Underfunding the County Jail is a ticking time bomb

Ten months ago, Oklahoma County commissioners approved a budget that yet again failed to fully fund the beleaguered Oklahoma County Detention Center (county jail) for the 2025-2026 fiscal year. Almost immediately, cries that there would be a massive jail budget shortfall of over five million dollars began to circulate in the media and among county officials, the jail trust, and jail administrators. Last week at the BOCC meeting, I spoke to the fact that the county seems to have money for everyone and everything except for maintaining a safe, humane, constitutional jail as required by the Oklahoma Jail Standards Act, and that failing to properly fund the jail is a ticking time bomb.

Now, after months of county infighting, public grandstanding and hand-wringing over potential dire consequences, the County Budget Evaluation Team last week asked the Budget Board to wave a magic wand to cover much of the shortfall, somehow pulling over $2,650,000 from out of a hat. This is happening even though trust Vice Chair Derrick Scobey has been repeatedly saying “we’re broke” and the county continues to fund questionable projects such as the Investors Capital Building remodel money pit for District Attorney Vickie Behenna’s offices and the infamous half a jail about to break ground at the new jail location.

The majority of the magic money would have been allocated from the Oklahoma County general fund reserve, which is the county equivalent of the state’s rainy day fund, with the remainder coming from the JUUL fund, a settlement involving e-cigs. I say “would have” because, for better or worse, the Budget Board today voted unanimously to defer the allocation of those funds to a future meeting.

But here’s the truth: the County, specifically our county commissioners, created this monster when they handed over complete control of the jail’s operations to an unqualified Chamber of Commerce created jail trust that cannot be dissolved unless they vote unanimously to dissolve themselves. Under the trust, our jail became known as the deadliest jail in America. Yet for years commissioners failed to take action or properly fund the jail as over 60 deaths and countless atrocities have occurred since the trust’s creation.

Now, suddenly, there is great concern over budget shortfalls, understaffing, and unapproved raises in what appears to be a county equivalent of the political theater that our federal and state governments perform for the cameras and voters during every election cycle. As a long time critic of the jail trust, I still believe that the trust should be dissolved and control returned to the sheriff, but it seems disingenuous that Scobey and others who ignored the cries for reform from human rights activists and family members of the over 60 people who died or were traumatized in the jail since the trust’s inception, are now calling for the dissolution of the trust and the resignation of current administrator Tim Kimrey, the first jail administrator who has actually reduced the number of deaths in a facility that even critics agrees is grossly underfunded.

The residents of Oklahoma County deserve better than to have their county government fragmented and in complete chaos, with no real plan for solving the very serious issues facing our county, both now and in the future.