By Samantha Vicent and Susan Hylton
Tulsa World
TULSA, Okla. — While the Department of Corrections struggles with having 99 percent occupancy in its prisons, Tulsa County and other entities in northeast Oklahoma are feeling the effects of prison-ready inmates taking up valuable space in their jails.
“Whenever we hit 230 (inmates) during a warrant sweep last year, we were filled to the gills,” Rogers County Undersheriff John Sappington said. “We average anywhere from 190 to 200.”
The Rogers County Jail in Claremore has the space to accommodate 250 prisoners, but that doesn’t mean it has enough beds, blankets or other necessities, Sappington said.
“We also don’t have the staff to house 250 inmates,” he said. “We’ve lost (staff) due to them walking back and seeing all the inmates and saying, ‘This isn’t for me.’ ”
Also contributing to Rogers County’s overcrowding are about 50 inmates who are being held for the Department of Corrections. Their presence brings an additional $250,000 in revenue from the state, making it nearly impossible to operate without them despite the capacity problems they cause.
“It’s like renting your house out to make a house payment,” Rogers County Sheriff Scott Walton said.
Ideally, five detention officers would be on the floor at any given time, Sappington said. But that often isn’t the case.
The jail often has inmates who are sick, Sappington said, explaining that “they’re methamphetamine abusers and have heart problems and everything else.”
“When they get sick, someone has to go with them” to a hospital or clinic, he said, and “when you’re running at a minimum level, (having just) one officer on the floor causes you a lot of problems.”
Tulsa County: The Tulsa Jail has been overcrowded for the past nine months, and the Sheriff’s Office has said it expects to be over budget by $1 million this fiscal year.
Sheriff Stanley Glanz said last month that he plans to ask a judge to order the Department of Corrections to pick up the 260 DOC-ready inmates who remain in the county’s custody.
That number - at either the Tulsa Jail or in other county jails where Tulsa County pays to house them - had dropped to 164 as of Friday.
Undersheriff Tim Albin said Tulsa County pays several less-populated county jails to keep DOC-ready inmates for $27 a day, which is the state rate.
“Some of them can actually make money at that rate,” he said.
The Tulsa Jail’s total jail population was 1,744 on Friday, according to its daily report. The official capacity is 1,717.
Creek County: Jail administrator Kelly Birch said the Creek County jail is typically under its 346-inmate capacity but that there are still operational challenges due to the number of DOC-ready inmates, which averages about 90.
He said that’s because the jail has two pods with 24 beds each for female inmates. “So if we have 32 females, I can’t use the extra beds for anything else,” he said. “It does hurt our budget.”
Other beds also have to remain unoccupied because suicidal inmates are kept away from the general population in holding cells that have two or three beds, he said.
Muskogee County: Sheriff Charles Pearson said the backup of DOC-ready inmates is a daily battle.
“They are saving lots of money off the backs of counties, and there is nothing we can do about it,” he said.
Jail superintendent Joe Hughart said the facility is usually over its 282-inmate capacity. To catch the overflow, Muskogee County pays Craig County to house some inmates in its jail.
As of Friday, the Muskogee County Jail had 287 inmates, including 48 DOC prisoners.
“The state saves millions a year by leaving them in our jails for $27 a day. The longer we keep them, the more money it saves the state. That’s a fact,” Pearson said.
Osage County: Undersheriff Lou Ann Brown said she has dealt with similar issues surrounding the jail’s DOC-ready population.
“We have been able to keep it under control, but we do have 26 inmates ready to go to the DOC right now,” she said. “So far we’ve been able to manage, but it’s pushing the limit for us.”
Brown expressed frustration with the DOC’s inconsistency regarding which inmates it requests for transport to prison.
“There’s no set schedule; we just have to wait for them to contact us and tell us who to bring,” she said. “The time before last, we took some (inmates) down that they told us to bring, but when we got there they wouldn’t take them, so we had to bring them back.”
Osage County has 17 detention officers who keep watch over about 130 prisoners. The official jail capacity is 142 prisoners, and it is often over capacity on weekends and after warrants sweeps, Brown said.
Washington County: Before Washington County’s new 226-bed county jail opened nearly two years ago, the old jail routinely accommodated about twice the number of inmates as its official capacity, Undersheriff Steve Johnson said.
“We had 72 beds. We were farming out inmates to other counties as far away as Craig County,” he said. “We were paying them money to keep our inmates. ... And we were transporting back and forth to bring (inmates) to court.”
As of Friday, Washington County had 185 inmates in custody, and about 35 of those were ready for transport to prison, Johnson said. He, like Brown, said he wished the DOC had more regularity when deciding to take prisoners.
“There’s no real strategy to (DOC transport),” he said. “We’ve never experienced an issue of anyone being turned away, but we have experienced times we’ve had scheduled chain pools (of inmates), and they’ve canceled the whole chain pool.
“In the two or three times we’ve gotten up to 200, we’ve called DOC and they’ve been responsive in getting DOC inmates out of here so we can get our numbers down.”
Johnson said he tries to have four detention officers working inside at all times. The jail has 23 staff members, including nurses.
Pawnee County: Although the county is running about double the number of DOC-ready inmates it had about a year ago, it is still under the jail’s 110-inmate capacity, spokesman Mike Waters said.
The jail averages 22 to 30 DOC-ready inmates in a population that runs between 65 and 85.
Okmulgee County: The Okmulgee County Jail has a contract with the DOC to keep 26 medium-security inmates. It receives $27 per day for each one, which equates to $256,230 annually, according to Tulsa World records.
The jail’s last inmate count was 263 - 37 more than its official capacity of 226, spokesman John Martin said.
Despite the overcrowding, which creates additional work for the jail’s 29 staff members, Martin said the county is lucky in comparison to others in the state.
“I wish we weren’t overcrowded as often as we are, but we feel confident. There’s always room for improvement, and that’s what we try to do,” he said.
“Compared to some other places like Tulsa County, we’re dealing with a relatively small number. Our numbers tend to be quite substantially smaller because we are a county of about 40,000 people.”
Area jail capacities and inmate counts as of June 21
Creek County
Capacity: 346
Inmate count: 315 to 320 on average
Muskogee County
Capacity: 282
Inmate count: 287
Okmulgee County
Capacity: 226
Inmate count: 263
Osage County
Capacity: 142
Inmate count: 130
Pawnee County
Capacity: 110
Inmate count: 65-85 on average
Rogers County
Capacity: Space for 250, accommodations for 200
Inmate count: 200 or more daily
Tulsa County
Capacity: 1,717
Inmate count: 1,744
Washington County
Capacity: 226
Inmate count: 185-190 on average
Source: County sheriffs, undersheriffs and administrators