Donna Coffey is the McCurtain County Drug Court Administrator in Oklahoma.  She has been with the program since its implementation in June 2003, under the direction of District Judge Willard L. Driesel.

Oklahoma Drug Courts – hope for a brighter future for thousands of drug addicted felons, hope for an overcrowded prison system, and hope for the taxpayers who support the enormous cost of imprisoned felons.

The sight of a new participant pleading in to drug court is heart wrenching.  Some are there with family support, some are there with nothing, but all are there with the same look of hopelessness, helplessness, and fear.  Years of substance abuse, mental health issues, incarceration, and rejection have taken their toll and the uncertainty of what drug court will bring only adds to the level of anxiety.  Such is the condition of many Oklahomans.

Changes soon begin, however, with attention from counselors, case managers, and supervision personnel that includes a deputy who actually visits the home regularly without making an arrest!  Years of shame and guilt begin to subside and the anxiety level drops as participants learn that it’s okay to talk about their addiction and the events that led to it.  The dull eyes begin to brighten. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the second of two blog posts on rural poverty by Mariah Levison, a graduate student in International Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis, based on a presentation that Oklahoma Policy Institute gave last month at McCurtain Memorial Hospital in Idabel. In our initial post, Mariah summarized some of the data and theories on the causes of poverty in McCurtain County. Here she examines the research on amenities based development as a strategy for addressing rural poverty. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month Oklahoma Policy Institute was invited by McCurtain Memorial Hospital in Idabel to give a presentation on poverty as part of a monthly lecture series that the hospital has convened to examine pressing social problems facing their area. Our presentation was prepared by Mariah Levison, a graduate student in International Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis who has been working with OK Policy this summer. Mariah here summarizes some of the data and theories on the causes of  poverty in McCurtain County.

McCurtain County, Oklahoma’s southeasternmost county, also is one of the poorest counties in the state. McCurtain has the third highest poverty level in the state. One in every four residents of McCurtain County lived below the federal poverty level, $22,000 for a family of four, in 2007. The unemployment rate in McCurtain was 10 percent in May of this year. Additionally, McCurtain experienced a population decline of -2.5 percent between 2000 and 2008. During that same time period Oklahoma grew at a rate of 5.6 percent.

To understand poverty in McCurtain County, we have to start with the county’s rural nature. According to The United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA ERS) rural areas tend to be poorer than urban areas, with 14.2 percent of the rural population being poor compared to only 11.6 percent of the urban population. Nationally, the rural poverty rate has exceeded the urban rate every year since poverty was first officially measured in the 1960s. Furthermore, USDA ERS calculates that the poverty rate–16.8 percent–is highest in counties like McCurtain , that are not adjacent to urban counties. The vast majority of poor rural counties are in the South, like McCurtain County. Read the rest of this entry »