EDITORIALS

Allbaugh served Oklahoma well as DOC director

The Oklahoman Editorial Board
Joe Allbaugh

After 3 1/2 years as director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, Joe Allbaugh has decided he’s had enough and is resigning. The governor will be hard-pressed to find a more passionate advocate for his employees, the taxpayers and those who are locked up.

Allbaugh, 66, brought a straight-shooting approach to the job, and didn’t mind if his brusque style ruffled feathers. “We are so antiquated from top to bottom, it is embarrassing,” he said shortly after he was appointed in January 2016.

He promised that lawmakers, at a minimum, would hear from him “about the issues confronting the Department of Corrections — the good, the bad and the ugly,” and he followed through.

Not long into his tenure, he angered several lawmakers when he asked his board for permission to close prison work centers in 15 Oklahoma communities. The centers provided cheap inmate labor to those municipalities, but cost the DOC $17.6 million per year.

Under Allbaugh, the DOC moved the 1,300 work center inmates to the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite, and inmates at Granite were relocated to the North Fork Correctional Facility in Sayre.

Allbaugh worked to place inmates with similar classifications at the same prisons, instead of mixing medium-security inmates with minimum-security offenders. Noting that 94 percent of those in prison will return to society someday, he attempted to remove prisoner beds from spaces intended for education, work programs and re-entry programs.

His budget requests in recent years have exceeded $1.5 billion — roughly three times more than the Legislature wound up appropriating. Most of what he asked for, $813 million, was to build two medium-security prisons, which he said were needed because the inmate population continues to climb and current facilities are inadequate.

Allbaugh has proposed closing the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester (except for the wing that holds death row prisoners) and moving its inmates elsewhere. He has pushed for pay raises for correctional officers, who are badly outnumbered by inmates, and for all DOC employees. He has advocated for the state Pardon and Parole Board to approve more parole requests each month, and for reforms that do more than “nibble at the edges” and help drive down the inmate population. If significant steps aren’t taken, Allbaugh has said, Oklahoma runs the risk of having the federal government take over the prison system.

In offering his resignation, Allbaugh may have been one step ahead of the posse. The Legislature this year approved a bill, sought by new Gov. Kevin Stitt, to give the governor authority to hire the directors of five major agencies, including the DOC. Earlier this month, Stitt replaced the head of the Department of Human Services.

Regardless of the reason for leaving, Allbaugh is to be commended for his efforts and for his forthrightness. “We have a footprint in 67 facilities around the state,” he said early on. “We get no efficiencies in the system. It’s just absolutely asinine.” State government could use more straight talk like that.