review found.
The escape prompted wide debate over Arizona’s relationship with private prisons, which critics called cozy due to the companies’ political influence.
That incident triggered Arizona’s overhaul of its monitoring of private prisons and led to a " very effective and aggressive monitoring program,” Patton said.
“You can see we became very, very aggressive” in oversight of private prisons after the escapes, he said.
Patton said he will bring many of those practices to Oklahoma.
“I will go out and steal some of the things that I’ve created here in Arizona and bring them to Oklahoma,” he said.
In Oklahoma or any state, “you have to have staff in there every day making sure they are following the tenets of their contract,” he said.
“You have to make sure that they are following all the policies and guidelines that they’ve set forth. The only way you can do that is through appropriate reporting and communication I have absolutely no problem picking up the phone and calling the president of CCA or GEO to discuss an issue,” he said.
Both CCA and GEO operate prisons in Oklahoma under DOC contracts. Private halfway house operator Avalon Correctional Industries recently had its Tulsa men’s halfway house shuttered by DOC amid videos surfacing of inmates fighting for entertainment and gambling purposes.
The department said it canceled the contract after investigations revealed “serious infractions” at the facility affecting inmate safety. Avalon officials initially claimed the closing was “politically motivated retaliation,” then asked DOC to reconsider and promised better oversight and more accountability in the future.
Patton said the issue of employee salaries — Oklahoma correctional officers have gone many years without a pay increase — is in the hands of the Legislature and out of his control.
“I want to address the things I can control. I was that correctional officer; I came up through the ranks. I want to hear from them what I can do to make their lives better ... when they talk about staffing levels and they’re short of staff what can we do (to improve working conditions)?” he said. “The only way to do that is talking to the staff themselves. I am in a unique position that, again, I came up through the ranks. I’ve been there at 2 o’clock in the morning supervising those offenders by myself.”
Employee retention and staffing levels have been a continued problem for Oklahoma’s prisons in recent years. The state remains No. 1 in per capita female incarceration.
Patton said he’s a “data driven” person with “lofty” goals, including dealing with capacity issues, growth needs, public safety and the well being of staff.
Gov. Mary Fallin has also asked him to conduct a review of the state’s Justice Reinvestment laws that were passed in 2012 but have yet to be fully funded or implemented.
“The governor has asked me to, immediately upon arrival in Oklahoma, to dig deep into that and see where we are” with implementing the law, he said.
Problems in Oklahoma’s system
Oklahoma’s corrections system: Patton faces serious issues as new director
Staffing: The department has struggled to retain employees and hire new ones in recent years, especially when faced with competitive salaries offered for oil field jobs, officials have said. Systemwide, the facilities are staffed at about 60 percent of what they should be. But some medium- and minimum-security prisons in western Oklahoma have struggled to stay even 50 percent staffed in recent years. Corrections officers have gone more than eight years without a pay raise in Oklahoma and the state’s ratio of correctional officers to offenders is the worst among at least 49 states.
Issues with private facilities: Avalon Tulsa was recently shuttered for inmate fights and “serious infractions.” Avalon’s Turley halfway house has at least three pending lawsuits alleging neglect in the death of an inmate, sexual abuse of inmates on work release jobs and discrimination against a longtime volunteer. In December, a male inmate walked away from Avalon’s Carver facility in Oklahoma City and was fatally shot after he tried to rob an off-duty state trooper. Corrections Corporation of America’s prisons in Cushing and Holdenville were locked down several times in 2013 due to serious incidents involving inmate violence.
Safety: A female case manager was recently attacked at Joseph Harp Correctional Center. A federal report recently found that incidents of inmate-on-inmate sexual violence at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in McLoud were the highest in the nation. Last July, a group of female Oklahoma inmates filed a federal lawsuit claiming they were sexually assaulted by several guards at Mabel Bassett. In 2012, a male inmate at Oklahoma State Penitentiary died of smoke inhalation after officers took more than an hour to respond to a fire he started in his cell.
Reforms: In 2012, Gov. Mary Fallin signed the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, a highly touted public safety measure designed to curb prison crowding and improve public safety. It called for the creation of “intermediate revocation facilities” for those who make technical violations of probation and parole and deter them from regular incarceration. It also called for additional officers to supervise for nine months those leaving custody. Those two key elements have yet to be funded.