Prisons chief aims to release some nonviolent offenders
Facing the challenges of a prison population that has been bloated for years, Oklahoma Department of Corrections officials say with no help from the state Legislature they are now considering options to “open the back door.”
The department is developing a program to allow a select group of nonviolent inmates to leave state prisons and finish their sentences in community supervision programs, administrators told the Oklahoma Board of Corrections Tuesday at its monthly meeting.
“What we have not done in recent history is open the back door to any great degree,” said Laura Pittman, director of population, programs and strategic planning. “What we’re looking at is opening the back door with highly selected inmates.”
Pittman estimated there are about 1,500 inmates eligible for community supervision, such as GPS monitoring or halfway houses, who can qualify for release based on good behavior credits, as long as a community program is available. Under the proposal, eligible inmates would have to be within 18 months of release and have no violent or sexual crime convictions. There are currently more than 26,000 inmates in Oklahoma’s prison system.
However, Pittman said those numbers are based on the department’s outdated offender management system. She expects once field interviews are done, 30 to 50 percent of those 1,500 inmates will be found ineligible due to misdemeanor domestic violence charges and victim protection orders that are not registered in the prison system’s database.
The department is legally left with few options to address its population, Director Joe Allbaugh told the board. The department spent $1.6 million in June housing more than 1,600 inmates in county jails due to a lack of prison beds, Allbaugh said, and there is not time to wait for the state Legislature to pass meaningful criminal justice reform.
“We as an agency, and, more importantly, we as a state, we need to undertake these difficult decisions, even though at the end of the day none of the options are anything that anybody can really enjoy,” he said in an exacerbated tone.
“I’m not trying to throw the Legislature under the bus, but somebody has got to make a move here ... or there’s going to be a serious event,” Allbaugh told reporters after the meeting. “We’re just trying to be proactive in thinking a different way.”
While support for criminal justice reform has increased in recent years, with Gov. Mary Fallin frequently giving her public support for reform this year, advocates and state officials say the Oklahoma Legislature has failed to pass meaningful reform.
Allbaugh hopes the proposal will be ready to present for a vote at the September Board of Corrections meeting and be implemented by year’s end.
The department can only alleviate some of the population pressure, said board member Adam Luck, but it has to bear the burden of the entirety of Oklahoma’s criminal justice system.
“We’re all frustrated,” he said following the meeting.
Luck said although the proposed program is still being formulated, he is supportive of doing whatever is within the department’s legal ability.
“The reality is if we could solve this problem, we would have done it a long time ago. This is definitely not going to solve the problem,” he said.