People
Issue No. 18 - August/September 2004
One Day in the Oklahoma City Jail…
by Colin Pearce
A jail is the last place you’d expect to be a bastion of good character, especially one that housed the likes of the Oklahoma City bomber and his accomplice.
But my visit to the Oklahoma City Jail early this year changed my thinking about character and the way we can all manage people for good and see massive improvement.
I met troopers and Sheriff’s deputies bragging and beaming about the great leaps they’ve made in prison culture in the last five years. I saw prisoners laughing good naturedly with officers, taking classes, improving themselves and showing respect to each other. It was a bit like a 13 storey YMCA camp with big locks.
WORTHWHILE AT LAST
Lieutenant Bobby Carson told me, ‘In the last five years we have come 50 years. I’ve been in law enforcement 23 years and I can at last say I am doing something worthwhile with my life.’
CHAINED TO THE TAPS
The Warden, Major Clifford Uranga told me the history, ‘Back in ‘98/99 we were beside ourselves with some 40 or so juveniles we were housing at the time and with them beatin’ on each other, beatin’ on the jail and beatin’ on us we got so we had to chain them to the taps when they showered.
I appealed to Chaplain Argyl Dick to find us some help and to find it fast. He discovered the Character First Program just down the road from us – it had been there all the time but we’d missed it. Anyways we started to work with it and in a short time we had those rival gang members eating at tables with cutlery, talking to each other by their first name and calling us “Sir” and “Ma’am”. That turned our facility around and we started running with the program. Now five years later there’s not a trooper or an inmate who would want to turn the clock back.’
SO HOW DO THEY DO IT?
They certainly do more than I can tell you in one small article so over the next few months I’ll write more. However the program can be s...
