Oklahoma Watch (https://oklahomawatch.org/author/cadcock/)
With their state funding in decline, Oklahoma district attorneys are turning to issuing tickets and putting people on probation for a fee. Their newest effort is to crack down on uninsured drivers by scanning the license plates of thousands of Oklahomans on roadways every year and mailing them tickets.
For more than three years, Tulsa residents and businesses have been paying fees to a voluntary city program to ensure police will be the first to respond to an intruder alarm on their property. But because of a technical issue with the 911 system, those who paid the fee have received the same level of service as those who didn’t pay.
Oklahoma’s largest private-prison company is proposing to acquire the state’s second largest provider of halfway houses, which would give the company a dominant footprint in private incarceration in the state.
David Hammock was one of nine men who took their own lives in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary between 2012 and 2015. Convicted of arson at age 18 for burning down the old Sallisaw High School, he failed at chances to gain early release, and then, in the end, lost hope.
The director of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation resigned, then, after meeting with the agency’s commissioners, withdrew his resignation.
Between 2012 and 2015, nine inmates in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary took their own lives, giving Oklahoma’s only state-owned maximum security prison the highest suicide rate among corrections facilities. Is solitary confinement to blame?
Federal agents investigating racist messages sent shortly after the 2016 presidential election interviewed three men who graduated from Tulsa-area high schools in recent years, obtaining search warrants for the home and phone of one of them.
Oklahoma has among the highest prisoner mortality rates and homicide rates in the nation, according to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
A law firm representing law enforcement agencies across the state has issued advice to some agencies that they have the right to withhold many records from public view, including agency budgets, payroll, contracts and inventory.
Nearly half of the contributions given to a federal political action committee closely tied to Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt came from the energy industry, according to Federal Election Commission documents.