Second Look Oklahoma would like to present topic relevant material that has been compiled over the last 60 years; with contributors ranging from state & federal authorities, university legal divisions from around the county, private consulting groups, advocacy groups, the international community, and the United Nations.
Second Look Oklahoma would like to begin a long overdue conversation concerning criminal justice reform with the Oklahoma State Legislator to discuss how people are treated in accordance with human dignity, and how the state is currently handling all of the challenges it is presented with. This is a coordinated effort to increase public safety, execute department priorities and increase fiscal responsibility.
All states are trying to continually progress as a society, evolving with the cultural norm of the day, creating wealth through economic creativity.
The goal of any state government is to protect and serve the community, SLO believes the state has achieved this goal, but like anything there will always be challenges and hurdles to overcome.
In the 1990s the State of Oklahoma took a bite of the poisonous fruit that the federal
government laid out for all states contained in the truth-in-sentencing incentives to adopt a harsher sentencing scheme for all people convicted of crimes that were classified as serious violent offenses.
The premise of this movement and proposed result was that by incarcerating people convicted of these specific violent offenses, this would deter others from committing those same violent offenses. This has been undeniably disproven, with fifty years of empirical data to support.
There is currently a 65% “clearance rate” on murder in the United States… Meaning that out of a 100% of homicides in the U.S. (wrongful/ malicious taking of life) only 65% of the time does law enforcement find a perpetrator. Maybe by no fault of anyone’s (i.e. no evidence to go off, no witnesses, ect.), but as a result legislators across the U.S. are pressured by the victims of these violent crimes to protect the community they have been charged with. In turn, this has resulted in reactionary based policy stemming from victims trauma, as opposed to data driven policy rooted in empirical observations that are logically consistent. This statement can be immediately validated by what SLO has branded “No Brainers.” For example, when we look at the thousands of non-violent drug offenders that were previously serving decades until 2017, we now look at this and say: “yes, that’s a no brainer, these individuals are not a threat to the community, and they no longer need to be incarcerated.” The problem is that this was decades behind the rest of the United States, and there still remain thousands of “No Brainers” in the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.
Oklahoma is seemingly unwilling to directly address the “pink elephant[s]” in the room, (i.e. violent crime) which statistically this category of offenders are the least likely to reoffend and recidivate (Individuals that have served 20 years or more are the least likely to re-offend and anything beyond 20 years serves no rehabilitative function, barring extenuating circumstances). The people all agree that no one should have to serve decades for non-violent crimes, but whether or not the people agree by “intelligent choice” or not, no state can justify requiring people who have committed violent crimes without injury, to serve multiple decades of their lives with no form of review in between here and there. How many people currently have such sentences..?
Answer: currently unknown.
At this current moment no one can say for sure, only because no one is filtering for this data. This is SLO’s main objective; to provide real-time information of this nature, regarding all offenders under the ODOC’s custody, to the state legislator so that they might make the most informed decision about what course the state should take regarding all people who have been sentenced to serve decades of time in the Department of Corrections.
Human dignity demands this of us.
