State’s aging prison facilities become growing problem
Prisons across Oklahoma are near or more than a century old, and most were never intended to house or rehabilitate state prisoners.
More than a century ago, around the time of statehood, The Indian Mission School Haloche Institute was opened in Taft. By 1909 it was an orphanage for deaf and blind children, and the building would serve as various children’s homes until the late 1980s. Today it houses more than 1,000 female inmates, nearly twice the number it is rated to hold.
In 1923, to meet the growing need for treatment, the state opened a tuberculosis sanitarium for black patients in Boley, one of about a dozen of the state’s remaining all-black towns. Two years later it became the State Training School for Negro Boys, and it remained a boy’s school until 1983. Today it houses more than 800 inmates, 25 percent more than it is rated to hold.
In 1904, three years before Oklahoma became a state, a county high school opened in Helena. The facility also served as a junior college and orphanage and until 1982 was a training school for boys operated by the Department of Human Services. Today it houses more than 1,300 inmates, about 400 more than it is rated to hold.
These facilities represent just a portion of prisons across Oklahoma that are near or more than a century old, and most were never intended to house or rehabilitate state prisoners. They illustrate a growing problem facing the Oklahoma Department of Corrections: a lack of sustainable infrastructure, in large part the result of decades of an ever-growing prison population without proactive budgeting.
Now the department finds itself in much the same situation it did in the late 1980s when the state began converting the buildings into prisons, and wardens and administrators worry if a fix isn’t found soon, a facility full of inmates could find itself inoperable at any moment.
Historical artifacts
Standing next to a wooden display case in his office, Warden William Monday talks about the various historical artifacts behind the polished glass. Bullets, cannon pins, belt buckles, bottles, all Civil War era. Before the William S. Key Correctional Center in Ft. Supply became a state prison, it was the grounds for Camp Supply, an Army supply base in the late 1800s. It operated for several decades as a mental health hospital starting a few years after the turn of the century.
It is not uncommon for such artifacts to turn up in inmate’s cells during surprise searches, Monday said. After all, they’re scattered across the prison yard, sometimes just below the surface.
In the middle of the prison grounds is a twostory house separated by a tall fence topped with razor wire. It’s faded blue paint is chipped and curling at the tears. General Custer once slept in the house, a relic of both the area’s history and a time when the state could afford to preserve such artifacts.
Walking the grounds, it’s easy to envision William S. Key’s days as a mental health hospital. The prison is spread out like a campus, small brick buildings separated by large expanses of grass, parking lots and trees. The dormitories have changed little since decades ago when they housed patients. The lack of air conditioners does not make them so different from cell blocks at newer prisons, but the drop ceilings do. Officers must check them daily for contraband.
The decades-old buildings are riddled with nooks and crannies where inmates can hide illegal drugs, paraphernalia, weapons or the occasional Civil War relic. But the undesirable layout is the least of Monday’s worries.
“I look out my office window to make sure it’s still standing,” he said.
Monday and his staff manage to fend off countless infrastructure needs every day, problems that could cripple the prison if not kept at bay. The plumbing is full of sediment, shrinking the channels inside the pipes and forcing the system to pump harder. The sediment weighs down the pipes, causing their braces to snap in a tunnel system that spreads throughout the grounds carrying steam, and it clogs his boiler system.
Two boilers, close to 40 years old, must accommodate the entire prison because a third one failed years ago.
“This is what keeps me up at night. This building,” Monday said, standing outside the powerhouse.
“It’s such a sensitive system that 24 hours a day I’ve got an inmate out there that does nothing but watch gauges and check temperatures,” he said.
If a boiler reaches a dangerous temperature the inmate on watch has a direct line to central control, a job that was given to a prison employee until about 10 years ago when staffing levels dropped too low.
Monday is also faced with the fact that utilizing a nearby modern transformer would overwhelm his outdated electrical system.
“The agency is going to have to address those needs in the near future,” he said. “Maybe not tomorrow, but with my powerhouse it could be as soon as tomorrow. It could run and not have any trouble for the next 10 years. It’s just a crap shoot, really.”
Boilers are also a problem at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. Two units at the maximum security facility run on a single boiler and a rented chiller that costs the department $7,000 a month.
“I go home every evening with my fingers crossed this valve doesn’t break or this lever doesn’t snap,” said Tim Grider, head of maintenance.
A chiller that size could probably make a single unit ice cold, he said, but trying to pump cool air into two barely keeps them from getting unbearably hot in the summer months. Throughout the facility windows are cracked, the bottoms of doors are rusted out, basements with tangled streams of exposed outdated wiring are prone to flooding, and several cell blocks and buildings are either too old or too deteriorated to house inmates.
Behind the prison stand two more testaments to the lack of funding to maintain historical grounds, the former prison rodeo arena and the original cell block for the inmates who built the penitentiary at the time of statehood.
By the time the inmates finished building the penitentiary in 1908, the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite had already been operating for three years. The reformatory holds 600 inmates today.
In one of the newer units at the state penitentiary, Grider watches water spew from seams in a water heater, leaving a puddle on the floor beneath it.
“I can plug it, fix it, but it’s not going to last 30 days,” he said. “So, to get it done I have to put a bid out for a total replacement.”
Even if a new heater, estimated at $38,000, was in the budget, it would take weeks, perhaps months, to be approved for purchase, ordered and installed.
“And, not only that, that’s just for one. I really need two of them,” Grider said.
“I hate to say this, but the old way of the Department of Corrections was get it fixed, get it going, we’ve got to have it going. They really didn’t care about the long term.”
Ken Klingler, warden of the John H. Lilley Correctional Center in Boley, could not agree more. Klingler said in the past, the department’s mentality was “You’re the warden, it’s your job, fix it. If you got to use bailing wire, fix it. If you’ve got to use barbed wire, fix it. If you’ve got to tape it together, fix it. If you’ve got to use PVC pipe, fix it. But don’t ask for more money.”
Lilley, the former sanitarium, is also laid out like a campus. The prison’s squat brick buildings are too small to house the number of inmates the facility has to hold, but somehow Klingler and his staff make it work.
“When I first started here this was a kitchen,” said Velvin Thomas, chief of security and 19-year veteran of the department, as he walks into a converted cell block. The former kitchen is so crammed with bunks that an officer’s line of sight is severely limited. The layout and the dropped ceilings make monitoring inmates difficult for the one officer assigned to the unit.
“This is not how we would design it, but when you take over a building you can’t come in and renovate it. We don’t have the money,” Klingler said. And, again, steady budget cuts and a lack of proactive funding make that seem impossible.
It’s easy to delay maintenance when you’re trying to make sure inmates are clothed, fed, and monitored, said Gregory Breslin, a deputy warden at the Eddie Warrior Correctional Center.
“When you’re short staffed, one of the areas that ultimately suffers is maintenance. You know, you can’t do without an officer, but you can do without a maintenance man,” Breslin said of the gradual reduction in the department’s workforce.
Water leaks in several of the facility’s flat roofs have caused walls to buckle and sent cracks throughout entire buildings. The small dorms now house 160 inmates each and lack a fire suppression system. Their old plumbing systems have become overwhelmed.
“It gets like a rain forest in here,” Breslin said while standing in the showers, where several toilets are out of order.
A lack of proper drainage and ventilation causes water to drip from the ceiling and bleed through the tile floor, adding to damage underneath the structure. In an attempt to stop the flow of water, maintenance staff has had to get creative, even resorting to coating the shower floors with the spray-on protector used to line truck beds.
When investigators with the American Corrections Association, a nonprofit that accredits prisons across the country, come to tour the facility, cracks in the structure can be covered with putty, but those fixes are purely cosmetic.
“We patch it up a couple days before they get here and it looks fine, but that doesn’t really solve the problem,” Breslin said.
And while the department’s prisons that were designed and built to house inmates are much newer, the years have not been kind to them. Over a few weeks in June and July, the department spent more than $74,000 restoring power or running water to three of the facilities.
Converted facilities
Many of Oklahoma’s prisons were converted from hospitals and schools in 1988, the year Gov. Henry Bellmon forced the state Legislature into
special session to address, in part, prison overcrowding. During the previous regular session, Democrats and Republicans had not been able to agree on funding for the state Corrections Department.
“One of the government’s most important duties is to help ensure the public safety of our citizens. We do this in many ways, but the final line of defense against dangerous criminals is the operation of our prisons,” Bellmon said when proposing the special session.
The Legislature eventually gave the department $17.7 million dollars, about half of what the department had hoped for.
James Saffle was warden of the state penitentiary at the time, and he would lead the department as director soon after. The converted facilities were so old even back then that they never seemed to him to be a viable long term solution to the department’s looming overcrowding problem.
“They were falling apart when we got them,” he said. “The state as a whole, and I’m not being critical it’s just true, the state as a whole has never had an intensive funding process that would maintain the infrastructure we own as a state. The perfect example of that is the state Capitol.”
Saffle said nothing much seems to have changed, the only difference being that the Democrats and Republicans have switched sides of the argument.
“The coin flipped over is all it is.”
“Those were terrible facilities,” said Lex Holmes, state finance director under Bellmon.
He and Bellmon had a tough time convincing lawmakers to look at prisons as infrastructure in the same way they did with roads or schools, Holmes said.
“The budget was so horrible that everything was deferred. You deferred all sorts of construction. Everywhere you turned capitol maintenance was deferred. There’s nothing very sexy about putting on a new roof, and putting on a new roof doesn’t put (an inmate) in a bed.”
Gary Maynard, director of the state Corrections Department in 1988, said many in state government saw corrections employees as resourceful and savvy enough to fix problems on the fly, and the perception made policymakers comfortable with keeping the budget flat year after year.
Being resourceful and hardworking is “a good culture and attitude to have,” Maynard said. “But when it comes to prisons you can only patch them up so many times.”
“It would be very easy for one of our facilities to become a tinder box in just a matter of seconds,” said Director Joe Allbaugh.
“If I could I would close a couple of others that need to be closed,” Allbaugh said. “The amount of money we are spending to keep McAlester open is unbelievable. It’s probably costing us anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000 a day to keep people in McAlester.”
Allbaugh estimated there is $2 billion in ignored maintenance systemwide.
“It’s a hard look at what reality is.”
Allbaugh said he is working on establishing a maintenance fund for the department, and in June he hired a superintendent of construction and maintenance to oversee the department’s facilities.
“You can’t refurbish these facilities, it’s too cost-prohibitive,” he said. “But just regular maintenance, there has not been a line item in the budget ever for maintenance. Now, how asinine is that? So, the agency is always on the back side of responding to a crisis. Sewer broke, water went out at Conner, and then you have to scramble to figure out how you’re going to have to pay for it.”
Maynard said Oklahoma was the only state of the four where he has served as prison director where the problems facing the department haven’t changed in decades.
“You hope that the efforts you make, if you make improvements to the system, they’ll have some lasting impact.”
But, he conceded, “I guess it hasn’t changed since I was there.”