Last month, Tulsa County’s board of commissioners took over the area’s juvenile detention center. Their takeover came after detained youth filed a lawsuit against center staff, two detention officers were charged with sexual abuse, and the facility fell out of compliance with the state. With their takeover, commissioners appointed former Tulsa County jail administrator David Parker to oversee the Family Center for Juvenile Justice.
KWGS’ Max Bryan spoke with Parker about what he’s done so far, his goals and how he approaches juvenile justice.
MB: We’re coming up on a month that you’ve been in charge of the juvenile center. What have you done in this time?
DP: We’ve put some new leadership in place and eliminated some positions that were not producing, and had been problematic in the past. But most importantly, what we’ve done is enhanced the quality of life for the residents and the employees that work there. We’re building relationships with our external customers. That includes you, the rest of the media; with the public defenders’s office. I like to think our presence with the public defender’s office has enhanced greatly. We have multiple contacts with them on a daily basis.
We’re in the process of redoing policies and procedures. We’ve brought on board probably one of the best policies and procedures people in Oklahoma. We’ve already dived into the (Oklahoma Partnership Initiatives) audits, and we’re trying to respond to those where there wasn’t any quality response before. We meet with (the Oklahoma Office of Juvenile Affairs) either in person or on the phone daily — and when I say daily, that’s multiple times a day with different entities because we want to reestablish and re-enhance that relationship as well. So I believe we’re well on our way to becoming a better service provider for everyone involved, including the taxpayers of Tulsa.
MB: So you’ve told me you’ve eliminated some positions and made some personnel decisions specifically with problematic workers there. Can you go into that just as much as you can, given the lead-up to you being hired and taking over as the director?
DP: I really can’t other than that, because there’s still some investigations going on. And until all of those are cleared up — all of that transpired before we got there, and I just don’t feel comfortable saying anything other than that.
MB: Understandable. So what is your overall approach to managing the center?
DP: My overall approach is, detention is a customer service business, whether people realize that or not. Any business, if you don’t have quality customer service, then you won’t really have good business.
Now, I understand that people are in there for committing crimes, or are alleged to have committed those crimes. But still, while they’re there, we want to make sure their stay is not necessarily punitive, but progressive to where we can address some programs to aid them where once they get out, to become a better, more productive citizen. By having good customer service with the residents that are there, we also keep the costs down by not having to repair things that are tore up. So not only are we trying to send people out with a better attitude and a better directive; we’re going to keep people from tearing things up with taxpayers’ money.
So we’re going to address that with programs, incentives. And if we can reduce the cost of operating while we’re doing that, then better off for our other customers, which are the taxpayers of Tulsa County.
MB: Now, you mentioned this a little bit earlier, about customer service. You’ve mentioned the media specifically. But I’m going to go a little bit broader, with the public. Given the circumstances with which you were hired, do you have any plan to make sure the public trusts what’s going on in the center?
DP: Absolutely. The commissioners, since they’ve taken over, are well in the process of developing a community board to basically — I don’t want to call it an oversight board, but I’ll call it a partnership board that’s going to come in, and as we develop programs, we vet those programs with them. We are able to show the measurable outcomes that come from those processes.
I think always, you want to have different people surrounding you that have different ideas and different opinions, because no matter who you are, you don’t know everything. So when you bring those other people in, they’re able to provide you with quality ideas that you can take with and run, or you can enhance the ideas that you have. So I think that bringing a board on is a great thing.
