By Kirk Kramer
Phoenix Staff Writer
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The Oklahoma Department of Corrections is closing the Muskogee Community Work Center because of budget shortfalls, but Rep. Jerry McPeak thinks the numbers crunched by the department don’t add up.
“How do you make financial decisions without considering your income?” said McPeak, D-Warner, following a meeting Thursday at the work-release facility on U.S. 69.
Concerned business owners, elected officials, and other community leaders met with officials of the Department of Corrections to ask questions and express their opposition to closing the 36-year-old facility.
By today, only 19 inmates will be left at the work center, down from 80 on July 2, when DOC officials announced the closure. By the end of next week, they will all be gone.
“What we are asking, is a stay of execution so the people of the community can help find a solution,” McPeak said.
Local leaders who spoke at the meeting said they would like to look at other sources of revenue to keep the work center open.
Twenty of the 80 inmates who were housed at the work center were “work release offenders,” who hold jobs at local businesses in the months preceding their release from prison. They work mostly at minimum-wage jobs. Fifty percent of their wages are given to the Department of Corrections to help pay the cost of jailing them. McPeak said this amounts to $120,000 per year.
DOC’s Administrator of Community Corrections Dan Reynolds said the per diem rate — the daily cost of feeding and housing each inmate — is around $60 a day.
“At other facilities, it might be half that,” he said.
The facility’s annual budget is $262,439.
In addition to work release offenders, the work center provides inmate labor for city, county and state units of government, as well as non-profit organizations.
Evelyn Hibbs is executive director of Women In Safe Home (WISH), a local shelter for battered women. She wrote of the benefits her organization reaps from inmate labor and the hardships the closure of the work center will impose in a July 21 letter to McPeak.
“We depend a lot on our volunteers, especially those from the Department of Corrections, who fill our maintenance and everyday needs at the four facilities that we operate,” Hibbs wrote. “Losing the DOC workers who provide a very needed service of maintenance for our agency could mean the difference in continuing our services, or having to close the shelter and stop all services that we provide.”
Benny Wheeler of Wheeler Metals typically employs five work release offenders at his steel yard.
“I’ve seen how it prepares guys to go back into the community,” he said. “Instead of $50 and a bus ticket, they leave prison with $3,000 to $5,000 built up. They have something to work with. And working out in the community, they develop social skills instead of being exposed to a bunch of criminals.”
McPeak agrees that the program helps rehabilitate offenders.
“Recidivism is lower,” he said. “Inmates don’t end up back in the correctional system. The data show that.”
McPeak said keeping the Muskogee work center open is partly a matter of fairness to people in northeastern Oklahoma.
“It’s the only facility of its kind between the Kansas line and Holdenville,” he said. “Tulsa and Oklahoma City have several.”
Questions of geography also loom large for inmate Ralph Lord, who faces a transfer to the Oklahoma City work center. His mother lives in Muldrow, and he has a sister in Fort Smith, Ark.
“Mom’s sick, my sister’s sick,” said Lord. “Oklahoma City is too far for them to travel. It’s hard on them even to drive here.”
Kristi Olzawski is interim assistant district supervisor for the Northeast District of DOC’s Community Corrections Department and helps run the work center. She said no layoffs are anticipated among the staff of 22, and no one’s salary will be affected. But the prospect of transfers to other work centers around the state is painful to those Olzawski supervises.
“Everyone loves working here,” she said. “They consider themselves a family.”
Olzawski and some other staff will continue to administer probation and parole programs for the Northeast District from the facility.
Reach Kirk Kramer at 684-2901 or kkramer@muskogeephoenix.com.
