Oklahoma Criminal Defense Blog

When the big prison riot at North Fork Correctional Facility in Beckham County erupted in October, 2011, it required help from lots of law enforcement from surrounding communities.  The facility is owned by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), but the private prison does not have the wherewithal to put down a riot, especially one of this magnitude.  Forty six prisoners were injured, sixteen of them taken to local hospitals, and three of them were critically injured.

The Oklahoma Department of Corrections wants to know what happened.  None of the perpetrators has yet been prosecuted.   Department of Corrections did not have what it considers adequate reports, nor does the local  district attorney have reports adequate to prosecute anyone. Department of Corrections would like to demand more, but there is apparently a hole in the laws, such that Department of Corrections seeks an amendment in the laws for reporting by private prisons.

The proposed change in law would require a private prison to provide information to the Department of Corrections regarding an riot, escape “or other serious emergency and facility operations”  upon request of Department of Corrections.

A couple of months after the riot, neither the Department of Corrections nor local law enforcement had received any reports from CCA.  Now CCA says it has long since submitted its report.  However, the local prosecutor says he is still waiting for something in a form he can prosecute.

CCA sent its own investigators who compiled a 2,700 page report on the riot, and they delivered it several months after the riot.  One of the the problems is physical evidence needed for prosecutions.  It has been kept somewhere in lockers and has not been prepared for use in the courtroom.  The CCA investigators did not have the necessary forensic experience to prepare a case for the courtroom, or else they forgot what they once knew.  Assembling physical evidence, the testimony of witnesses and otherwise putting a case together for effective use before a jury is not just  an exercise in logic, nor are all the methods necessarily intuitive.  It requires experience to know how to do it.  Ask any criminal defense attorney.  Cases are won and lost every day in courtrooms from the success or failure to fit such pieces together.  Some of the physical evidence in this matter has just sat in a locker and was never sent to the laboratory for analysis.  That includes blood analyses and fingerprint comparisons.

What about the cost for all the local law enforcement required to put down the riot, a riot that took place on private property?  Apparently, it’s just the cost of doing business, since the CCA prison brings a $20 million per year payroll to Beckham County and is the largest employer in Sayre.  Obviously, the area residents consider the prison to be an economic contributor, so no one is complaining about the cost borne by local governments for the riot.  That is surely why the district attorney and the local law enforcement officials are now diligently down-playing any complaints about CCA.

Neither is anyone complaining that all the prisoners are from California, shipped here due to California’s overfull prisons.  Apparently, people believe that prisoners bring economic benefit whatever state they may come from.  But all 2,000 of those California prisoners at the North Fork Facility are projected to be gone by the end of 2013. The only issue officially from the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, is that private prisons are not required to provide sufficient reporting to the Department.

When talk turned to letting prison inmates out early with ankle monitors, who thought about losing money?  Apparently, the people who operate the private prisons who lose inmates from such a program.

On the first day of this month, the Department of Corrections implemented a new statute, HB 2131, that released on GPS monitoring those inmates convicted of non-violent crimes who were serving a sentence of less than five years and have only ninety days of their sentence left to serve.  The only recent change in the law is that it makes eligible those who have ninety days left on their sentences rather than 180 days.

The largest for-profit provider of halfway houses in the state of Oklahoma was so concerned about losing this business that they met with officials of the Department of Corrections, then met with the governor and the Speaker of the House, who was the author of HB 2131.  Avalon Correctional Services explained their concern, with a straight face as just a concern for public safety.  Speaker Steele explained that Avalon met with him just to be sure he understood how good their programs are.

The company has seen a big drop in its halfway house populations.  Their halfway house in Tulsa was only 60 percent to capacity this October versus 97 of capacity in October, 2010.  Since Department of Corrections pays Avalon $33.75 per day per inmate, the total drop could reach $120,000 per month for only one of the Avalon facilities.

The Department of Corrections claims to have 10 years of studies that show this type of release works.  The Department’s director, Justin Jones, said he got an avalanche of telephone calls for people concerned that hundreds of inmates would be released under the new law.  But, in fact, fewer than 170 inmates were released early for the GPS monitoring.

The new law is aimed at reducing the terrific costs of housing inmates in times of budget shortfalls.  It did not change who is eligible; it just changed time frame of remaining sentence from 180 days to 90 days.

The Department of Corrections claims this program has a 90 percent success rate for women and an 87 percent success rate for male inmates.   This is better than any of the specialty programs, like drug court or community sentencing, both of which are excellent programs with excellent track records.

Avalon helped address the state’s budget shortfalls two years ago when it agreed to accept a 5 ½ percent decrease in the per diem rate Department of Corrections paid for halfway house occupants.   The department budget fell from $503 million in 2010 to $462 this year.

Year after year, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections comes back to the legislature again and again for supplemental funding.  They can never get enough money.  It’s the same in every state.

“Corrections spending is a Pac Man in state budgets everywhere.  It’s eating into all other priorities,” Michael Thompson, executive director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center said.  He spoke earlier this week at a forum to discuss corrections policies.   He and other experts, discussing what other states are doing about problems in corrections, said Oklahoma legislators seem to be headed in the right direction.

This year the Oklahoma legislator has proclaimed corrections a top priority.  Its consumption of money has been a black hole for years, and there is no end in sight.  The prison population has been exploding from one of the highest rates of incarceration in the country.   The Speaker of the House said, “I don’t believe we can afford to continue on the path we are on.”   That is an understatement.

The experts offered some ideas from other states.  The state of Washington decided in 2002 to reduce sentences for drug offenders.  The cost savings were dedicated to drug courts.  The crime rate now is 43% lower than it was in 1980, yet spending for criminal justice has increased 117 % during that period.   The director of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, Steve Aos, offered a perspective.  “If you put everybody in prison, your crime rate will go to zero.  If you put nobody in prison, your crime rate is going to go up.  Where you want to be on that curve is a very important policy call,” he said.

That is why policy changes in the state of Washington have brought savings to the state budget.  Aos said the state’s budget deficit this year would be 25% greater if not for the savings from the changes in corrections policies.

Thompson said the state of Kansas is safer now even though it spends less on corrections.  The state of Kansas adopted changes similar to those of Washington, and its prison spending went down even as its crime rate went down.  He said Oklahoma has a huge reliance on prisons because it does not use enough other options in probation, parole and community sentencing or other alternate sentencings.

Among the proposals pending in Oklahoma are requiring more alternative and community sentencing and removing the governor from the parole process for nonviolent offenders.  Why take the governor out of the process?  The governor, like all politicians, cannot appear soft on crime.  That’s why the number of paroles has declined over the years, even while the legislature enacts harsher penalties and higher minimum sentences and the courts stuff more inmates into the system every year.  More in, fewer out.  It just cannot go on because we ran out of money a long time ago.

There were 2, 760 women in Oklahoma prisons in 2010.  Of that number, 1,744 or 63% were in need of substance abuse treatment, but programs are not available for them.  Education programs are even more scarce.   A substance abuse treatment program requires 4 to 12 months to complete.   Of the 885 women inmates released last year, only 28% of those who needed such a program had done so.

Substance abuse programs have a budget of $611,404 from state, federal and private funds.  Of that total, federal funds are $161,050 and $200,314 come from the George Kaiser Family Foundation.  The state must match any federal contributions

About 71% of women coming into prison need general education.  That is defined in terms of Department of Corrections programs as literacy, adult basic education and the GED (General Education Diploma).   There were 1,500 who did participate in one or more of the general education programs.

Inmates also have access to programs sponsored by Career Tech rather than the Department of Corrections.  Last year, 329 women participated in their programs in the electrical and manufacturing trades.  Inmates are discouraged from pursing the health and some other fields because of employment restrictions on those with felony convictions.  Of these, 222 completed their program, 82 are still working on it, and 22 did not complete it.  Incompletion can result from disciplinary action but also from transfer, discharge or parole.

Courses in manufacturing and computer skills are the most popular.  Manufacturing includes learning inventory and warehousing.

The Department of Correction spends $74,000 a year for basic education classes.  Career Tech spends $5.7 million on skills courses for all inmates, of which $627,513 is spend on programs for female inmates.  Male inmates makeup 90% of the total prisoner population in Oklahoma.

Every criminal defense attorney knows that substance abuse programs and education programs, especially literacy, cut recidivism.  Warehousing prisoners just prepares them for the next cycle back into  prison.  It’s always a question of money, of course.  But fitting a 13 month sentence into a 12 month program is a problem as well, when the first 2-3 months of the sentence are taken up with initial processing.   Thirteen months is the average sentence for a non-violent offender, which is what most drug offenders are, and, as noted above, it takes from 4 to 12 months to complete a substance abuse program.  So it’s not just money.  But the money is never there.