Stopping career criminals and lifelong addicts is so simple.
First, you eliminate the practice of concurrent sentences. Look over the amount of time given for offenses and make sure it is reasonable and fits the crime, then ensure that every single day is served in prison with zero exceptions. That will send a notice to criminals, move out of state or stop committing crime because society is now serious about stopping crime.
Second, we have plenty of beds for violent criminals. What is needed is less costly methods of serving sentences, in fact sentences should be served with work sentences so the inmates labor offsets the cost of jail or prison, pays off the fines and fees, pays restitution to the victim, and returns enough revenue to the state to completely fund the criminal justice system. The vast majority of criminals including Earl Ray Talley in the story above do not need to sit in a concrete block cell with bars on the doors and windows.
Minimum security or low security camps can cheaply be set up, pick one of the far SW or NW counties with very little population, build the camps with prison labor and jail inmate labor shipped in from all over the state housed in tent camps like our soldiers put up with. A one square mile camp with razor wire fences, dogs running free between the fences, will require fewer guards. Half of the camp is factory buildings, little to no heat other than climate control needed to protect the finished product, cement buildings will stay above 40 degrees in the coldest of weather. Plenty of people work in those conditions or worse.
Supplement this with the ability of private companies to build their own secure barracks for workers, this has already been done up around Grand Lake with the chicken processing companies. The workers are hired out for say $30.00 a day with another $10.00 being paid into an account for the workers for snacks, phone calls, medical expenses, and a savings account for when they finish their sentences. Work them six days a week, twelve hour days, so the company profits enough to pay for their medical care and the costs of supervising and maintaining the inmates.
The $30.00 the state receives is split between DOC costs to supervise/over see the programs, with the court system to pay for the cost of prosecuting and adjudicating the crimes, and victims that ought to receive 150% of the damages done by criminals. You are looking at $9500.00 gross income per inmate if the inmate is in a private company work program rather than spending $40,000 per year warehousing them in medium security prisons. One year sentence for the DOC costs, one year sentence for the justice system costs, and one year for the victim's restitution, three year sentence maximum will cover 80% of all crimes.
Few criminals will want to come back to serve hard time gutting chickens or working in a sawmill or factory. Yes, federal law impacts some of this, put the state's congressional officers to work getting that fixed, till then work using consent decrees signed by the inmates. You get them to agree by making regular prison as boring and as hard as allowed by law. An offer of a three year sentence at hard labor versus a thirty year sentence in normal prison will get most of the inmates to agree.
There are going to be some people like Ear Ray Talley that cannot function in society and cannot be helped by the system. Those folks serve their sentences at the work camps and afterward are remanded as either mental patients or chronic drug/alcohol abuse patients if they had committed a crime while incapacitated and cannot function on their own. They continue to work as well, in better circumstances, with the costs of their supervision and upkeep being taken from their wages and the balance saved for when they are able to kick their addiction.
And a lot of crimes done by mentally ill people can be dealt with by incarcerating them for mental illness, not for minor criminal acts and most victims would agree. Take away their rights till they are healed or functional or in a functional lifestyle that might not be ideal as far as freedom goes but might be ideal for them. But make sure that they have a citizen guardian, not one of the professional guardians that rape clients for cash.
A wonderful idea would be to build work camps in the far rural areas where no one is likely to escape on foot, with a one mile square medium security camp being surrounded by a sixteen square mile minimum security camp for the addicts or those mental patients that have committed violent crimes. Those that heal themselves or are healed by mental health/ substance abuse counselors graduate to outside the fence for a time till they have proven that they can function in society.
There will be a lot of objections like families find it harder to visit. Existing law and practice needs changed to make it harsh enough in prison that prisoners will accept the new system. Perhaps even you need the high security prisons in the center of the camps with professional supervision and low security inmates serving as guards. Drugs will have to be eliminated, it can be done, and harsh penalties for guards or supervisors accepting bribes that allow contraband to be brought into the prisons and work camps. And the largest set of opponents will come from lawyers, prosecutors, judges, mental health and substance abuse workers, and prison guards who will find their services less in demand. Cop will be ecstatic, once they arrest a criminal they are off the street quickly and surely, and won't be back for at least three years.
The idea is scale-able as well. Counties could band together to create the same system, slashing costs for jails and court costs. People like Talley will commit a dozen crimes in three years but not if they are in a work camp. Court docket will be cleared so that after an arrest a trial can occur within weeks and the case closed in six weeks. We will have time for jury trials again and force prosecutors to stop handing out easy sentences in exchange for plea bargains, if someone broke the law, make them pay the price. Misdemeanors will be handled in county as they are today, giving an safety valve for first time offenders. And the courts will be free to spend a lot more time watching over the system so that it isn't abused.
One thing that many of Oklahoma voters agree with the liberals on is that the current system is not working. Making it harsh, sure, quick, and just will stop 90% of crime, either by taking the criminals off the streets, encouraging them to move to a liberal state where they are free to practice their “trade”, or simply convincing criminals that crime does not pay.
