My name is Matt Elliott. I'm 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 normally 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 have 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. Kind of protect them from some of the BS, 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 them 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 COs in a number of different things related to looking after inmates.
We try to kind of 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 them 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. Like, prosecuted him with felony assault. The system is set up to penalize and correct people. So that's plenty of punishment. That's kind of one of the things that our training tries to address is proper correctional practices and getting people ready for reentry.
We're having significant problems recruiting people to come work here. You'll 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, we've got a radio and that's it.
It's not a great ratio if you're, you know, 20, 21 years old and you're trying to look at a career opportunity, especially for a 1370 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'll 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 enough.
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 a 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 have staff will 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 and makes it all worse. Understaffing doesn't just affect security, it really affects too the programs that we can offer. And 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 of 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 is 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 our goal is incarcerate everybody who we're mad at for breaking the law, then it works great.
great. But if the goal is to make 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, you think, well, 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 who are trying to keep the public safe, they see that as dismissing somebody's crime.
Anybody who goes to prison, I guarantee, to 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 would 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.