Gov. Mary Fallin got a national stage Tuesday to tout Oklahoma’s work to stop sending so many women to prison.
Fallin was the keynote speaker at Women Unshackled, a forum to address female incarceration hosted by the Justice Action Network. Fallin said risk screenings to get nonviolent women out of prison and into local programs proved successful enough to expand them to county jails.
"So, we've had about 6,000 female offenders who have been screened within the past four years in our county jails, and those have been able to keep 90 percent of these women out of prison," Fallin said.
Fallin said 83 percent of women in Oklahoma prisons are nonviolent offenders, and 42 percent have drug-related convictions.
The governor said drug and mental health courts are effective tools for keeping women out of prison.
"Sixty-nine percent of our women in a prison in Oklahoma have had an actively managed mental health issue — in other words, they've been under active treatment for some kind of mental health issue or a serious mental health issue — compared to 44 percent of the men," Fallin said.
Fallin said Oklahoma’s initiatives must work. As it stands, the state’s prison population is on track to grow 25 percent in the next decade, costing the state $2 billion.
Fallin’s criminal justice reform efforts began in earnest in 2015 when she tasked a committee with finding policies to slow Oklahoma’s prison population growth. Her motivation is helping kids. She said those with a parent in jail or prison are five times more likely to be incarcerated later in life.
"I think there is a way that through smart-on-crime policies and solutions that we can break that intergenerational cycle of children following in the footsteps of some of their parents, grandparents," Fallin said.
According to federal statistics, three in five women in U.S. prisons have children under 18.
