Lawmaker seeks help advancing criminal justice reform measures
Frustrated by a lack of legislative action on criminal justice reform bills, state Rep. Bobby Cleveland announced Friday that he plans to ask House Speaker Charles McCall to reassign the bills to his House Public Safety Committee so they can get a hearing.
“This is very important,” said Cleveland, R-Slaughterville. “It’s important to the state of Oklahoma. We are in a budget crunch . ... We’re spending so much money incarcerating people that shouldn’t be there. It’s time that we take up and do this.”
Cleveland made his remarks at a hastily called news conference after state Rep. Scott Biggs, R-Chickasha, recessed a Conference Committee on Judiciary — Criminal Justice and Corrections that he chairs without taking up more than a half-dozen criminal justice reform measures, including four bills that Cleveland said are crucial to reform efforts.
Oklahoma voters expressed their desire for criminal justice reform in November when they approved two ballot initiatives designed to help ease the problem.
State Question 780 made certain low-level crimes misdemeanors rather than felonies, including simple drug possession and theft of items valued at less than $1,000. State Question 781 called for using the money saved by incarcerating less people to help fund drug
treatment and mental health programs to address root causes of crime.
Biggs suspended the committee meeting after the House went into session, stating that House rules prohibited the committee from continuing to meet while the full House was convened.
Biggs left open the possibility that he might reconvene the committee meeting later, but some reform advocates were skeptical about whether he ever planned hear the bills, noting that Biggs has expressed opposition to some of the reform provisions.
Biggs did not respond to a message seeking comment and House Speaker McCall was not immediately available for comment.
“The speaker is focused on budget negotiations,” Jason Sutton, spokesman for the speaker’s office said Friday. “The House will have time next week to deal with policy issues.”
Cleveland identified the four crucial criminal justice reform bills as House Bills 2281 and 2286, and Senate Bills 649 and 689.
“We need to have reform,” Cleveland said. “What we’re doing is not working. It’s disappointing that we met so long over the interim and then we get in here and try to get something passed to help our prison system, to save us money — that we’ve got people that’s holding it up.”
House Bill 2281 seeks to decrease the number of people incarcerated for low-value property crimes by making the theft of items valued at less than $1,000 a misdemeanor rather than a felony. The current felony threshold is $500. The bill also would take a tiered approach to the length of potential sentences to be handed down for thefts greater than $1,000, with longer sentences possible for crimes where the value of items stolen is greater.
House Bill 2286 is a wideranging bill that would require development of an administrative parole process, establish training and eligibility requirements for Pardon and Parole Board members and make nonviolent offenders eligible for parole after serving one-fourth of their sentences. The bill also would establish a geriatric parole process, prohibit inmates from being excluded from an electronic monitoring program because of an inability to pay, require the development of a matrix of incentives and sanctions to influence behavior of parolees and develop a system of graduated responses to technical parole violations.
Senate Bill 649 seeks to reduce the amount of extra prison time that nonviolent criminals can receive for being repeat offenders. The sentence for a repeat nonviolent offender would be limited to 1.25 times the maximum sentence that could be given to a first offender for the same crime.
Senate Bill 689 would allow judges and prosecutors more options in diverting people from prison to treatment and supervision programs. It also seeks to decrease financial barriers for convicted individuals seeking to re-enter society and expand the use of graduated sanctions and incentives.
The bills were created to carry out recommendations of a governor’s criminal justice reform task force that found Oklahoma’s prisons are overcrowded because the state has been handing down too many lengthy prison sentences for nonviolent crimes.
Without reform, Oklahoma is on pace to add 7,218 inmates over the next 10 years, requiring three new prisons and costing the state an additional $1.9 billion in capital expenditures and operating costs, the task force said.
Task force members said those costs could be averted and the prison population could be reduced 7 percent over the next decade through a combination of sentence reductions and other reforms, including increased funding for alternative mental health and substance abuse treatment programs.