LAWTON – The GEO Group will manage the Lawton Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility for another year, but some inmates will be transferred to another prison under an agreement with the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.
GEO and the DOC recently agreed on a one-year contract extension, set to begin July 1. The contract calls for the DOC to reduce the Lawton prison’s population by moving some inmates to another location.
The Lawton prison currently houses 2,616 male inmates, including the state’s only protective- custody unit. But as part of the agreement, the state will transfer 238 inmates to another facility, reducing the Lawton prison’s population to 2,378.
For its part, GEO will take steps to curb violence, improve access to programs and give inmates more time out of their cells.
GEO officials were glad the state agreed to transfer some inmates from the Lawton prison, Executive Director George Zoley said in a June 26 statement.
“This decision will significantly enhance our ability to address and manage inmate incidents,” he said.
DOC Director Steven Harpe said the new contract does not mean the Lawton prison will return to the status quo.
“We are putting more procedures in place to ensure safety for our incarcerated population,” he said in a statement. ‘Significant challenges’ GEO owns and manages the Lawton Correctional Facility, the state’s only private prison. LCF was dubbed the state’s most dangerous prison after several violent incidents over the past several months.
Gov. Kevin Stitt, who recently vetoed a bill that would have provided an extra $3 million a year in state aid to GEO, cited those incidents in a June 20 post on X, formerly known as Twitter. He said he rejected the additional funding because conditions at LCF have not improved, and several inmates have died as a result.
“As the businessman governor, I hold bad vendors accountable,” Stitt wrote. “GEO hasn’t improved, yet asked for millions more in taxpayer funding. Enough is enough.”
Stitt’s veto prompted GEO to announce in late June that the company would end its state contract to manage the Lawton prison.
Wage inflation and staffing shortages have affected state prisons’ ability to recruit and retain employees, GEO officials said in a June 20 statement announcing the company’s decision.
“Unfortunately, the recent veto of funding that was approved by the Oklahoma State Legislature will only exacerbate our significant challenges,” officials said. “Upon extensive consideration of the current funding levels and resources relative to the present service requirements, we have determined that we are no longer willing to manage the 2,600-bed Lawton Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility without changes to financial and operational terms.”
GEO proposed a three-month contract extension, saying that would allow the state to relocate LCF inmates if both sides could not agree on new funding and contract terms.
The Department of Corrections countered by saying the state had increased GEO’s funding by $6.5 million over the last four years, but the company had failed to improve conditions at the Lawton prison.
“Our dissatisfaction with the current state of LCF and GEO’s facility operations has reached a critical point,” DOC officials said in a June 20 news release.
Contract negotiations Rep. Trey Caldwell, who is vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said talks between the Department of Corrections and GEO had broken down recently. He added that he knows DOC Director Steven Harpe and GEO’s executive director, George Zoley, and he brought the two sides together to negotiate a new contract.
“My role was kind of to make sure those guys were being able to have an open dialogue and communicate, and trying to facilitate the negotiation process,” Caldwell said in a June 28 phone interview. “Helping that move along, once they kind of hit roadblocks and once that relationship had broken down, on their behalf.”
After several days of negotiations, the DOC and GEO announced that they had agreed to extend the company’s contract for another year.
Caldwell said neither side got everything it wanted from the negotiations, but he thought they had reached an acceptable compromise.
“I think DOC wins,” he said. “I think GEO Group wins. I think the taxpayers of the state of Oklahoma win. And I think the 460 families that depend on those jobs for employment here in southwest Oklahoma – I think they’re the biggest winners.”
Zoley thanked Caldwell for his help.
“His invaluable assistance was instrumental in helping us reach an agreement with the state on the continued operation of the Lawton facility for the coming year,” Zoley said. Harpe said he echoed GEO’s gratitude to Caldwell. The DOC director also said he wanted to thank Gov.
Stitt, House Speaker Charles McCall, Rep. Kyle Hilbert and Sens. Darcy Jech and Brent Howard for their guidance.
Next steps Under the new contract, the Department of Corrections will move 238 inmates from the
Lawton prison to another facility. The agency will also pay GEO about $47.5 million to manage the prison for another year, down from approximately $48 million last year.
DOC officials have not yet decided where to house the inmates, said Kay Thompson, chief of public relations for the agency. She said the state has approximately 800 vacant inmate beds, but some of those are at women’s prisons.
“What we have to do is, we have to figure out which population,” Thompson said. “So, are we looking at people with certain ages, certain crimes? And it may just be a mix of everyone that we move into a bunch of different facilities. So that plan is still in the works.”
The DOC is also planning to convert the Lawton prison from a privately managed prison to a state-run operation. That would include leasing the building from GEO, retaining employees who want to continue working at LCF and conducting extensive background checks on those staffers.
“We would run them through a crossover academy, and so then they would become state employees,” Thompson said. “At that point in time, that’s when we would take over operating it.”