“No one’s every asked that before,” Charlie Price, State Attorney General spokesman, said Tuesday.
“I’ve been here a long time,” Price said, “and I don’t know that one’s ever been closed before.
“Our best guess is that whoever runs the jail oversight will have to follow up on it. It will be up to them.”
Price said District Attorney Jerry Moore may have to do the research on closing the jail. Moore was unavailable for comment Tuesday.
Price recommended the State Jail Inspectors Division, which is a division of the State Health Department, be contacted.
But Don Garrison, who has served 12 years as the director of jail inspectors for the Oklahoma Department of Health, said he was unhappy to learn the Sequoyah County Criminal Justice Authority voted three to two Monday to begin the process of closing the jail.
“Nobody’s told me about it,” he said. “They need to let me know.
“They’ve got a big problem,” he said. “They are going to have to take the prisoners to other jails. That’s what the state statutes say…every county, at the county’s expense, shall have a jail or access to a jail.”
Garrison has been working with the authority on funding problems, and the county jail has received good inspection reports all along, Jail Administer Christine Calbert has reported.
Garrison said the county may also enter into a contract with a private jail corporation, but housing prisoners elsewhere, either with other counties or in a private institution, was going to be expensive.
“They better get out and vote for jail funding,” Garrison recommended. “They are going to have to do it real quick, because it is going to cost some money.”
About closing the jail, Garrison said, “That’s a legal problem. This has never come up before while I’ve been here.
“Your district attorney and judges are going to have to figure out what to do about it.”
Calbert was directed by the authority Monday to begin contacting the county’s judges and district attorney about how to close the county jail and what to do with prisoners.
Associate District Judge A.J. Henshaw said Calbert visited with judges Monday afternoon.
“I have no idea,” Henshaw said about closing the jail. “It caught us off guard. I thought we were going to wait for the OSU study comparing the costs of the sheriff and authority operating the jail.”
District 1 Commissioner Bruce Tabor announced his request for the study at a commission meeting July 13. Officials with the Oklahoma State University (OSU) county office said the study is underway and is expected in about a week.
Tabor, on Tuesday, said the commissioners may turn the jail over to the sheriff, who would have to operate it on county funds. The commissioners fear using county money for the jail will cut the budgets of other county offices so much that many staff members will have to be laid off.
The final decision on the jail lies with the commissioners.
The one-sixth of a cent sales tax now collected for jail operations, which raises about $30,000 a month, may also disappear. Because the two money sources — sales tax and county money — cannot be combined, and because the sales tax was designated for jail operations, it may be the sales tax will disappear, and not available for housing prisoners elsewhere or available to the sheriff to run the jail. That is another question which will have to be researched, county officials said.
