Jail backlog
By World's Editorials Writers on Sep 14, 2013, at 2:27 AM Updated on 9/14/13 at 4:27 AM
Editorials
The 6,300 employees at the American Airlines Maintenance Facility in Tulsa could use some certainty, but they're going to have to wait.
The loss of 12 lives, 13 counting the suspect, in the Navy shipyard shootings Monday is tragic. With each killing spree the natural reaction is to search for the motive or the psychological reason for such a horrific event.
Tulsa Sheriff Stanley Glanz should be feeling good about an Oklahoma County judge's recent ruling that may make the Department of Corrections pay more for the pleasure of keeping its inmates in the Bryan County Jail.
After years of overcrowding and financial strain caused in part by a chronic DOC-backlog of inmates, Glanz in July filed his own lawsuit in Tulsa County District Court seeking relief. That request is pending. Glanz already believed he was on firm footing, citing a 2007 appeals court ruling, applying to all counties, which limited DOC-ready inmates' stay in county jails to 45 days. Some DOC inmates have remained in the Tulsa Jail for as long as 180 days before they were transported to prison.
The DOC backlog creates overcrowding and a financial burden. DOC pays far less than what it costs the Tulsa Jail to feed and house inmates. Sheriffs including Glanz and the recently retired sheriff in Bryan County have complained that the amount DOC pays is less than what they receive from other outside clients who want to keep inmates in the county jail.
The backlog is not entirely the fault of DOC, which, with nearly 26,000 inmates behind bars, faces its own overcapacity problems and financial woes. For decades, the agency has consistently been forced to seek a supplemental appropriation just to get it through the fiscal year.
DOC's only the innkeeper and the inn is perpetually full. Yet the inmates keep arriving.
The real problem rests with the Legislature. Lawmakers refuse to fund DOC at adequate levels or to sufficiently fund prison reform measures it passed nearly two years ago to reduce the nonviolent offender population by having those offenders serve their sentences in a less expensive, more productive setting.
The Legislature instead operates on the cheap, putting public safety at risk by keeping prisons over capacity, which causes jail backlogs. In turn, the backlogs overburden jailers like Sheriff Glanz.
We've said it before and we'll say it again: Maintaining the fourth-highest per-capita incarceration rate in the nation comes with costs. It keeps Oklahoma's prisons perpetually full with the overflow crowd waiting around in county jails. Somebody has to pay for it.
Editorials
The 6,300 employees at the American Airlines Maintenance Facility in Tulsa could use some certainty, but they're going to have to wait.
The loss of 12 lives, 13 counting the suspect, in the Navy shipyard shootings Monday is tragic. With each killing spree the natural reaction is to search for the motive or the psychological reason for such a horrific event.
