Private prisons certain to play important role

OUR VIEWS | NO CHANCE OF STATE COPYING FEDERAL PLAN

OFFICIALS with the U.S. Justice Department announced plans recently for the agency to eventually end its use of private prisons. The reason? A steady decline in the number of federal inmates in recent years.

It would be nice if someday Oklahoma didn’t need to rely on private prisons, but that may never happen. Or if it does, it almost certainly will be many, many years from now, because what’s transpiring at the state level shows no sign of mirroring federal trends.

Sally Yates, deputy U.S. attorney general, noted in the agency’s announcement Aug. 18 that private prisons played an important role from 1980 to 2013, when the federal prison population grew by a whopping 800 percent to 220,000 inmates. Since 2013, however, the inmate count has fallen to 195,000.

Yates also said private prisons don’t maintain the same level of safety and security as those run by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. This is similar to what Joe Allbaugh, director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, said in proposing that the DOC lease the empty private prison in Sayre in order to transfer inmates out of Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite. Allbaugh says his agency can do a better job than private prisons, and at less cost.

The DOC’s board approved Allbaugh’s plan to transfer inmates from Granite to Sayre, in order to make room at Granite for inmates who were staying in community work centers. Those centers have been closed.

But Oklahoma’s use of privately run prisons, which began under former Gov. Frank Keating in the mid1990s, is sure to continue for a good long while, simply because the need is there.

According to the DOC, roughly 5,900 state inmates are housed at private prisons in Cushing, Holdenville and Lawton (and another 1,500 or so are in private halfway houses). The total represents about one-quarter of the roughly 27,000 state inmates who are behind bars.

The Justice Department’s news won’t force employees at the one private prison in Oklahoma that houses federal inmates (it’s in Hinton) to look for new work any time soon. This is because the prison is under contract with the feds until 2020, and has a five-year renewal option after that.

Likewise, those who staff the private prisons in Lawton, Cushing and Holdenville can rest easy. Unlike the federal prison population, Oklahoma’s state prison population has only continued to grow over the past 30 years, and it shows no real sign of slowing significantly.

Oklahoma’s state prisons now stand at 109 percent of capacity, which is actually down a bit from just a few months ago.

However, roughly 1,400 state inmates are being held in county jails awaiting transfer into state facilities. As those transfers are completed, the prison capacity percentage will climb again.

The Legislature has approved small reform measures in the past few years that were designed to curb the prison population growth, but it will take sweeping changes to produce a decline in the population and reduce the crime rate.

Ultimately, it will also take money (and the political will) to build new state prisons to replace the many aging structures in the system.

Thus, private prisons will continue as a necessary piece of the corrections equation in Oklahoma.