OK – Prison Population Legislative Inaction
A state Board of Corrections member on Friday called legislative inaction on proposals to reduce the prison population shameful. News in the Tulsa World.
Board member Robert Rainey said the Department of
Corrections submitted to lawmakers a list of evidence-based, best-practices suggestions to reduce the prison population and lower incarceration costs.
Fourteen bills were introduced in the current legislative session; only one remained alive after Thursday’s deadline for measures to make it out of their chamber of origin.
“To see these fail out of the starting gate is frustrating,” Rainey said at a Board of Corrections meeting. He said board members might have been naive to believe that the Legislature would be “more productive.”
He said the Department of Corrections has cut to the bone and eliminated programs in the face of required budget reductions and added that he hoped the public and offenders would not be hurt as a result.
“If that happens, it is no one’s fault but the Legislature,” Rainey said. “It is a failure of legislative leadership, and it is shameful.” The agency’s staff levels are 1,411 employees fewer than the authorization of 5,895.
Board member David Henneke said the Department of Corrections can’t continue to lose employees and keep the public safe. “Someone at the Capitol has got to understand we can’t continue the way it is, or someone is going to die,” he said.
Henneke noted that the only measure still alive — Senate Bill 2292 — would create a Drug Offenders Sentencing Task Force. “We are tired of task forces,” he said, adding that such groups spend money and produce no results.
Lawmakers are more worried about campaigning than addressing critical issues, Henneke said. They don’t want to pass measures because they are afraid that doing so will harm their re-election bids, he said.
“It is about time these people started to do what is best for the state of Oklahoma, not what is best for their campaigns,” he said.
Senate President Pro Tem Glenn Coffee, R-Oklahoma City, said the comments from board members are one more example of growing frustration with a difficult budget year.
“I certainly understand that part,” he said. Coffee said most of the recommendations wouldn’t have affected this year’s budget and that some of the suggestions would threaten public safety.
He said he doesn’t think the agency is making adequate use of private prison beds and halfway houses to reduce costs.
An MGT of America audit of the agency, requested by the Legislature and released in 2008, noted that the state’s standards for putting offenders in community facilities and halfway houses rank “among the most liberal community placement criteria in the nation, allowing some offenders to be placed in a community setting as much as eight years before the end of their sentences.”
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