- My name is Matt Elliot.
I am the Public Information Manager
for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.
There's a huge misperception about
what a Correctional Officer is and what they do.
A Correctional Officer is not a guard,
which is what people often think of.
They're not just standing there just watching inmates.
You'll be assigned to a housing unit
maybe where people are living.
You've got to take them in and out.
You've got to take them to get their medicine.
You've got to help them be sure they get fed,
kinda protect them from some the B.S. if you will
that can go on behind the wire.
It's at times a dangerous job.
It's a very important job.
It's also a job where you can help
impact people's lives.
These are all human beings.
A lot of them have done bad things,
but we need to be able to provide them a chance
to not only atone for what they've done,
but become a productive member of society
whenever they release.
And you can't do that with someone
who has been treated for their entire lives
like they're worse than dirt.
We train our C.O.s in a number of different things
related to looking after inmates.
We try to walk the line of being secure,
and protecting the public, but also understanding,
you treat someone like an inmate, they act like an inmate.
You treat 'em like a human being,
they act like a human being.
We had one instance where a staff member
assaulted an inmate who spat on him.
And we fired the heck out of that guy,
and we also prosecuted him,
prosecuted him with felony assault.
The system is set up to penalize incorrect people.
So that's plenty of punishment.
That's kind of one of the things
our training tries to address is proper
correctional practices and getting people
ready for re-entry.
We're having significant problems
recruiting people to come work here.
You have one Correctional Officer
looking after 150 inmates on a pod.
They're trained, we train and prepare people,
but they've got pepper spray, they've go at radio,
and that's it.
It's not a great ratio if you're 20-21 years old
and you're trying to look at a career opportunity,
especially for 13.70 some odd an hour.
So many of our facilities are out in these rural areas.
Those individuals are probably more likely
to go work on the oil fields where they will
make more money with less danger involved.
Some of our medium security prisons, one in particular,
we've actually had to shut down a housing unit there
because we don't have enough people
to effectively and safely staff it.
We could put inmates in it,
we certainly have enough inmates.
It makes it harder to control contraband
in and out of the facilities.
Contraband is a major problem.
It's a lot harder to control the thousands
of cell phones that will be coming in,
keep things like pot off the yard, meth.
A member of the public will drive by the facility,
throw something over a fence.
Or they'll place something, if it's not a secure facility,
at a particular spot.
Every now and then we'll staff be involved in it
and we prosecute them and fire the heck out of them
and prosecute them as well for that.
Almost all the violence that happens on the yard,
inmate on inmate, inmate on staff, is because of contraband.
Somebody gets indebted to somebody else
and they can't pay and so then violence ensues.
And if we don't have enough Correctional Officers
behind the wire to control that,
then it branches out into all of that,
it makes it all worse.
Under staffing doesn't just affect security,
it really affects too the programs that we can offer.
There might even be programs that are offered
by volunteers, but if we don't have enough
Correctional Officers we can't always
facilitate all of those things.
If we have more support staff and more trained professionals
who can come in and provide this program
to correct why people are here in the first place,
that goes a long way towards actually
helping us accomplish our mission.
One thing that was a little bit surprising
when I came here was how many people
can see the waste that goes on,
indiscriminately locking up people.
We might as well take a big pile of money and burn it.
If out goal is incarcerate everybody
who we're mad at for breaking the law,
then it works great.
But if the goal is to mete justice,
if it is to correct the reasons why
people end up in prison, then we are
failing the heck out of it.
We're just wasting resources.
We haven't fixed the whole reason why they're here.
It's only just recently in Oklahoma that we've
started leading the country in incarceration rate.
But if you look at things like our crime rate,
it's not like Oklahomans are more criminal.
When you look at that and you think
what the heck's going on.
It's because the state has favored
incarceration over other means, traditionally.
But for some offenders it isn't quite
the best approach because it doesn't address
some of the motivations that might lead
somebody to prison, like addiction.
Other people, on the other side of the issue especially,
people are trying to keep the public safe.
They see that as dismissing somebody's crime.
Anybody who goes to prison, I guarantee you
they do time; it is not a great place to be.
It's a punishing place.
We're going to make people atone for their actions,
but we're also going to correct the reasons
why they got here and that's what we'd like
to be able to do.
And right now we can't do that nearly at the level
that it needs to be.
It doesn't make sense from a policy standpoint.
It doesn't make sense from a human being standpoint.