Even with the slight decrease, the number of inmates in state institutions — 1,404,053 — is equivalent to locking up every man, woman and child in Philadelphia.

Last year, 26 states housed fewer inmates than they did the year before, according to a recent report by the Pew Center on the States. Twenty-four states, including Oklahoma, continued to add inmates — some with a vengeance.

As of Dec. 31, Oklahoma had 26,397 inmates, up about 530 inmates from 2008. That 2.1 percent increase might not sound so bad unless you consider that the prison system:

• Is at 99 percent capacity with 1,500 inmates backed up in county jails
• Is down 700 corrections officers
• Is in a state that has a $1.2 billion revenue shortfall going into the new fiscal year beginning July 1

Oklahoma is tough on crime. Its Legislature, in fact, is habitually TOC, in good times and in bad, and especially in election years. As one retired lawmaker put it: “We’ve felonized just about everything but flatulence and I hear that’s coming soon.”

Even with a funding crisis, the drumbeat to felonize more crimes — 26 — and to enhance penalties for existing crimes — 19 more — continued this legislative session.

Board of Corrections member David Henneke recently called the prison population levels “beyond critical.” Board member Robert Rainey complained lawmakers had mostly ignored the board’s suggestions on ways to save money.

Several states,the Pew report aid, have enacted reforms designed to give taxpayers a better return on their public safety dollars. Strategies include:

• Diverting low-level offenders and probation and parole violators from prison
• Strengthening community supervision and re-entry programs
• Accelerating the release of low-risk inmates who complete risk-reduction programs

Oklahoma has adopted some of those policies but not in great enough numbers to make a major difference.

About 90 percent of the offenders we lock up eventually get out and live among us. But the state spends relatively little money treating inmates for addictions or training them for jobs. And, we make it impossible for most felons to find employment when they do get out. So, too many career criminals take up where they left off when released because they have no other skills and drug abusers return to their addictions. It’s a sure-fire combination for keeping the prisons full.

In the past 20 years, corrections costs nationally have quadrupled and account for one of every 15 state general fund discretionary dollars. Corrections represents the second fastest-growing category of state budgets behind Medicaid.

The Pew report, however, found that the public is warming to prison alternatives.

“The public is supportive of using community corrections rather than prison for nonviolent offenders,” authors said. For instance, in a 2007 voter poll, 71 percent of Texas respondents preferred a mandatory intensive treatment program as an alternative to prison, a level of support that increased to 83 percent when respondents were told the diversion of lower-level offenders could help avert $1 billion in new prison costs.

Declining state revenues are starting to make policy leaders realize that the public’s support of incarceration may wane when it’s done on a scale that robs mightily from other state services.

Advances in supervision technology, including GPS monitors, faster drug tests and ATM-like reporting kiosks, offer authorities new technologies to monitor the whereabouts and activities of offenders in the community.

“These capabilities are giving lawmakers, judges and prosecutors greater confidence that they can protect public safety and hold offenders accountable with sanctions other than prison,” Pew authors said. Policy leaders are realizing that they can effectively reduce their prison populations, and save public funds without sacrificing public safety.

“That’s a drastically different policy environment than the one that existed in the 1970s and 1980s, when states decided that building more and more prison cells was the answer to crime,” authors said.

For some offenders incarceration is the appropriate punishment. Other offenders might serve their debt to society through less costly means, freeing up funds for other priorities such as seeing that students are educated, that roads, bridges and other infrastructure are maintained, that the elderly and fragile are protected and that the health care system is adequate.

In punishing lawbreakers it’s important to distinguish between those we fear and those we’re just mad at. We have to prioritize spending. Do we throw Bubba in prison or do we throw grandma out on the street? When we put people behind bars who might be punished through less expensive means, we sometimes end up punishing ourselves.

The House Appropriations Committee voted 12-9 against Senate President Pro Tem Glenn Coffee’s joint resolution, which called for a public vote on an amendment to the state constitution.

Another state agency merger bill that would consolidate the Scenic Rivers Commission with the Oklahoma Department of Tourism narrowly passed the committee.

Lawmakers are considering merging several state agencies as they grapple with a $1.2 billion shortfall in next year’s budget.

In other legislative action Wednesday, the full Senate approved a bill to exempt animal husbandry, or livestock breeding, along with horseshoeing and teeth filing from the Oklahoma Veterinary Practices Act.

The proposal to merge the Pardon and Parole Board ran into trouble when several senators voiced concern it could create a conflict of interest for DOC personnel to decide which inmates should be paroled. Currently, that function is performed by investigators with the Pardon and Parole Board.

“I could see the department being under pressure to release inmates to get the numbers down to make budget,” said Sen. Kenneth Corn, D-Poteau. “I think we’re better served with an independent Pardon and Parole board.”

Sen. Anthony Sykes, who carried the bill, said the proposal eliminates a duplication of services performed by employees at the two agencies and would save the state about $500,000 each year. Sykes says the merge would eliminate the need for a director and general counsel at the Pardon and Parole Board.

“It’s efficiency of government that we’re looking for,” said Sykes, R-Moore. “I think they’re both performing the same function.”

The practice of filing horses’ teeth, or teeth floating, has been a source of controversy at the Legislature since rodeo star Bobby Griswold was arrested last year and charged with a felony count of practicing veterinary medicine without a license.

Griswold, who has lobbied for a change in state law, later pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of possession of a dangerous drug without a prescription and received a deferred sentence.

“They obviously wanted to make an example out of me because I was high-profile,” said Griswold, who was in the Senate gallery when the bill passed. It now heads to the House.

Sen. Mike Schulz, who authored the bill, said Griswold’s prosecution made it clear the law should be changed.

“That sent shock waves across Oklahoma among livestock producers who were doing something they’ve always done,” said Schulz, R-Altus.

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.”

The list of felons whose names match those of state lawmakers includes six murderers, four rapists, 58 burglars and 17 embezzlers, to name a few.

While none of the current state lawmakers are felons, determining the background of any future political candidates or other public employees with any certainty would be more difficult if a bill introduced this year becomes law, government openness advocates say.

Senate Bill 1753 by Sen. Debbe Leftwich, D-Oklahoma City, has triggered a debate regarding limiting access to certain public employee records.

Leftwich has said she authored the bill, which would make secret public employees’ birth dates, over identity theft concerns. The Oklahoma Public Employees Association and State Troopers Association favor the bill.

The state’s two largest newspapers — the Tulsa World and The Oklahoman — and the Oklahoma Press Association have argued against passage of the bill.

OPA lobbyist Mark Thomas has said keeping public employees’ dates of birth public is critical to the media. Reporters
use birth dates to confirm or exclude individuals when researching public employees’ pasts.

The bill, if approved, also would nullify a recent opinion issued by the state attorney general’s office, which indicated that state agencies should assume that birth dates are public unless the state Open Records Act or other pertinent statutes close them.

The Dec. 8 opinion indicates “since dates of birth are not declared by the Legislature to be confidential, the presumption of the law is that they are public and should be released upon request.”

The public employees’ union has argued that the dates of birth should be made secret to protect workers’ personal safety and their identity from theft. In arguing for closure of the records, the association has not cited a single case in which an employee’s identity was stolen using public records.

The state Open Records Act already keeps secret several types of records related to public employees. The list of confidential records includes public employees’ home addresses, telephone numbers, Social Security numbers, work evaluations, internal personnel investigations and payroll deductions.

News organizations routinely use birth dates when examining large computerized lists of public employees’ names and comparing them with computerized prison and arrest records. The World has used the process to help identify felons who worked with vulnerable populations such as school bus drivers and nursing home employees.

Birth dates were utilized in a 1998 Tulsa World series that identified more than 200 school employees who had past brushes with the law.

A former Tulsa World reporter who worked on the series, now on the Washington Post investigative staff, said making dates of birth secret will make it harder for news organizations to do their jobs and may have unintended consequences.

“Every time lawmakers whittle away at access to public records, it gets more difficult for journalists to report fully — and accurately — on the workings of government,” said the former World reporter, David S. Fallis.

Leaving dates of birth public also protects public employees with common names from being linked to others who may have past criminal records, Fallis said. As an example, having just a first and last name would lead to three dozen state lawmakers’ names being matched with 206 state felons.

House member Mike Brown has the distinction of perhaps having one of the more common names among legislators. So it should come as no surprise that there are 68 Michael Browns who are Oklahoma felons.

Sometimes having a middle name doesn’t distinguish either. There are seven Michael R. Browns who share the same middle initial as the lawmaker.

Even having a year of birth does not always help distinguish two people. There are two Michael Browns who are felons and share the same year of birth as the non-felon legislator. One of the felon Michael Browns with the same birth year is a murderer. Rep. Brown, D-Tahlequah, could not be reached for comment.

Joey Senat, an associate professor of journalism at Oklahoma State University and former president of FOI Oklahoma Inc., said the felon-legislator matching exercise “demonstrates you can be mistaken for someone who has committed a crime if you have the same name.”

“So having that date of birth as a secondary identifier, it’s a way to distinguish between people,” Senat said. “And in the end it protects your privacy.”

Senat said FOI Oklahoma, a freedom of information organization, doesn’t dismiss the identity theft problem.

“But the reality is, we’ve got a lot of experts that say a date of birth is not going to be used to steal a person’s identity,” Senat said. Ironically, birth dates already are easily obtainable for most lawmakers.

The Oklahoma Almanac, produced by the state Department of Libraries, includes biographical information submitted by every current state lawmaker. Eighty-five percent of the 149 members of the Legislature included their full date of birth with their self-contributed biographies.

Bill Young, public information manager for the libraries department, said he was not aware of any identity theft issues or other problems that have arisen from the publication of the lawmakers’ birth dates, which are not requested by the almanac’s editors.

The bill awaits action in the House after it was approved Feb. 18 by a 44-0 vote in the Senate. If passed by the House, the measure will return to the Senate for consideration

Corrections Department spokesman Jerry Massie said Friday that even though the agency is slated to receive a supplemental appropriation from the Legislature, officials still had to fill an $11 million gap after being told to trim their budgets by 10 percent for the rest of the fiscal year.

Massie says DOC Director Justin Jones told the Oklahoma Board of Corrections that 39 of the affected workers accepted early retirement buyouts. He says no corrections officers were included in the cuts.

Massie says the agency received a $503 million appropriation for the fiscal year, but the cuts mean officials will have about $48 million less to spend.

Furloughs which had been scheduled to begin next month for state Department of Corrections employees have been lifted at least until the beginning of the next fiscal year, which begins on July 1.

The planned furloughs were lifted due to an agreement between Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry and the state legislative leadership for a $7.2 million supplemental appropriation to the DOC.

In McAlester that means DOC employees at Oklahoma State Penitentiary, the Jackie Brannon Correctional Center, the District Three Probation and Parole offices and the DOC regional office, are no longer facing the furloughs, or unpaid days off work— at least until after June 30, when furloughs could come up again because of the new 2010-2011 budget.

The Department of Corrections plans to begin furloughing all of its 4,514 employees starting in March to deal with budget cuts.

Some 119 employees took an early buyout offer as the agency worked to trim its budget, DOC Director Justin Jones said.

And if his budget is further cut by the minimum 7.5 percent he was told to expect in the next fiscal year, Jones said, the Corrections Department also will have to lay off 459 employees.

“That is not crying wolf,” Jones said during a regular Board of Corrections meeting at the Lexington Assessment and Reception Center.

The agency also may close some prisons by increasing capacity at others, he said.

State agencies have been told to reduce their budgets as a result of declining revenue.

The cuts had been 5 percent starting in August but rose to 10 percent for December and January. Assuming that the cuts revert to 5 percent in February and stay there until the end of the fiscal year on June 30, the agency will have cut $41 million from a $503 million budget, Jones said.

Since July 1, the Department of Correction has added 709 inmates, DOC chief of operations Ken Klinger said.

The prison system is operating at 100 percent capacity, Jones said.

The board’s suggestions on ways to curb the growing prison population and reduce costs don’t seem to interest lawmakers or state leaders, Corrections Board member David Henneke said.

Board member Robert Rainey said he was “surprised, shocked and dismayed” by the response the agency has gotten from the Legislature.

He said sentencing reform will come only after a federal judicial order requires lawmakers to spend money.

“The Legislature wants to incarcerate low-risk offenders and not pay for it,” Rainey said. “It is shameful. I am embarrassed.”

The Department of Corrections can’t do more with less forever, he said.

“At the end of the day, it is a failure of our leadership,” Rainey said.

Board member Ted Logan said he envisions a scenario in which someone is hurt or killed as a result of the cuts, followed by finger-pointing.

“I hope something gives before it reaches that point,” he said.

Think of Unit 7 at Lexington Prison as a transfer station for thousands of inmates who enter the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. Among those who enter the gates and live beyond the razor wire are men convicted of sex crimes, drugs and even murder.

With sentences from several months to life, hope is sometimes difficult to see. That is until, in walks a lady.

“She’s brought all that out you just want to be a nice person anymore,” says Wade Adams. “So, Lady has taught you to be a gentleman? Ahh. I think she has.”

Wade is still a work in progress. He’s doing time for murder. He trains dogs for placement with senior citizens and the disabled. He’s one of ten men who help rehabilitate abused and abandoned animals.

“And most of them do come here with some issues,” says Lee Fairchild who runs the program called Friends For Folks.

The dogs are trained in basic obedience and also housebroken. The animals live with the inmates for weeks sometimes months. Without question, the program is life changing. For the trainer, the dog, and folks like 84-year-old Artie Nixon.

She makes her way to a 30-pound border collie whom she wants to share her home.

“She’s scared right now,” Artie says. “But we’ll bond together. It won’t take too long,  a few days.”

“It’s a proven fact that when an elderly person or any person for that matter pets a dog, their blood pressure goes down. They start feeling a little bit better,” says Fairchild.

Artie’s health is changing and she needs companionship.

“Well with my problem of hard of hearing, I don’t always hear my door bell and I don’t always hear my telephone. So I know I’ll watch her expression and then I’ll find out what it is.”

But you say it’s just a dog? Well no, it isn’t. At times, it’s unclear who benefits most from the training, the dog or the inmate.

“It just makes them a lot more responsible and caring,” Fairchild says.

And better prepared for the outside world, and better equipped to handle their emotions — men like Larry Raffaell, who is already serving 33 years for murder and been denied parole more than a dozen times.

“I could watch TV and not get emotional at all, anymore anytime an emotional program comes on I’m finding I’m wiping tears, I got something in my eye,” he says.

Inmates like Larry learn to value another life and strangely it begins with an animal. Then they have to let it go.

“I hope I don’t cry. It’ll be alright. Hopefully, the next one comes in real soon.”

The Friends for Folks program costs four-thousand dollars a year to operate and the animals are free to qualifying applicants.

Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections is currently in contact with five other states — Kansas, Michigan, Nevada, Oklahoma and Virginia — and has asked the states their specific proposals for housing the prisoners, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania corrections department said Thursday.

Michigan is actively pursuing a deal with Pennsylvania, according to Russell Marlan, a spokesman for Michigan’s Department of Corrections. The state has excess prison capacity and is looking to cut $120 million from its $2 billion annual prison budget. Bringing in prisoners from other states would also preserve hundreds of corrections jobs in the state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation. “We will be going after this aggressively,” Mr. Marlan said Thursday. The Obama administration is also considering housing some of the detainees being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Michigan. The administration is in the process of determining whether a maximum security facility in Standish, Mich., could house terrorism suspects. An alternative is the federal prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Like, Michigan, Virginia is also facing deficits. On Tuesday, Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said the state will close three correctional facilities due to budget woes. Kansas has considered shortening sentences for imprisoned criminals to cut costs and help close a budget gap.

“Nobody has said ‘yup, we’re going to do this,’” said Susan McNaughton, a Pennsylvania corrections spokeswoman. But Pennsylvania has already been forced to place 234 prison inmates in roughly a half a dozen county prisons, she said, due to overcrowding in prisons. “This will all have to be taken into consideration,” she said. “They’re looking at the opportunity that best fits them, and best fits fiscally,” said Mr. Marlan. “We are interested and we are going to respond.”

Sheriff John Whetsel put a doomed tax initiative before voters in 2003, a proposal he now admits was flawed and lacked accountability. Current and former county officials said the timing might have been right, but the politics of the day killed any chance for a successful fix. Now that county officials are united behind the cause, the price tag appears out of reach.

If the county can’t come up with a solution that is palatable to voters, the federal government could mandate changes that would go on the county’s property tax rolls without giving voters or local officials any say.  “I think certainly the DOJ (Justice Department) is saying that there has been a lack of political will to see this resolved,” District 2 Commissioner Brian Maughan said.  “They are saying collectively it’s not been there and they are tired of messing with us and will take it into their own hands, which is the grave risk we run,” he said.

Whetsel’s 2003 proposal would have established a permanent two-fifths-cent countywide sales tax which he estimated would bring in $30 million a year. Whetsel would have used the money to hire more employees for the jail and deputies for his enforcement activities. The proposal did not include money for jail renovations or any oversight for how the money could be used.   Voters shot it down by a 4-to-1 margin.  County officials at the time were sharply divided …

Voter distrust after mistakes in the jail’s 1991 construction made it almost impossible to come up with a successful proposal.  “I think there is truth to the fact that the citizens put a lot of faith in county officials many years ago and county officials let them down,” Whetsel said. “As honest as I believe the county officials are now as a group, people have a long memory.”

County officials are now unanimous in their efforts to fix the jail. A process that began shortly after the Justice Department’s report a year ago led the county to hire a group of engineers to develop a plan for fixing the jail’s problems. But the $400 million price tag the group came up with is unacceptable, Maughan said. All three commissioners agreed voters will never approve such a plan and have asked the engineers to significantly trim their proposal to make it more reasonable. “We have to do something,” Maughan said. “We have to make some last-ditch effort before we just concede and allow DOJ to come in and take over.”