After last year’s contentious contract negotiations narrowly avoided a public safety problem, Oklahoma appears poised to allocate $312 million of cash reserves to purchase a Lawton prison owned by the GEO Group, which currently receives a per diem rate to house about 2,300 state inmates.
The Legislature’s two budget committee chairmen have expressed varying levels of support for the proposal, and an April 10 letter from Department of Corrections director Steve Harpe to the GEO Group put the agency’s “intent” into a written form that caught some lawmakers by surprise. Harpe wrote to David Donahue, the GEO Group’s CEO, in response to a draft purchase agreement that proposed a “non-refundable deposit” and some sort of April 15 deadline.
“I want to convey our intent to purchase the Lawton Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility,” Harpe wrote. “However, I must be transparent about the proposed timeline and non-refundable deposit. Since we first received notification about the purchase offer, we have been in ongoing discussions with the executive branch and the Legislature about the proposal. Both see the value in the property and we all wish to retain the asset. Oklahoma’s Legislature is currently in session and working through the state budgeting process. As such, the April 15 deadline is not feasible. Accordingly, we respectfully request a 60-day grace period beginning July 1, 2025, to allow continued collaboration with both the executive branch and legislative leadership. In meetings with the Legislature, they have indicated that they would authorize a $60 per diem rate during the extension period starting July 1, 2025. A mandatory non-refundable deposit is not possible.”
A spokesperson for the GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment about the Lawton prison negotiations, which have built for months as the parties sought to avoid a repeat of 2024’s contentious confrontations. Gov. Kevin Stitt’s office also did not respond to a request for comment on the proposal.
‘We have three options’
As he left a budget meeting about Department of Mental Health problems last week, Senate President Pro Tempore Lonnie Paxton briefly discussed the situation, saying the $312 million prison purchase remains in the mix along with other major capital requests from the University of Oklahoma — $150 million for a pediatric children’s heart hospital — and Oklahoma State University — $295 million for a new College of Veterinary Medicine complex. (While the OU and OSU projects are posted on the House budget portal, the DOC prison purchase request is not.)
“Remember that (Lawton prison purchase) was not on anybody’s radar at the first of session, so it’s just being added to our radar and we’re trying to assess that as well,” said Paxton (R-Tuttle). “I’ve probably been involved in it more than anybody (in the Senate) has since it came out of nowhere — myself and Sen. Hall.”
Senate Appropriations and Budget Committee Chairman Chuck Hall (R-Perry) had a slightly different answer, noting how annual contract negotiations between the private prison company and DOC grew particularly contentious last summer. (Stitt, who signed the largest commutation in state history and got sued for it after a released man murdered two people and boiled their hearts with potatoes, has ended contracts with private prisons before.)
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“I’ve been aware dating back to last year when the governor vetoed the per diem rate increase (and) the GEO company was concerned about their ability to be able to carry on services, so I anticipated discussions would take place about whether or not they would renew that contract,” Hall said. “So I might have been a little bit more in the loop than the pro tem whenever it became apparent that there might not be a renewal of the GEO contract, and I immediately briefed the pro tem (and) brought him up to speed. So we have begun to discuss our options. We’ve had the director of DOC come in and speak to our caucus and give us all the information that we asked for.”
Hall said Harpe “certainly believes in and is advocating for the purchase of the facility.”
“We have three options as I see it,” Hall said. “One is to purchase the facility. Two is to try to negotiate a per diem rate increase so that they would continue to provide the service. Or three, we allow the thing to shut down, lose 400-plus jobs for those hard working men and women in the in the correctional system down there, and we relocate those prisoners to existing facilities.”
Hall said he is not necessarily “advocating” for the Lawton prison purchase, but he said Oklahoma’s aging prisons and the cost of building new facilities are factors worth considering.
“The average age of Oklahoma corrections facilities is [more than 80 years old]. That’s our privates and the ones we own, the majority of which were never really designed to be prisons in the first place — that we’ve just retooled and fortified to be able to service the need. The GEO facility in Lawton is 27 years old. We know, or at least we estimate, that to build a new prison to be able to handle that population would be in excess of $1 billion, and so bought right it may make some sense for the state to lower the average age of our facilities — to have a more modern facility that’s ready to go — and then we don’t find ourselves in a per diem-adjustment position on a facility that we don’t own.
“I like the idea, at least initially, of lowering that average age down and having a more modern facility that’s ready to go to take care of this population.”
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Caldwell: ‘Very pressing’ issue spurs Rainy Day Fund request
House Appropriations and Budget Committee Chairman Trey Caldwell (R-Faxon) echoed many of Hall’s sentiments. With his southwest Oklahoma district circling Lawton, Caldwell has been paying attention to the state’s recently contentious relationship with the GEO Group for years.
“The House is for the position of purchasing (the prison),” Caldwell said. “We agree with the governor. We think that, one, it’s a good deal being able to buy a prison of that type, kind and quality for the price that’s been offered. I think it’s a really good deal for the state of Oklahoma longterm.”
But with state coffers featuring strong savings while recurring revenues sag, Caldwell has asked Stitt’s office to do something relatively novel to help facilitate the purchase.
“I think it’s very pressing. I’ve advocated for the governor to declare it a state of emergency so we could access the [Rainy Day Fund]. This is a ‘rainy day’ type problem. This is why you have a savings account when something like this that’s beyond our control (comes up). The private entity, GEO, no longer wants to have a business relationship with the state of Oklahoma. I don’t necessarily agree with their reasoning why, but they are a private entity, and they’re more than willing to make that determination themselves. They don’t want to exit their contract early. They’re just saying they’re not going to renew their contract with the state, and so that means as the state we have a responsibility to the citizens of the state of Oklahoma to keep them protected and safe.”
Caldwell said Oklahoma has adequate capacity for housing minimum security inmates, but even after years of efforts to lower the state’s prison population, a need remains for medium and high-security prison space.
“So it’s either pay some other state an exorbitant amount of money to house them for us, or to build a new prison, or to purchase this one, or to lease or find some type of prison,” Caldwell said. “But there aren’t really any other options across the state of Oklahoma when it comes to going out and leasing. There’s not an empty medium and maximum security prison just sitting somewhere that we could go lease.”
That’s not entirely true, but the market realities of staffing a prison factor in as well, DOC officials say. CoreCivic, another private prison company, currently owns two active prisons in Oklahoma: the Allen Gamble Correctional Center in Holdenville (operated by DOC under terms of a lease) and the Cimarron Facility in Cushing. But two other prisons owned by CoreCivic — the medium-security Diamondback Correctional Facility in Watonga and the medium-to-maximum North Fork Correctional Facility in Sayre — are currently empty.
Still, the population disparities among Watonga (2,600 residents), Sayre (4,800 residents) and Lawton (90,000 residents) present significantly different value propositions when it comes to the Department of Corrections recruiting and retaining prison employees.
“The biggest asset, in my opinion, that GEO has in southwest Oklahoma is the human capital,” Caldwell said. “And that’s one position that we’ve taken now since January — is if they send out the pink slips and they tell their employees that they’re leaving before we have an opportunity to come to a deal, then the value of that prison goes way, way down. Now it’s just a building. It’s still worth something, but the fact that we can transfer the vast majority of those employees — every single one of those employees will be offered employment through DOC at the same wage or greater wage. So again, saving those jobs is obviously important to southwest Oklahoma, but from a state perspective, it’s hard to (recruit and) train 500 DOC correctional officers.”
Kay Thompson, chief public relations officer for DOC, offered a similar assessment.
“We are interested in securing the Lawton Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility for several strategic reasons: It is fully operational and has staff in place; all assets needed to operate the facility are included in the purchase price (kitchenware, beds, camera systems, etc.); it comes with additional land that could support new housing units if needed in the future. This also would be the newest state-owned facility and is newer by an average of 54 years,” Thompson said in a statement. “Repopulating North Fork [Correctional Center] is not an option for us. First, we had issues staffing the facility (in Sayre). We kept one housing unit closed and ultimately vacated NFCC for this reason. Also, reopening would pull staff from [Great Plains Correctional Center in Hinton] and [Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite], negatively affecting those facilities. Diamondback in Watonga is not an option for us to lease, only purchase. However, since that facility has not been operational in many years, it would take millions of dollars to make it so, and staffing is also an issue.”
Thompson said GEO’s asking price for the Lawton prison has dropped significantly over the past year.
“In November 2024, the GEO Group added the opportunity to purchase LCRF to our list of options for $500 million. On Jan. 6, 2025, they made this our only option, albeit at $312 million. We began communicating with the executive and legislative branches shortly after. The purchase was publicly discussed during the [Appropriations and Budget Subcommittee on Public Safety] meetings for both chambers (Senate Jan. 21 and House Jan. 24) and in the full Senate Appropriations (and Budget Committee) on Feb. 5,” Thompson said. “We also engaged [the Office of Management and Enterprise Services] to contract with an appraisal company to ensure this was an appropriate deal for Oklahoma taxpayers. Several states have built prisons in the last few years. If we were to build a new prison, the cost per bed could range from $286,000 (Indiana) to $500,000 (South Dakota). Utah, Alabama, Illinois and Georgia’s prisons cost approximately $300,000 per bed. The appraisal came in higher than the purchase price.”
Thompson, however, emphasized that what to do “is ultimately the decision of the legislative and executive branches.”
“ODOC is dedicated to operating transparently and being good stewards of taxpayer dollars,” she said. “We look to the governor and legislators for guidance on the next steps and appreciate our positive working relationship with both chambers and the governor.”
(Clarification: This article was updated at 7:45 a.m. Monday, May 5, to clarify the operator of the Allen Gamble Correctional Center.)
