By Kevin Canfield
Tulsa World
TULSA, Okla. — Tulsa County Sheriff Stanley Glanz asked a court Tuesday to order the Department of Corrections to pick up all state inmates awaiting transfer to state prisons from the Tulsa Jail.
“We’re basically looking for some direction from the court to order DOC to take their inmates, which in turn will reduce our population to a manageable number,” said Undersheriff Tim Albin.
The injunction request, filed in Tulsa County District Court, came on the 122nd straight day the jail has been over its 1,714-inmate capacity, according to the lawsuit.
Albin said the jail’s inmate population as of mid-day Tuesday was 1,792, with 160 to 170 of the inmates being held for the Department of Corrections.
The lawsuit does not seek to permanently remove DOC inmates from the jail but to require that they be removed once they are judged and sentenced and thus eligible to be moved to prison.
In an affidavit attached to the lawsuit, Glanz states that the jail “regularly houses DOC-ready inmates for weeks and months after (the same inmates) have been sentenced to imprisonment in the state prison system because the DOC refuses to timely schedule and receive said inmates.”
DOC spokesman Jerry Massie said there is a simple explanation for why nearly 1,800 DOC-ready inmates are backed up in county jails statewide.
“We don’t have any place to put them,” he said.
State prisons, which house more than 25,000 inmates, were at more than 98 percent capacity Tuesday, Massie said.
‘Hopefully, the court will give us some direction on how to handle them in the future. The court may say, “Tulsa County, you are stuck.” ’
UNDERSHERIFF TIM ALBIN
That leaves about 700 open beds, but Massie said that does not mean 700 DOC-ready inmates can be pulled from county jails across the state.
“You just have to have the right bed at the right security level of the offender that is coming in,” he said. “It’s not just as simple as putting them in.”
Massie said the 700 figure is deceiving.
For starters, there are another 600 inmates - beyond those in county jails - in the DOC system who are out for court dates or who have been hospitalized but will brought back to prison, Massie said.
Meanwhile, the state is reducing the number of inmates at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester from 900 to 600, and any effort to put more inmates in private prisons would require a reallocation of funds.
The Tulsa Jail’s average daily inmate count has been over capacity for nearly a year, causing cost overruns of more than $600,000 in fiscal year 2013.
Albin said DOC inmates put a strain on the jail budget because the state pays the county only $27 a day each to hold them.
“And our costs are at least twice that amount and probably more,” Albin said.
The overcrowding has been more than a financial burden, according to the lawsuit.
Overcrowding at the jail violates state health and fire standards, “lowers the inmate-to-staff ratio, necessarily results in inmates sleeping in mass in the dayroom area, increases the likelihood of violence, mistakes and injury to inmates and staff, lowers employee morale and makes it difficult to recruit and retain detention officers,” the lawsuit states.
Even if DOC were to pull all of its inmates from the jail immediately, it would simply bring the jail population in line with its functioning capacity of 1,650, Albin said.
“And hopefully, the court will give us some direction on how to handle them in the future,” he said. “The court may say, ‘Tulsa County, you are stuck.’ ”
Massie said DOC is already pulling more inmates from the Tulsa Jail than it typically would, and that has consequences for other county jails.
“We have to cancel other county (pickups) and those sorts of things,” he said.
And at least once a week, according to Massie, a county jail will invoke the 72-hour rule, which requires DOC to pick up within 72 hours the number of inmates equal to the number of inmates the jail is over capacity.
Albin said the Sheriff’s Office invokes the rule almost weekly but that it doesn’t solve the overcrowding problem because it only lowers the jail population to capacity.
“And then I get another 100 DOC inmates, and I’m right back where I was,” he said.
The Sheriff’s Office has had a good relationship with DOC, but it owes it to the residents it serves, the inmates in its care and the employees who run the jail to get the inmate count down, Albin said.
“DOC overcrowding is not our problem,” he said.