Another budget year, the same sad story: The combination of tax cuts and the recession results in severe cuts to public services.

Over the past two years, most agencies have lost 15 percent or more of their funding. Even though state appropriations as a share of the economy is at a 30 year low, next year’s shortfall is projected at $500 million. The Governor’s proposed budget for next year would eliminate some agencies and take another 3 to 5 percent from the rest.

Last year we surveyed some of what’s been lost. Here’s an update:

• With personnel costs making up 93 percent of its budget, more cuts to the Public Safety Department will mean furloughs and possibly laying off troopers. The Department already has 110 fewer employees than 2 years ago, and more than half of the drivers’ license testing sites across the state have been closed. A portion of these funds are being replaced by increasing the fee to reinstate a driver’s license. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, we surveyed some of the budget cuts that state agencies were being forced to implement as result of the state’s revenue shortfalls. Since then, the grim news continues to spread deeper into core programs, affecting major services like education, social services, and infrastructure. Our intern, Matt Garder, provides this round-up of coverage from the state’s newspapers of some of the actions that state agencies, cities, and school boards have announced in recent weeks to address budget shortfall, as well as looming cuts on the horizon: Read the rest of this entry »

From time to time, we use the OK Policy blog to post submissions we receive from Oklahomans who have interesting perspectives on important policy issues for the state. This entry is from Amy Santee, Senior Program Officer with George Kaiser Family Foundation in Tulsa. The opinions stated below are not necessarily the opinions of OK Policy, its staff, or its board. This blog is a venue to help promote the discussion of ideas from various points of view and we invite your comments and contributions. To see our guidelines for blog submissions, click here.

Currently, the State of Oklahoma incarcerates more women per capita than any other state in the nation, a rate of 134 per 100,000, compared to a national average of 69 per 100,000. Tulsa County incarcerates at an even higher rate, 169 women per 100,000.

This practice has a devastating impact on thousands of children around our state.  There are an estimated 4,500 minor children in Oklahoma with their mothers in prison.  These children are at greater risk of school failure, depression, drug and alcohol abuse. Without a successful intervention, they are likely to become the next generation of inmates at the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.  Incarcerating non-violent female offenders does not make economic sense, nor does it protect the public safety.  Is it not better public policy to provide these women with treatment and the tools to become better parents and productive citizens? Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we released the August edition of our Numbers You Need bulletin. In addition to tracking monthly and quarterly trends in employment, inflation, work support programs. state revenues, and foreclosures, each issue also looks at annual data for one key measure of Oklahoma’s prosperity and well-being. This month we looked at the state prison population. At the end of FY ’09, the state reported 25,197 offenders in prison. The good and surprising news in that number is that it represented an increase of only 59 inmates, or 0.2 percent from the end of FY ’08, and an increase of just 119, or 0.5 percent, from two years previously.

As can be seen from the graph, this leveling in the number of prisoners is a departure from the trend of recent years. From 2000-2007, the inmate count grew by an annual average rate of 1.5 percent. The slowdown was unexpected: when MGT of America released its major audit of the Department of Corrections in early 2008, the inmate population was projected to grow to 27,035 by the end of FY ’09, on its way to a total of just under 29,000 prisoners by the end of FY ’16. In both news accounts and follow-up conversations, DOC Director Justin Jones attributes the slowdown to two factors: a reduction in the number of offenders being sent to prison for probation violations due to creative policies being implemented by DAs in Oklahoma County and elsewhere; and new policies that allow prisoners not to lose earned credit towards release for certain misconduct.

In 2007, the most recent year for which national data was available, Oklahoma imprisoned 665 people per 100,000 population, compared to the national average of 506. Oklahoma’s female incarceration rate that year was more than twice the national average and highest in the nation. Our heavy reliance on incarceration has social, economic, and fiscal consequences that will remain an ongoing challenge for policymakers and communities to address in the years ahead. However, that progress is already being made in keeping in leveling off the inmate population deserves to be noted and celebrated.

We hope you’ll check out the full edition of August’s Numbers You Need.

The New Yorker‘s Shouts & Murmurs humor column recently ran a brilliant piece by Ian Frazier that imagined a colloquium convened by Al Gore to address the problem of global warming… of hell. After presentations by a Samaritan sorcerer of the first century consigned to everlasting perdition for the sin of simony, a scientist from NASA, and the former Vice-President, Satan Himself takes the microphone. Here are excerpts of his talk:

Right now in Hell we are hurting. That’s the single most important take-away I would like you to get from what I have to say to you this afternoon: we are hurting. Hell is being pressed to and beyond its limits to such an extent that we are having trouble simply performing our jobs. Every day, I must make hard choices from among an inadequate supply of options. People in the land of the living are constantly requesting that this or that other person “rot in Hell,” and we’ve always tried to accommodate that, and as a result we have literally tens of billions of individuals—tier after tier after tier of them—sitting there rotting, and we have had to put in new tiers and still they are all over the place. And is anybody besides us giving any thought to maintenance? To the necessary monitoring of the rot? To staffing?…

Because of ongoing constraints, I am sorry to say, the operation of Hell is no longer even close to what it should be, and important areas of quality are being degraded. I hate with my most ancient and implacable hatred of all that is good to have to say this, but unfortunately it’s true. So, for me, the whole increase-in-temperature thing, while important, is pretty far down on my list of concerns. I can stand at the exact center of the sun, temperature twenty-eight million degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s like a summer breeze to me. Far as I’m concerned, warming is not the problem; it’s the over-all decline in Hell’s capabilities. Right now, with the resources we’re being given, we are not punishing souls for their specific transgressions anymore, we’re just warehousing them. And that’s a shame.

Overcrowding?  Decaying facilities? Warehousing? Maybe Oklahoma Corrections Director Justin Jones could be brought in to offer Satan some solace!

A recent report by the Pew Center on the States finds that Corrections Departments’ budgets have quadrupled over the last 20 years in this country. The report points out that spending on corrections outpaces all other state spending except health care. In 2008, states spent $47 billion on corrections.

Without getting into issues of priorities, the question needs to be asked if this money is being spent in a way that is accomplishing our goals. (Before that, I guess I should stipulate that I would identify the goal to be making our community safer.) It seems as if the competing concerns that are weighed against each other are, on one hand, being tough on crime (or especially appearing so) versus the enormous strain on state budgets associated with incarceration. The current recession and the resulting crisis it has caused for state budgets, including Oklahoma’s, is forcing states across the country to implement early release programs or to be more pragmatic about the approach toward certain offenders and programs. Read the rest of this entry »