Justice-involved youth have faced a heightened risk during the COVID-19 pandemic. Youthful offenders, already likely burdened with childhood trauma and the stress of separation from family, faced considerable risks living in shared facilities with other youths during a highly infectious global pandemic.
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On March 28, the Oklahoma Policy Institute released its latest report, which focuses on the state's youth justice system. To celebrate the report's release, OK Policy held an online panel discussion to look more deeply at issues impacting the state's youth justice system and the issues raised in the report.
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Better Tomorrows: A Landscape Analysis of Oklahoma’s Youth Justice System and Suggested Reforms reviews the historical context for Oklahoma’s youth justice system, examines contemporary processes and actors within the system, and recommends a series of reforms that can help achieve better outcomes for justice-involved children and their families.
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Even after progress, Oklahoma still ranks third in overall incarceration, with more than 21,000 people in state custody and another 26,000 under some form of supervision.
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OK Policy’s newly created Tribal-State Policy Analyst role will be pivotal in providing research and analysis on tribal priorities within a state policy context.
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By:
Dave Hamby
November 19, 2021 // Updated: March 25, 2022
Based on feedback from residents statewide, the Oklahoma Policy Institute has developed legislative policy priorities for the upcoming 2022 legislative session that can help Oklahomans live healthier, raise thriving families, and ensure the safety of their communities.
Following the conclusion…
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Though the Legislature has again failed to fund the treatments that SQ 781 statutorily required, we know that justice reform has measurably reduced the prison population and that mental health remains severely underfunded.
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Criminal justice reform was a lower profile priority in Oklahoma’s 2021 legislative session compared to previous years. Despite this fact, several significant reforms aimed at increasing economic opportunity for justice-involved families were signed into law.
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Our analysis suggests that rural Oklahomans are asked to pay just as much, and often more, than their urban counterparts. More worrisome still, urban areas like Tulsa and Oklahoma counties have the most difficulty in collecting fines and fees, meaning rural Oklahomans are effectively contributing more of their money to fund the court system as compared to their urban counterparts.
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By:
Steve Lewis
March 15, 2021 // Updated: March 15, 2021
Sen. Julie Daniels, R-Bartlesville, has spent considerable time working to make the collection of court fines and fees both more efficient and less destructive to the lives of people who are legitimately unable to pay. She held an interim study…
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