Operating on a shoestring budget with limited staff, Atoka County Sheriff Kody Simpson grapples with many of the same problems other rural sheriffs face from year to year when it comes to insuring his jurisdiction’s 65-bed jail. Liability insurance for a correctional facility is hard to find, and rates have increased as much as 300 percent in the last four years.
Insurance provides law enforcement agencies with financial protection in the case of workers’ compensation claims and general liabilities, or in the case of lawsuits for incidents like jail deaths, which can result in settlements of several million dollars. Wagoner County, for instance, agreed to pay $13 million to settle the 2021 death of Angela Liggins, and the separate law enforcement beating death of Jeffrey Krueger could result in another major payout.
Atoka County spans nearly 1,000 square miles with less than 15,000 residents, and Simpson operates his department on about $231,000 in funding, leaving little funding to purchase insurance — and certainly not enough to settle any potential lawsuit worth millions of dollars.
His department accounts for about 15 percent of the county’s $1.5 million annual budget. County funding is generated through a 2 percent sales tax and property taxes, but revenue is limited in rural communities with lower property values.
“About a quarter (of the county) is state and federally owned, so we don’t collect much tax off that land,” Simpson said during an August interim study on jail insurance in front of the Senate Local and County Government Committee.
The study, which featured testimony from county commissioners and other officials from around Oklahoma, was requested by Sen. David Bullard (R-Durant).
Bullard said rising rates and shrinking options for carriers spurred the need to examine the history and nature of jail insurance in rural counties.
“This is probably going to be the biggest interim study that I have, because we’ve seen problems going on statewide, have we not?” Bullard told fellow senators. “We’ve seen problems that need to be addressed. Nobody seems to be able to tell me what that is. We look at solutions, and everyone kind of has some concepts of what those solutions are.”
For Simpson, one question he has involves why jail insurance policies are so expensive and why they are hard to get.
“I question why these jails are being reduced or dropped totally from their insurance,” Simpson said during the meeting. “Why are we going through one insurance agency and not using capitalism to get more competitive rates?”
Counties use an insurance pool to minimize risk
To meet their policy needs, most county jails in the state participate in a pair of insurance pools managed by the Association of County Commissioners of Oklahoma. Policies are offered for workers’ compensation, as well as property and liability.
ACCO executive director Chris Schroder discussed the pools during the Aug. 20 interim study.
“Most counties weren’t able to get liability insurance, so most of the judgments at that time were going back to taxpayers,” Schroder said. “So commissioners put a package together so they could offer general liability for property, auto and law enforcement liability when they created the program. It was an affordable option for insurance they couldn’t get elsewhere.”
Insurance pooling aims to spread risk around among participants.
“Each county is part-owner of the pool,” Schroder said. “Each county is responsible for being a good member. And, being part of a pool, you will have a bad year. You’re not going to be able to avoid lawsuits or hail damage or tornadoes. Some counties might have a bad year, while others have a good year.”
Like Oklahoma County, which has seen nearly 60 detainee deaths in its jail over the last five years, Atoka County has been sued for deaths inside its facility. Most recently, the family of a man who died in jail from influenza in 2019 sued the Atoka County and won a $3.2 million judgment in federal court.
Schroder estimated that about 60 to 70 percent of detainee deaths result in federal lawsuits where there are no caps for damages and awards have been increasing.
“We are seeing a slight uptick in lawsuits, but the real change has been in the dollar value,” Schroder told senators. “Talking to some adjusters, 15 years ago, you could settle most cases for about $100,000. But now, we go up to our policy limits, which is $1.5 million this fiscal year, and with federal lawsuits, it won’t touch it. The county can come in and say they want to settle for $2.5 million, but the attorneys want $4 million, and essentially that difference will go back on the tax roll.”
For jails like the one Simpson runs, every day is a roll of the dice. Facing staffing shortages and challenges providing medical care inside their facilities, jail administrators must view every detainee as a life worth sustaining. But a variety of factors — from personal health issues, substance use and access to contraband — can make any individual who walks through the door can be a liability time bomb.
“We don’t have the funding,” Simpson told senators. “We don’t have the staffing. I have 14 employees, and I have to use some of them as dispatchers. That covers four municipalities, as well as the [Department of Corrections] and state troopers. I have a 76-bed facility, and I try to maintain it at 65 (detainees), and a lot of times we go over capacity. I can’t pay my employees enough or what they deserve. A lot of the time, we have one jailer and one dispatcher in the control room and one on the floor. That’s a danger to staff and inmates. One staffer versus 65, that is a major concern.”
Simpson said one solution might be to consolidate jails. Multi-county jails were authorized by the Oklahoma Legislature years ago, but none has been built since. Still, organic agreements between counties have arisen in recent years. Comanche County, for instance, tries to limit overcrowding at its jail by contracting with a half-dozen other counties to house detainees. Hughes County’s subterranean jail was closed in 2023 owing to liability concerns, which has left commissioners with little choice but to contract with neighboring Seminole County.
“We could have a better quality of employee and more employees per inmate,” Simpson said of the idea that counties could share jails.
Simpson has explored the idea of contracting for medical services inside his jail to reduce the risk of detainee deaths, but that too has proven prohibitively costly.
“To mitigate medical concerns in our jail, I reached out to county commissioners and looked at two different companies, and one quote was $250,000, and the other was $320,000,” he said. “They don’t have the funds.”
Commissioner: ‘We’ve been put on watch by attorneys’
Mike Brittingham has served as a Pushmataha County commissioner for 15 years. The rural southeast Oklahoma county covers about 1,400 square miles and is home to about 11,000 residents.
Brittingham said his county decided to self-insure rather than participate in the ACCO pools or seek policies from other carriers, fewer and fewer of which have reportedly been willing to write policies for jails.
“We have priced insurance like they have. INSURICA was probably one of the ones we looked at more than any, but their deductibles are high, their rates are high. That’s one reason we decided to self-insure,” Brittingham said. “By the time we spend the money out on deductibles and premiums, we can pretty well insure the same amount with the coverage ACCO has.”
Brittingham said attorneys have become well-versed in knowing where to look for potential jail deficiencies that help make their cases.
“We have been put on watch by attorneys, and when they see us have an incident, they are contacting inmates for legal counseling,” Brittingham told senators. “Our county hasn’t had a policy or procedures (manual) for five years. I have talked about these problems, but we couldn’t get anything done on creating those policies and procedures. We do annual jail inspections, and those are brought up during those things. But when you have an incident, attorneys will look for you not dotting your I’s and crossing the T’s. With a lot of inmates being federal, those end up there where there is no limit on what counties can be sued for.”
In his remarks to senators, Choctaw County Commissioner Jim Bob Sullivan said his county’s annual insurance costs across all areas, including jail liability, have skyrocketed.
Sullivan said that for Fiscal Year 2021-2022, Choctaw County spent about $288,000 on liability insurance and workers compensation insurance. Four years later, that total has ballooned to $866,000, or 25 percent of the county budget.
“We scratch and claw and do everything that we’re supposed to do to help the public,” Sullivan told senators. “It’s a hard journey, and we barely make it. And if we do, it’s by some miracle that we don’t have another lawsuit through the jail.”
Sullivan said that many lawsuits filed against the county for a jail incident “have something to do with drugs.”
“They come in whacked out,” he said. “They’re either on [drugs] or coming off them, and they do crazy things. You can’t predict what they’re going to do. Lawyers have figured it out, and they take it all the way to the federal level, where there’s no cap and they get rich.”
Sullivan concluded his presentation with a warning.
“It’s going to be a big problem with every county in the future if something isn’t done,” he said. “Right now, we have 10 counties that are in trouble, and the rest will be if something isn’t done.”
