Description:
Justin Jones talks about his 30-year career in the department of corrections.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Justin Jones
Interviewer: Female Interview, possibly Melba Holt
Interview Date: 11/8/2007
Interview Location: Ron J. Norick Downtown Library
Female Interviewer: Good morning, Mr. Jones. How are you today?
Justin Jones: Oh, I’m wonderful. How are you today?
FI: I’m just fine. Could you tell me your complete name?
JJ: It’s Justin Jones.
FI: Mr. Jones, we are welcoming you to the Oklahoma Voices Project. It’s a Centennial project, and your agreeing to interview with us makes all the difference. Your birthday?
JJ: I was born in 1955 on September the 30th.
FI: Where are we located?
JJ: Where I work now or - ?
FI: This building.
JJ: Oh. We’re in Oklahoma City at the beautiful Downtown Library.
FI: Where were you born?
JJ: I was born in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma.
FI: Where did you grow up?
JJ: I grew up in a rural area, but the closest town and where I went to school, was Maysville, Oklahoma.
FI: Maysville. What was that like?
JJ: It was famous in some respect because it was the home of Wiley Post. It was a small town. I would say at the time that I lived there and went to school there, there might have been 1,500-1,800 residents. I think there were 43 people in my graduating class, so it was one of those locations where everybody knew everybody’s business [FI laughs], and it was kind of like watching Andy Griffith and Mayberry, you know? Even though I enjoyed it and wouldn’t change a thing, it’s certainly something I wouldn’t go back to. [FI laughs]
FI: So you didn’t have any secrets in that little town.
JJ: Absolutely not.
FI: Who were your parents?
JJ: My mother is still living. Her name is Mary Louise Jones. My father went by the name of Pete Jones. His real name was Billy James Jones.
FI: What were your parents like?
JJ: That’s an interesting question. My mother worked nights at the Pauls Valley State School, and in those days, it was called the State School for the Mentally Retarded. She did the night shift for over thirty years doing laundry and night watch type duties of the grownups that were institutionalized there. Of course, things have changed, and we certainly don’t institutionalize people that much anymore. My father worked in the oil field and was a machine operator, threaded pipe and things of that sort.
FI: How would you describe your relationship with your parents?
JJ: That’s a really interesting question. It’s not a pleasant question in the sense that my father was a very dedicated alcoholic, very violent, never remembered birthdays or anything of that sort, so it was kind of an unusual world growing up. My mother was very dedicated, so anything that I can attribute to my success would probably be attributed to a very strong mother figure in my life.
FI: That is very sad about your father. Did you have any brothers and sisters?
JJ: I have an older brother who’s eight years older, Rodney Jones, and I have a sister who’s a year and a half older, and her name is Rita McCurtain. I’m very proud to say that all three of the children – I’m the youngest – we’re all first generation going to college. Previous to that, my grandparents on my father’s side couldn’t read or write, and they were sharecroppers. On my mother’s side, my grandfather worked on the railroad and could not read or write. We went from one generation of my grandparents, where the majority didn’t finish school. My mother didn’t finish high school but my father did, to the next generation all three of us went to college and finished, and I guess by many definitions in life, we’re successful and very blessed.
FI: You are very blessed, and you said that your mother had a lot to do with that.
JJ: Very strong.
FI: Very great.
JJ: Could you tell me, if you remember, the names of your grandparents on your mother’s side and on your father’s side?
FI: On my mother’s side, her mother’s name was Kay Woodall. My grandfather’s name was Tom Dickerson. That’s on my mother’s side. On my father’s side, it was George Jones and Nora Jones. I never knew my grandmother. She died before I was born, on my father’s side.
FI: Do you go back as far as remembering your great-grandparents, either on your mother’s side or on your father’s side?
JJ: No. They were all deceased. I’ve only seen photographs.
FI: Okay. Where did you attend school?
JJ: Well, I went all of my elementary and high school in Maysville, and then I went to East Central University in Ada and got my degree. Eventually, right after that, got married and started to work in corrections, and I’ve been there ever since.
FI: You mentioned that you had a brother and sister. Do you want to tell us what they were like in this interview?
JJ: Certainly. My brother went to Vietnam, so I was maybe nine years old, or maybe ten, when he went to Vietnam. He served three terms in the Marine Corps in Vietnam and was shot several times. I think he became part of the military machine in the sense that he enjoyed it so much he didn’t want to come home and he was forced to come home. It was many years before he would even talk about his episodes. My brother is very independent. He came to college on the GI Bill. First one ever in our family history to go to college. He was so independent, to put it nicely, he couldn’t work for anybody so he had to be an entrepreneur, [FI laughs] so he built his own company up and he’s – if you measure success by wealth, he’s extremely successful. We’re very proud of him. I didn’t get very close to my brother Rodney until I got older in life, until maybe my 30s or 40s, because with that many years difference and by the time he got back from Vietnam and never returned from the home setting, there was really never occasion to get to know him. My sister, on the other hand – we’re extremely close. Only being a year and a half apart, we were always there to support each other when times were bad as we were growing up.
FI: You said you got married. Do you want to name the person that you married?
JJ: I was married for twenty years to Sharon. Her maiden name was Tohoe. We have two wonderful daughters. Rita is 29 and lives in Boston, named after my sister. Allison is 23 and lives here in Oklahoma City.
FI: When you were a child, would you describe yourself as a happy child?
JJ: Probably not.
FI: Can you explain?
JJ: From the previous questions – happy in the sense that I compensated for that by being quite the comedian growing up. I had a lot of anger inside of me. It was many years to get out. It’s probably attributed to – once I left my hometown and never going back to it in any sense or fashion. Again, as you go through life, there’s purpose and I wouldn’t change a thing because if you’re happy with who you are today, you certainly can’t look backwards and say, “Well I would change this or that.” I’m very pleased with my life, so when you ask the question, was I happy, to be very honest in this interview, I would say probably not.
FI: I was hesitant to ask you that knowing some of the dynamics that could have gone with having a father who had the kind of problem that you described, but I admire you for being able to come and interview with us today because you’re a survivor of that experience and you have something to tell us about being in an experience like that that might encourage somebody else.
JJ: Well, it certainly gives you a different perspective and it makes you realize that there’s always somebody that has a tougher row in life. You never want to allow yourself to think of yourself as a victim because all you have to do is look a short distance and there’s somebody that had a much more difficult time than you. I think that makes you stronger as you grow older and gives you a better perspective on reaching out and helping people, which really kind of ties into what I do for a living.
FI: That’s good. Do you have a nickname?
JJ: Growing up, I’m not sure where it came from, but it was Jud. J-U-D. I always thought it was short for Justin. On the other hand, my grandfather George, who I was very close to and was my dad’s father, would help raise us on occasion and we would stay with him when things got bad, he called me “Whistle Britches” as a child. I’m not going to explain why.
FI: [laughing] You’re not going to explain why your grandfather called you Whistle Britches?
JJ: I will leave that up to your imagination.
FI: [laughing] Okay. We’re going to just let that go out there. How would you describe a perfect day in your life now, today? What’s a perfect day for you?
JJ: That certainly changes from time to time. If I had a perfect day today – that’s a difficult question because a perfect day for me is a good day at work, too, but I don’t want to sound too sick on this interview, so I will say if I wasn’t at work, because I absolutely love what I do, I would like to get up and have a long morning run or a bicycle ride, come back, go to Starbucks, end up at Barnes and Noble and reading anything free off the shelf that I want to read, cooking a lot because I enjoy to cook, maybe catching a Sunday matinee, and spending time with my girlfriend, and then probably watching late night TV and reading.
FI: Let’s look at your career path. Did you have a military career?
JJ: No, I did not. With my brother in Vietnam, they had the lottery in those days. I don’t know if you remember that. They would pull you.
FI: The draft.
JJ: Yeah, the draft. I had a lottery number and I was A1, and I was next up to go, and then I believe it was President Nixon that came in to stop the draft about 30 days before I was due to be drafted.
FI: It wasn’t your destiny.
JJ: It wasn’t my destiny or purpose in life.
FI: Let’s talk about your purpose. You went to East Central, and you went to school in the small community that you grew up in. Why don’t you take us on a journey to your career from the time you left East Central, just in your own words?
JJ: It was interesting at East Central because I started out as an English major. I wanted to be the next great American writer. I had to take a couple of courses called Old English Verse, and I decided I needed to change paths. In the ‘70s, with everybody coming back from Vietnam, East Central was infamous for having one of the better rehab programs for those that came back with war injuries. Everybody was either a psychology major or a sociology major, so I kind of fell in with that group of people. It was in thing to do, so I switched to sociology, but kept my English major, which eventually turned into journalism. The name on the transcript would be communication. I remember going to the placement office and they looked at my degree and my minor and said good luck. They didn’t have anything for me. Well, I was walking across campus and I saw a sign that said the affirmative action officer from the Department of Corrections was on campus. Obviously from looking at me, I didn’t qualify for affirmative action, but I was unemployed, so I figured I was a minority. [FI laughs] So I went, and I’ll never forget the guy’s name. His name was Gary Gardner, and his friend was Dwight Scott. Two very nice gentlemen that treated me very well, told me what I needed to do, and that they were hiring. Right after I filled out all the applications, the governor at that time put on a hiring freeze, so I went back to work in the oil field. I’d gotten married at the time. When the freeze for state employment was lifted, I had three or four different offers from various agencies, but because of the way they treated me, even though it didn’t pay as well as the other offers I had, I felt obligated to those two gentlemen and I hired on as a parole officer in 1977 and I just finished 30 years in corrections last month.
FI: So you started as a parole officer.
JJ: And ended up 30 years later as the director of the agency, and I did a lot of stuff in between.
FI: Well, let’s talk about how you made that path. Did you just go from that job as a parole officer through the various incremental move ups in that position itself?
JJ: I actually carried a caseload for approximately seven years. In those days, I also became a supervisor of other officers, but you still carried a caseload. I loved working with offenders and found it very enjoyable. You could assist people in helping themselves. You personally couldn’t change anything, but you could guide people in the right direction and be a good coach and those kind of things. We had a director that came in that said if you wanted to be upwardly mobile, you also had to have institutional experience. I decided just to transfer over to the local prison, which was a Lexington, and I went to work there and enjoyed that and thought that this was where I was going to stay.
As odd as it is, my career path actually resulted in a bet in the sense that we had been watching the bulletin board and there was a district supervisor opening for Oklahoma County in corrections over all the probation for Oklahoma County. We noticed it had been announced numerous times over the last year and it kept getting re-announced, and a friend of mine who got killed in the Oklahoma City bombing in the Murrah Building had said, “You ought to apply for that just to see what’s going on.” He said, “I bet you won’t get it.” I said, “Well, I’m not interested but I’m going to apply anyway.” Come to find out, they had interviewed a lot of people and rejected a lot of people, and I’m not sure why I was selected, but without his encouragement – whimsical encouragement – I would probably still be working at the institution, totally content with what I was doing. Then I became the district supervisor for Probation and Parole, and then a couple of years later, I was asked to be the Deputy Director of Probation and Parole. From there, I moved five different times with my family across the state in different conditions.
FI: Where were you moving that you moved them?
JJ: I lived in Chickasha. I’ve worked in Lawton, Duncan, Shawnee. I’ve lived in Oklahoma City twice. I was moved to Weatherford to be over – I was the Assistant Regional Director for the prisons in western Oklahoma. Then they moved me to Tulsa to be the Regional Director for prisons in the eastern part of the state. Then I got moved back to Oklahoma City because a new program started called community sentencing, and I had a community background in corrections, so I was moved back to take over that new program. Then I went back to being over Probation and Parole again. I was actually in Paris, France on vacation when I got the message that the director in Oklahoma had resigned and would I apply for it, so I actually applied from overseas. I was there on vacation with my oldest daughter. I came back and went through six months of interviews with the governor and the Board of Corrections and I’ve been director two years last month.
FI: So you’ve been with the department itself –
JJ: Thirty years, and director the last two.
FI: In the work that you’ve done with corrections, where do you feel that you have had the greatest impact in terms of being able to help solve the problems that they hired you to solve as an administrator?
JJ: As an administrator? Okay. I would say being transparent and especially as the director, challenging the old way of doing things, challenging people to change, whether that’s employees or the offenders or the disenfranchised people that we serve and the families that those people have, reaching out and trying to do preventive programs for the children of incarcerated parents whose grandparents are raising them, allowing the environment to be a little bit more thawed, to allow the flexibility of more church ministries coming in, more volunteers coming in, more programming coming in. The key is really prevention in programming. Anybody can lock somebody up for a period of time and then let them out when the law mandates. It’s what you do in the meantime, and I believe that corrections has to step out of that old paradigm and look at the future of Oklahoma, and the future of Oklahoma is with the children. Even though my mandate is adult offenders, those adult offenders have families, and they have children, and they have grandparents, and nobody wants those children and those grandchildren to end up like their mother or father, addicted to drugs and in prison.
I think corrections has to take a bigger picture of things, and we’ve got the family member that’s incarcerated. We’ve got to do family justice and bring everybody in and do wraparound and holistic services because I believe the governor and the Board of Corrections put me in this position because they wanted change. They wanted some cultural paradigm shifting so that the next generation of the people in Oklahoma won’t have as many people incarcerated. As we sit here today, we are number one in the world, not just in the United States, on the incarceration rate of females. We’re number one in the world. We are twice the national average per 100,000. We’re twice as bad as the national average in Oklahoma for females. We are number five on the incarceration of males per 100,000. I believe that I see and maybe you see a different world than what the rest of the citizens of Oklahoma see.
The research says that the length of incarceration has no effect on recidivism rates. It’s what you do during that length of incarceration, the treatment programs, the best practices and the validated research that says that these programs work. It does take a family. It does take a village. It takes – it’s senseless to think that employees with the Department of Corrections can do this all by themselves. It takes volunteers like you’re doing with this. We have over 10,000 hours of volunteer services a month inside corrections. It’s not just all faith-based group. So to answer your question, you really have to wrap your arms holistically around the whole family. That’s why I’m here.
FI: You know, I had been approached several months ago with some people concerned about the number of females being incarcerated in Oklahoma and grandparents raising grandchildren. I was studying that. I’ve been studying that when I began to do this work. I had no idea that I would get a chance to interview you. I wasn’t even through – I haven’t even really done my research to begin to know the best way to even approach that. When I had an opportunity to know that you were interested in this, in doing some work with the volunteers, it was after I had already scheduled your interview. If it were not for Lou and Jim, I would not have been able to know about you in time for you to be interviewed in these interviews.
JJ: There’s a thing about faith.
FI: Destiny.
JJ: Destiny and faith.
FI: It is destiny, and it is good to know that you do have the outlook that you have because you had a chance to study the system from inside. There is hope if we can come together and look at some better options for our people.
JJ: Absolutely.
FI: When you think about how you got into this line of work, do you have any regrets?
JJ: Absolutely not. In all sincerity, and my staff look at me when I say this, I cannot think of one day when I hesitated to go to work or regretted to go to work. The same thing is said as director. The world is different. My world is very different now. I can be speaking to a faith-based group in the morning. I can be speaking to high school class at noon. I can be having a meeting about the number of programs and the number of success rates in the afternoon. That night, I can go do an execution. It’s a very interesting, very challenging world as a director. You have to transition very quickly from one hour to the next to carry out all the mandates that the people of Oklahoma have voted on and imposed upon the agency and the Department of Corrections.
FI: Would you like to share your religious beliefs with us?
JJ: Well, it’s interesting. I mentioned my mother earlier. As strong as she was, sometimes you can be too strong. She drug me into Baptist churches as a child, so therefore I am not a Baptist today. [FI laughs] I have gone to about every denomination you can come up with. I currently go to Mayfair Congregational here in Oklahoma City. I quit joining churches a long time ago because I’ve never really been satisfied. I would rather self-educate. I have been to Reverend Reed’s church. I’ve been to Saint John’s and done work there. Fairview. I’ve been to almost every church that has a prison ministry. That’s where I get my continuous religious education, by being guest speakers and participating in churches that participate in corrections and the disenfranchised of the world. I no longer join churches because I know I won’t stay.
FI: Okay. With the work that you’re doing with the different churches, you’re doing it directly in conjunction with the faith-based –
JJ: In most cases. There are other things that are spin-offs. We have been working and trying to assist. We are certainly not the leaders in this, but it did originate with Pastor Manning. He has a church that caters to gang members on the east side. District Attorney Prater and I and others in the law enforcement profession have started working in those groups. We’ve co-sponsored, for the last several years, a conference with grandparents who are raising children of incarcerated parents to do best practices and education to help those grandparents raise those children to break that cycle. I guess, to answer your question, almost all of my religious-related activities in some way or fashion is [sic] connected to my profession.
FI: Except the attendance that you have at Mayfair.
JJ: That’s right for me, which is odd because they don’t have a prison ministry. They should, but they don’t.
FI: Well, you might have to take a break some kind of way from the prison ministry and the prison work, so probably you do just need to be at church. [FI laughs]
JJ: I appreciate that. That did carry over. We are one of the first in the nation to have a character and faith-based unit at our female prison and our reformatory in Granite, which is kind of the first in the nation to take that angle. There have been other faith-based units around the country, but they don’t tie it into character-based programming that’s been proven through research to work. We’re doing this without anyone other than the staff and there’s no appropriated dollars going into that. It’s all volunteer work, and it’s been extremely successful, if you define success by reducing violence on the prison yards, if you define success by people discharging and not coming back. I think the longitudinal studies on those programs will show that once again, Oklahoma is on the cutting edge of innovations related to reducing recidivism.
FI: Why don’t you talk a little bit about that in terms of – I’d like for you to talk a little bit about whether or not you feel that the work that you’re doing is actually reducing violence in the prison yard. I’m trying to think of what a prison was that was on TV. I think it was a private prison. Wasn’t it in Hominy?
JJ: In Oklahoma?
FI: Uh-huh. (meaning yes)
JJ: The one in Hominy is ours. There’s one in Cushing. There’s one in Holdenville. There’s seven private prisons around the state, so I’m not sure which one –
FI: Okay, so Hominy belongs to the state.
JJ: Dick Conner Correctional Center, yes. We’ve had some violence up there this year.
FI: Okay. In terms of your comparisons, say in the last five years –
JJ: Well, you’ve got to look at all the caveats in the last five years. We’re at the highest capacity we’ve ever been at close to 26,000 inmates if you count those waiting to come to us. We’ve done that without any staffing increases and things of that sort. Sometimes there’s so many caveats to that question. Sometimes if offenders in prison don’t feel like the correctional officers and staff can protect them from each other, then you have an increased amount of offenders joining gangs in prison. A lot of offenders will join a gang in prison, but when they get out, they don’t affiliate with those gangs. They only do it in prison because they want protection. We’ve seen an increase in gang-related violence in our prisons this term. We started a community group, which Opio Toure kind of had an issue when he was still in the House of Representatives here about the violence, the racial violence, in the prisons. We wanted to take a lot of energy that was directed toward complaining about it and we wanted to redirect that into a positive direction, so we started a community advocacy group, which included the head of NAB-Vets, which is the National Association of Black Veterans that are incarcerated. We got Roosevelt Milton, head of the state chapter of the NAACP. We brought in Revered Reed and a lot of other people, Hispanic leaders, et cetera, from all walks of life. We even brought in a Jewish rabbi. We brought in everybody and we opened up our prison systems and we started putting some substance to this group to go into the prison setting to meet with inmate counselors and to meet with different ethnic groups of inmates that had issues to talk about how you live with other races. A lot of people are put in prison, Black and white, who really, other than on a have-to basis, never had to live and certainly never had to share a room with somebody from a different race. We’ve got to remember that because we’re such an integrated society, but then again, that’s only on the surface.
The inmates are no different than anyone else. You feel more comfortable with people that look like you. I wanted to bring in people that looked more like the people that were having issues because they would speak more freely to them. We started the stop the violence group, which has been somewhat successful. I’m a little frustrated that it’s hard to get everybody to show up and identify and go into – we had them go into Dick Connor Correctional Center in Hominy, which you mentioned. It did a lot to help that yard to have people walking and talking on the units from the community who said, “Hey, I know you. You went to my church. What are you doing acting out in here? I know your grandmama and I’m going to go tell on you.” It really helps because there’s not anybody in prison that there’s not somebody on the outside that loves them and when that inmate knows that they know what they’re up to, they change their behavior. No matter how old you get, you’re always going to listen to your mama. You’re always going to listen to your grandparents. But when you’re an inmate and people aren’t coming to see you, you forget that there’s people out there still wanting you to be good, and even if you never get out of prison, and we have a lot of people that will never get out. They’ll die in prison of old age. You can still be productive, and you can still lead a purpose-driven life in prison if you can just focus your energy in the right direction.
FI: In your opinion, what do you think you are seeing in terms of the types of crimes that are causing these numbers to grow with people going to prison?
JJ: I think that it’s Oklahoma insatiable appetite for narcotics that drives most of the prison population. Our top two reception crimes every year are possession with intent to distribute and CDS – controlled dangerous substance, which is kind of unusual. If you look at Oklahoma, 59% of our prison population are there on non-violent crimes. That doesn’t mean they don’t have violence in their background, but their current crime is non-violent, and 41% is violent. That’s a little odd for a prison system in the nation. We’re kind of just opposite of most systems across the country, knowing they will have more violent offenders in prison than non-violent. We’re just the reverse of that. One of the reasons is there’s this insatiable appetite for citizens in Oklahoma to do drugs.
Now, when you talk about pushes prison growth, you’ve got to do what I refer to as the misery scale. I made that up. You won’t find that anywhere. The misery scale are all those social evils that Oklahomans are in the top 10 for: sexually abused children, the dropout rate, literacy rate, sexually transmitted diseases. It goes on and on and on. Teenage smoking. Teenage pregnancies. Sixty percent of all children born in Oklahoma are born out of wedlock, which means they have a high likelihood – I’m not talking about anecdotes – I’m talking about averages – of having a single-parent home. That single parent is probably going to have to work two or three jobs to survive. So if you look at the whole list of issues that are on that misery scale that are all proven to increase the likelihood that you’re going to have a high incarceration rate in your state, the key word to any of this is prevention. If we know that in Oklahoma, for example, the dropout rate drastically increases at the ninth-grade level, why is that? It’s because kids start doing enough drugs in the ninth grade that they can’t keep up anymore. They’d rather be out on the street. What are we doing about it? We’re kicking them out of school. That’s what they want. They want to be kicked out of school. If we don’t start re-investing our moneys on prevention, then the cycle will never end. Once corrections get them, we can have an impact on our correctional impact reducing recidivism, but the goal ought to be not having to come to prison in the first place.
So you ask me about programs that we do to reduce recidivism and things of that sort – in my thirty years, in the last ten years, we finally have this meta-analysis and this research that says if you do this, this works. We don’t do anything that’s not proven to work in Oklahoma. If we have a program that doesn’t work, we don’t do it anymore. It’s been proven that come programs will increase your likelihood of coming back to prison. We don’t fund those programs and we don’t utilize those programs.
FI: That’s very significant to know. What, in your opinion with your research, what have you found for the people who’ve been in prison, the ones that don’t come back, what are the things that you have found in your follow-up studies of those prisons, the ones that don’t repeat?
JJ: That’s a very excellent question because we call it the Big Four. For you to be successful on re-entry and not come back into the prison system, there’s basically four things that have to be current in your life. You can put them in any order based upon your needs. The order that I’m going to give them to you in can be re-arranged depending upon your assessment and what’s necessary.
The number one thing is adequate substance abuse treatment since about 80% of everybody in prison is there because of that. That doesn’t mean their crime was drug-related. They may have burglarized your home because they were on drugs. They may have assaulted their spouse because they were under the influence. Secondly, meaningful employment, not working three or four fast food jobs, but something that gives you purpose in life, that makes you feel good, that is able to help you and your family survive. Meaningful employment. You can kind of put as asterisk by that, and that’s education. For every year of additional education you get, it drastically reduces the likelihood that you’re going to go back to prison. Then, the last one is a significant other, family, mentorship, and/or spiritual well-being. I lump all those together because all of those mean something somewhat different. If I come back and I’ve got a loving family that’s not going to just enable me, but they’re going to challenge me and help me, then that’s one thing. A lot of inmates don’t have families. Do they have a good coach and mentor? Do they have a church home? It doesn’t have to be faith-based. As long as you’re in touch with your spirituality and you know more than right from wrong, that there’s a purpose in your life. Those are the big areas that research has said that if you’ve got all those things going for you, the likelihood of coming back to prison is almost zero. The big issue, though, is quality substance abuse and aftercare.
There’s always the exception. There are those sociopaths out there, and I always have to tell people this. I’m going to say it right now. You’ve got to thank God for prisons because there’s some people that should never get out.
FI: I understand that.
JJ: There’s sociopaths and they could assassinate you and go have a cup of coffee and never think about you again. That is very few. That’s the exception, not the rule.
FI: If you could make any change to our present system and you had the funds to do so, what would be the change you would make to benefit prisoners outside of just building more prisons?
JJ: I never thought I would ask to build more prisons, but I’ve had to do that because I don’t see currently that we’re going to have any significant change in the sentencing laws in Oklahoma, or we’re not going to have enough treatment programs and prevention programs to slow it down enough to not to build. When you ask me the question of what I would do, and again this may not directly answer it, but I think you need to re-invest and if you could stop prison growth today, which isn’t realistic, and take the money that you would save and put it into quality prevention programs with very young children and at-risk families and targeted neighborhoods that are high risk, then that investment now will pay you three and four times over five years from now in reduced prison costs. That’s the key. There’s been studies done. A good example in Wichita, Kansas, research was done. There’s one neighborhood in Wichita, Kansas that was the biggest contributor to the prison system in the state of Kansas.
FI: One neighborhood?
JJ: One neighborhood. I can tell you in Oklahoma, we can call it neighborhoods or districts. You can do that in Oklahoma. We can identify – they’ve done it with gang activity. They’ve done it with deadbeat dads who don’t pay, and there are these very high-risk neighborhoods. Let’s talk about that. Let’s target these neighborhoods, and when I say target, don’t go in and arrest everybody. Make an analysis of why these are at-risk neighborhoods and how we can solve this. I have found most people, given the assistance that they need, want to get ahead in life. They want to do better in life, but without the assistance – so I think re-investment. Start with your high-risk neighborhoods. Oklahoma has so much rural area, and actually research in Oklahoma says drug usage is a higher percentage the further out you go from Tulsa and Oklahoma City and Lawton. You get out into the rural areas and the percentage of children using drugs is much higher than it is in Capitol Hill or Edmond. Just as an example.
FI: I understand that is especially true with methamphetamine.
JJ: Absolutely, and what we call huffing, or inhalants of glue and paint. You get more poverty in the rural areas. You do cheaper drugs, but they’re actually more addictive.
FI: Mr. Jones, we would like to thank you for taking your time today to come and interview with us. We would like to give you a chance to make any comment that you want to make in terms of to the people of Oklahoma about the work that you’re doing that you think might be important before we end this interview.
JJ: First of all, Oklahoma is an absolutely wonderful state to live in. I’ve had opportunities to leave and I’ve chosen not to. It’s in the middle of the country. I love the seasonal changes. There’s so much potential here, but policymakers, decision-makers, the people of Oklahoma need to have a lot of vision. It should be embarrassing to everyone that we lock up women number one in the world. The state of Oklahoma has more inmates than New Jersey, has more inmates than Massachusetts, has more inmates than Washington state, states that have double and triple our population, and we sit here with the fourth highest in the nation per 100,000. That being said, it’s a great state. It has a lot of potential to be better. It’s in the middle of the country. You can get to either coast in three hours. I think people need to go into it with eyes wide open, and they need to understand that there’s an Oklahoma out there that the average person doesn’t see. That’s what I’ve been talking about, is the disenfranchised, that with a little assistance and a lot of prevention, we can turn this thing around. If not, we can continue to be number one and number four for my children and your grandchildren and everyone else. I certainly don’t think anybody will agree that that’s a good thing. I appreciate the opportunity and it’s an honor to be invited.
FI: Well, it’s an honor for you to share your views. It gives us some options that we didn’t have before. We had the opportunity to talk to you, to have access to your knowledge and your research. I’ll take this into advisement as I continue to do the work that I’m trying to do, but ordinary citizens hearing this tape might have a change of heart when they have an opportunity or might seek out an opportunity to participate in that group of people that want to make that difference, to set up some possible ways to provide prevention alternatives support for the people that we are trying to help in this area to keep them both from getting in to prison and once they get out of prison, staying out of prison. Thank you very much, Mr. Jones. Thank you so much.
JJ: Thank you, Ms. Holt. I appreciate it.
End of interview.