OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla.—On Valentine’s Day, some seven years after leaving the state Capitol as Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, Kris Steele watched an old man in a purple shirt pee into a cup.

“Do you have any special plans for today?” Steele asked the man as he stood vigil a few feet away in the worn yellow bathroom of The Education and Employment Ministry. Steele, a boyish looking 46, runs TEEM, a street-level nonprofit in downtown Oklahoma City that helps felons reenter society with job training, life skills and drug testing. Here, even the director snaps on blue latex gloves for urinalysis duty.


There is no shortage of work. Oklahoma has led the nation in the number of citizens it incarcerates, often in a neck-and-neck race with Louisiana. A June 2018 report by the Prison Policy Initiative declared Oklahoma “the world’s prison capital”—putting the tally at 1,079 people incarcerated per 100,000 when counting prisons, jails, ICE detention and juvenile lockup. The governor’s recent spate of commutations—including the record-setting 527 in a single day in November—and parole board reforms have helped nudge down that number, but the prison system remains so overloaded that the state’s Department of Corrections has requested $884 million to increase capacity by 5,200 beds.

“I refuse to believe Oklahomans are the worst people in the world,” Steele says. Rather, it’s a state suffering from addiction, trauma and poverty, and a political culture that prizes tough-minded approaches to social problems. He argues the penal system merely makes that situation worse. When I visited him in Oklahoma before the Covid outbreak, Steele told me that he loves his home state, “but we’re awfully quick to look at incarceration as a solution. It tears families apart, it creates instability. It makes the situation much worse.”

At TEEM, corrections inmates from a work-release, minimum-security facility are able to learn the construction trade beginning months before their release.

Steele’s opinion might not count for much except that he’s a well-connected and high-profile Republican in one of the reddest of red states, a political prodigy who was elected to state government at age 27 and within 10 years had ascended to speaker of the state House. A Baptist minister and fiscal conservative, Steele ultimately found his calling in an issue that was not a legislative priority of his party: reforming the prison system.

In office, even with the power of the speakership, he largely failed to move his party away from its reflexive law-and-order roots. On the outside, however, Steele has begun to have more impact—an approach that shows a widening chasm between the public and its elected representatives on this issue.


Since being term-limited out of office in 2012, Steele has brought together a diverse coalition of like-minded Republicans and Democrats, religious leaders, minority groups and deep-pocketed supporters, including Clay Bennett, who co-owns Oklahoma City’s hugely popular NBA team; the Arnall Family Foundation; the George Kaiser Family Foundation; and Oklahoma banking magnate Gene Rainbolt. Yet even as polls show wide public support for reforms such as decriminalizing drug possession and shortening sentences, and the federal government has been surprisingly aggressive in criminal justice reform, Oklahoma has remained mired in a political standoff when it comes to justice reform—one that has fractured the state’s Republican Party and united groups as liberal as the ACLU and as conservative as Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity.

Steele has rallied them under the banner of Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform, a nonprofit that operates out of a swanky urban loft over a craft brewery a few miles away from TEEM. It was OCJR, working with the progressive advocacy group FWD.us, fronted by tech giant Mark Zuckerberg, that helped apply pressure to the governor to commute those sentences in November. And it is OCJR, along with such partners as the ACLU, that is pushing a number of bills in the legislative session that ends in May, including bail reform and expedited release of incarcerated mothers.

But OCJR’s highest-profile effort is the ballot initiative called State Question 805, a constitutional amendment that it wants to put before voters in November that would end the practice of sentence enhancements, which can double the length of prison terms for second offenses. Even though coronavirus concerns ended the signature gathering early, Steele says 66 percent public approval for the measure helped his canvassers collect well over the 178,000 signatures necessary to get the question on the ballot.

In the meantime, Steele spends his days contending with the human impact of living in a state that prioritizes punishment over rehabilitation.


On this day in February, as he administered the drug test to the man on probation. Weathered and slight as a leaf in fall, the man’s voice wavered as he answered Steele’s question: He expected to stay home with his girlfriend on this Valentine’s Day. He hoped to eat steak and potatoes. Finishing, he handed the cup to Steele and watched in resignation as the built-in test strips changed color. “It looks like you may have some amphetamines in your system,” Steele said. His voice was even; he routinely sees people flunk the test. The man’s face crumpled as he admitted he used the week before. He already told his substance-abuse counselor, he said.

“I don’t …” the man started to say. His voice broke, and he tried again. “I don’t want to go back to prison.”

It’s a real fear. Steele is required to report the test’s results to the judge managing the case. Depending on his prior offenses, this man could see a mere tightening of his parole terms or he could be dragged back behind bars. In Oklahoma, a drug offender like this man will spend 78 percent more time behind bars than the national average. A violent offender will spend 21 percent more time.

“Listen, this is a journey,” Steele says. “The fact that you’re staying connected with your counseling and being honest about it means that we’re going to be able to conquer this.”

For now solace is all Steele has to offer, but it’s not for lack of trying.

‘Time to Cut Our Losses’

At TEEM, corrections inmates from a work release, minimum security facility are able to learn the construction trade beginning months before their release.





The crisis of incarceration has its roots in the 1990s tough-on-crime culture promulgated by the Clinton administration. Three-strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentences restricted judges’ discretion, and soon prison populations exploded nationwide. According to a 2014 report by the National Research Council, state and federal prison populations soared from 200,000 to 1.5 million from 1973 to 2009. The number of people detained today—from local jails to juvenile lock-up to immigration facilities to prisons is 2.3 million, easily making the United States the world’s leader in incarceration. A 2017 report by the Prison Policy Initiative estimated that imprisoning so many people cost $182 billion to government and families each year.

Oklahoma, in some respects, epitomized this trend.


In Oklahoma, a state born by lassoing Indian Territory, a tough-on-crime stance has long been politically advantageous. The result: From 2000, the year Steele was first elected, to 2010, the cost of corrections in Oklahoma soared 30 percent. Steele, who had been elected on a platform of low taxes and economic growth, saw these spending numbers as a threat to his fiscal conservative principles. He looked at the state books and saw a looming budget crisis. The corrections system was the second-fastest growing expenditure in state government after Medicaid.

“When I realized how much money we were spending and the trajectory, initially I thought this must mean we have the lowest crime rate of any state,” Steele told me. Instead, he found that Oklahoma’s crime rates were higher than many contiguous states. (Even now, while leading the country in putting people behind bars, Oklahoma is No. 11 in property crimes and No. 12 in violent crimes.) In his research, he talked to policy analysts and corrections officials. He visited prisons. He talked to felons and to their family members.

What he saw, as he describes it, wasn’t just a massively expensive system but a system that was criminalizing and perpetuating trauma. One story stuck with him: A woman who was in a car crash that broke her back and killed her 3-year-old son. She got painkillers for her back, and she kept taking them to numb her grief. Soon she was penniless, distraught, addicted and in prison for trying to sell stolen items to a pawn shop. “Here was a woman who very obviously experienced tremendous trauma and needed help and we didn’t help her,” Steele says. “We reacted to the behavior rather than to the cause of the behavior.”

Top: Jacqueline Blocker, engagement director for Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform, right, talks with Sandra Glover as she signs the petition in support of SQ 805, which would eliminate sentence enhancements for non-violent offenses. Bottom right: Dr. Tiffany Crutcher, whose unarmed brother, Terrence Crutcher was killed by Tulsa police officer Betty Jo Shelby during a traffic incident, talks to Michael Helms about SQ 805.

Steele grew up in a strict Baptist community. He was once berated by his pastor for dancing. He grew up to be a Baptist pastor himself before turning to the Methodist church in search of a denomination that he believed focused less on throttling human desire and more on helping the needy. It was a “paradigm shift,” he says. “The emphasis was more on the dos. Like, go out and and do good. Go out and help somebody.” When he began hearing the stories of felons, whose lives were often shaped by heartache and hopelessness (not coincidentally, Oklahoma also leads the country in childhood trauma), Steele felt elements of his Methodist faith—grace, love, compassion—“become more real than they ever had been.” And there was something else. He realized that a lot of the felons felt a way he has felt much of his life: shunned.

When Steele was 6 years old, another child playing with a pellet gun shot him in the head at point-blank range. The pellet passed through Steele’s brain, and he lay in a coma for 10 days while doctors told his parents he was going to die. He recovered, but he was not the same. To this day, Steele swings his left leg forward from his hip when he walks. His left arm and hand, though usable, curl from his elbow and his fingers often ball into a fist. Kids mocked him for his disability throughout his childhood. The result was another change to Steele—this one not physical. “I was able to identify with people who may be excluded or ridiculed or left out or stereotyped.”

“I was able to identify with people who may be excluded or ridiculed or left out or stereotyped.” —Kris Steele

This attitude, which he calls part of his “faith journey,” began to shape the way he saw larger social problems. “I think our communities are strongest when everyone is allowed to contribute to the greater good,” he says. “I think that sense of inclusion, at least in part, if I’m being 100 percent honest, stems back to some early childhood experiences.”

By 2012, his last year in office, Steele had convinced others that the incarceration crisis was not only a fiscal issue, but a humanitarian one. A bipartisan group coalesced that included business leaders, Republican Gov. Mary Fallin and the powerful district attorney who presides over Oklahoma City, a Democrat, David Prater. Together they ushered through the Justice Reinvestment Initiative authored by Steele, which was intended to preserve public safety while reducing costs by diverting nonviolent offenders to probation.

But the response from the right wing, and the law-and-order lobby, was outrage. Many district attorneys opposed the idea. The Sooner Tea Party chided the bill as “soft on crime,” and Fallin was up for reelection. Steele, who was a lame duck, could do little to ensure funding and implementation. Steele realized that while he had gotten the votes, he hadn’t gotten much conviction behind them. Late that summer, key players from Fallin’s office didn’t show for implementation meetings. Emails obtained by the local press showed some staffers worried that the bill aligned them with Democrats. Early the next year, Fallins’ general counsel announced that Oklahoma would reject the necessary federal assistance for the program. He declared it “time we cut our losses.”


In protest, Steele and Prater resigned from the implementation group. Steele left office clearly feeling there was unfinished business. Other than the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, he had passed only one reform measure: a pilot program to offer mental health and addiction services to pregnant women and mothers as a way to keep them out of prison.

Once he left office, his frustration with the Legislature convinced him to take criminal-justice reform directly to voters. His coalition of activists and business leaders crafted State Question 780, which downgraded to misdemeanors low-level drug possession and property crimes. District attorneys, once again, became the leading opponents. Steve Kunzweiler, the district attorney who represents Tulsa County, argued addicts would have less reason to seek treatment if their charges were lighter, and pressed the case that it reduced a prosecutor’s leverage in more serious cases. The opponents’ message failed to resonate with the public, and in November 2016, in a major victory for reformers—and a black eye for the people elected to pass laws—voters easily passed the initiative with 58 percent of the vote.

State Rep. Chris Kannady (R-Oklahoma City) is pictured on the House floor in 2019. | AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki

But soon after, the Legislature introduced a number of bills to undermine the law voters had just passed. One new proposal included creating felony zones around schools and churches, which would have created large swaths of land where the new law didn’t apply. Steele recognized that simply appealing to the public wasn’t enough: He would have to become as effective a lobbying force as the district attorneys. So he created a lobbying organization of his own, Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform, to fight the proposed bills and protect the intent of SQ 780. “We were able to say, ‘Time out. Distribution is still a felony conviction,’” Steele says. “All the safeguards to protect children are still there. Addiction doesn’t stop being an addiction based on location.” Steele and his team, at least temporarily, managed to hold off the encroaching bills.

The wind seemed to be blowing their way. In 2018, Republican businessman Kevin Stitt gained traction with voters in his bid for governor in part because he supported more criminal-justice reform. His win gave cause for hope, and at the start of 2019, pro-reform legislators—both Republicans and Democrats—introduced a raft of criminal-justice bills. The most transformative was bail reform, long advocated by Steele and introduced by Republican ally Rep. Chris Kannady. It would end up testing legislators’ commitment to reform.

A Las Vegas for the Luckless

Rusty Roberts, Tulsa bondsman

For poor Oklahomans, and there are plenty, doing time often starts before there’s ever a trial.

The Prison Policy Initiative estimated about 13,000 people in the state sat in the state’s local jails in 2018. Many couldn’t afford to pay bail so they could be released pending their trials. In Tulsa, the median stay for an inmate who hasn’t been convicted of a nonviolent felony is 33 days. In Rogers County, next door, the median stay is 183 days, according to data compiled by the Oklahoma Policy Institute. Nevertheless, bail bondsmen do brisk business across the state. The strip around the Tulsa County courthouse looks like a Las Vegas for the luckless, flashing with signs and bright billboards that scream promises of affordable bail bonds, typically 10 percent of the bail amount.

Kris Steele delivers petitions to qualify State Question 780 on the ballot in 2016. | AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki

The proposed law, known as Senate Bill 252, would have standardized bail procedures across the state, requiring everyone to get a bail hearing within a week and receive counsel. Most significantly, unless deemed a risk by the judge, nonviolent offenders would be released on their own recognizance. In other words, without having to post cash bail. A 2016 task force assembled to address dangerous overcrowding in the Oklahoma County jail (where offenders from Oklahoma City are housed) found that 80 percent of its prisoners hadn’t even been charged yet with a crime. Rather, they sat in jail awaiting trial.

Reform advocates call this “criminalizing poverty”: pulling citizens who haven’t been convicted out of their homes, and out of the workforce, simply because they couldn’t afford bail. Steele’s group launched a massive support effort, joined by two powerful pro-business groups, the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity. They argued that the financial and human toll of Oklahoma’s penal system was hurting the state. But even Americans for Prosperity, the well-funded national group credited with turning once-blue Wisconsin into one of the nation’s most anti-union battlegrounds under Gov. Scott Walker, ran into resistance.


District attorneys, again, opposed the reform measure. This time they had the added weight of the bail-bonds lobby behind them. Tulsa bondsman Rusty Roberts hired a lobbyist to argue to legislators that the bill didn’t give judges enough discretion on whom to release on their own recognizance. “It’s just not good for public safety,” Roberts said, summarizing the message. “It’s not good for victims.”

“Whether or not things get done still lie in the fear of elected officials taking those actions. We still see a lot of folks legislating from a perspective of fear.” —Nicole McAfee, ACLU

Rather than weighing in on the legislative battle, Gov. Stitt declared he would create a task force to make recommendations by the end of the year. Last May, at the end of the 2019 session, SB 252 failed by just four votes. Reformers looking for hope noted how close the vote was, even without a push from the governor’s office. Plus, a smaller piece of legislation did pass, one that already had the political cover of the approval of voters: A law that made SQ 780 retroactive, so that people in prison for crimes now classified as a misdemeanor could walk free.

“There’s a lot of agreement on what the reform priorities should be,” says Nicole McAfee, who lobbied for the reform bills with the state ACLU. “Whether or not things get done still lie in the fear of elected officials taking those actions. We still see a lot of folks legislating from a perspective of fear.”

‘Woots’ Rose From the Crowd

Rejeania Miller-Strayhorne, formerly incarcerated woman who canvasses for SQ 805

On the morning after Valentine’s Day, Kris Steele emceed a rally in support of the latest strategic end run OCJR is trying to make around the legislature.

The rally was for SQ 805, the new voter initiative to end sentence enhancements for nonviolent crimes, which advocates believe is a cancer ailing the entire system. According to a review of data by Fwd.us, nearly 80 percent of Oklahomans with a prior nonviolent conviction received a sentence enhancement. In Arizona, another top-10 incarceration state, the number is closer to 26 percent. Many states do not even allow sentence enhancements for anything but select violent crimes, says Felicity Rose, Fwd.us’s research and policy director.

Unlike previous ballot questions, SQ 805, would have the power of a constitutional amendment, which is a bigger lift than previous initiatives because as a constitutional amendment SQ 805 requires far more signatures, gathered in the same amount of time, to get on the ballot. The organization is taking the gamble because a constitutional amendment is far more difficult for the Legislature to later meddle with, and its members feel this is a linchpin to overhauling the state’s penal code.

Activists allege that prosecutors have used the threat of enhanced sentences to increase their conviction rates through plea deals. These enhancements, which can double a prison term for a crime if it is a second or third offense, aren’t merely intended to lock away violent felons. They make it possible for prosecutors to seek (and judges to approve) life sentences for a vast array of nonviolent crimes, like lying to a pawnbroker about where you got that Rolex. The result is high conviction rates, as well as income to fund their offices: Courts charge defendants fees, sometimes several thousands of dollars, for the costs of prosecuting their cases, and a portion of the fees are distributed to prosecutors offices around the state. Prosecutors object to SQ 805 because they say it takes the power for making laws out of the hands of the elected officials.

About 100 people gathered in the white cement basement of a high school in Oklahoma City. The crowd, nearly all wearing deep blue sweatshirts that said “Yes on 805” on the front, looked like a sports team on game day. Steele brought a diverse lineup of speakers to the stage—a representative of the Urban League, a local rapper named Jabee, and a woman whose sentence for drug possession had been stretched to 12 years because of enhancements. Perhaps the least likely was an elderly rich white man in a sport coat: Gene Rainbolt, the 91-year-old banking tycoon who is enshrined in the Oklahoma Hall of Fame for building the largest state-chartered bank in Sooner history while rewriting banking laws in his favor along the way. He also grew up poor before emerging as a philanthropist with a heavy checkbook.

Top left: Rejeania Miller-Strayhorne displays her corrections ID card. Miller-Strayhorne was paroled last August after serving 17 years of a 30-year sentence for trafficking. Top right: Miller-Strayhorne canvases for SQ 805 outside the Sprouts Natural Foods Market in Oklahoma City. Bottom right: Miller-Strayhorne heads into her apartment in Norman, Oklahoma. Bottom left: Miller-Strayhorne prays over lunch with her pastor, Lee Walker.

Steele announced Rainbolt as his mentor and thanked him “for being a part of this revolution on criminal-justice reform.” While Rainbolt is famous among the power suit set, this crowd of mostly young people, roughly half white and half black, merely clapped politely until Rainbolt blasted into the microphone, “The destruction of human potential is simply not acceptable!”


Faces lit up. “Woots” rose from the crowd, and Rainbolt, stooped but still tall, followed with, “At 91, I like the words of Dylan Thomas: Do not go gentle into that good night, but RAGE! RAGE! RAGE!”

A roar filled the basement as Rainbolt shuffled off the stage.

At the rally was Rejeania Miller-Strayhorne, who told me she canvasses every day, “rain, sleet or snow to help eliminate that enhancement law.” Miller-Strayhorne, 51, was convicted of drug trafficking in 2005. She admits she was an addict, but she insists she never trafficked drugs, that she was arrested just for being inside the home of a dealer. “They said I should have known better,” she says.

Faces of Women in Recovery Women In Recovery is an Oklahoma nonprofit that helps women recover from addiction and avoid prison. Left: D. Kandice Nowak, 33, graduated from WIR in 2015 after 19 months in the program. She was facing 20 to life for 21 felonies and 17 misdemeanors, all drug related, when she entered the program. After successfully completing the program she is now a home care coordinator with Life Senior Services, helping the elderly age in place. She had her record expunged in 2018 and has one child and is married. Top right: C. Sonya Pyles, 45, graduated in 2015 after 16 months in the program. She faced six years for petty larceny and possession with a felony enhancement. Now with three children and one grandchild, she is a project coordinator for Tulsa Lawyers for Children. Bottom right: Kellie Gregory, 48, graduated from Women in Recovery in 2014 after spending 17 months in the program. She was facing 20 to life for endeavoring to manufacture a controlled substance. She had her record expunged in 2018. | Photographs by André Chung for POLITICO Magazine

No place has incarcerated more women per capita than Oklahoma, dating to 1991. While putting women behind bars is trending nationwide—more than 200,000 now sit in local jails and state penitentiaries—Oklahoma continues to set the pace. From 2017 to 2018, the number of women sent to prison in Oklahoma jumped 21 percent.

Miller-Strayhorne got charged with trafficking, the minimum sentence for which can be 10 years. But because Miller-Strayhorne already had a record—second-degree burglary, shoplifting, some bounced checks—her sentence ballooned to 30 years. “I never hurt no one,” she says, an assertion backed up by her Department of Corrections record. “I only hurt myself by doing drugs.”

She got out on parole in August. Now her full-time job is walking through Norman (she has no car) making $15 an hour, reeling in about 70 signatures a day so that, “I can be a part of changing something for the next Rejeania Miller-Strayhorne.”

‘Republicans Are Very Split’

Ravyn Boerner reacts after her husband Shaun Boerner, sentenced in 2018 for trafficking meth, was granted parole.

In early November, Governor Stitt made national headlines when he commuted the sentences of more than 500 inmates convicted of low-level drug and nonviolent offenses.

It was the culmination of the effort that began in 2018 under his Republican predecessor, Gov. Mary Fallin, who commuted the sentences of about 30 individuals in prison for crimes reclassified as misdemeanors after SQ 780. When the Legislature picked up the mantle to make 780 retroactive for all such people in prison in early 2019, Stitt accelerated the process by working with the pardon and parole board to grant commutations for a much larger set of prisoners.


“Today, we’re implementing the will of the people,” Stitt said at a news conference that day.

The governor’s eagerness led activists to believe that he would continue to prioritize criminal-justice reform when the 2020 legislative session opened in February. In an interview in December, a lobbyist representing a conservative wing of the justice reform coalition expressed confidence that the logjam was over, and he would take the supermajority Republican Legislature with him. “Stitt has proven he’s willing to move forward on reforms,” said the lobbyist. “It seems to me they are all in on changing the system.”

But when the task force report commissioned by the governor was released in January, activists saw none of the urgency they had expected. The report was thin, and its first recommendation was to extend the task force another year. It explained well-known problems, such as the need for bail reform—the same measure the Legislature had blocked in 2019—but offered no specific solutions. But it did recommend the government create a Bible college in the prison system.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt greets a woman who had her sentence commuted by the state on Nov. 4, 2019. | Mike Simons/Tulsa World via AP

In the State of the State address that followed the report’s release, Stitt touted the progress made in corrections as a result of faster paroles (favorable pardon, parole and commutation recommendations increased by 255 percent over 2018 to 3,288), and the impact of SQ 780 in shaving numbers off the prison population—then emphasized other priorities, such as expanding the state’s Medicaid system and streamlining state services.

The governor’s office did not respond to an interview request from POLITICO. But in a public statement, Stitt said he opposed SQ 805 and supports sentence enhancements for crimes like DUIs, human trafficking and domestic violence. And Stitt’s is not the loudest voice of opposition to 805. As usual, it’s the prosecutors, specifically their lobbying arm, the District Attorneys Council.

The council funds its lobbying work partially through the millions of dollars it receives from fees charged to the criminal defendants. For example, according to a 2015 analysis by the Oklahoma Policy Institute, getting busted for growing pot would cost a defendant about $3,300 in fees before a punishment is even handed down. If possession of drug paraphernalia is part of the charge, it can add a further $1,200. Fewer defendants would mean less revenue from fees. But that’s not the argument prosecutors are presenting to the public. They argue that the system as it stands protects the innocent and deters crime. “SQ 805 … would take away one of the most important tools law enforcement has to keep someone from escalating their behavior,” wrote Jason Hicks, the President of the Oklahoma District Attorneys Association in a recent op-ed.

Steve Kunzweiler, district attorney, Tulsa County, pictured in 2018. | AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki

Steve Kunzweiler, the district attorney who represents Tulsa County, argues that the Legislature created the penal code and appropriate changes should therefore be made by it—not ballot measures. “When you’re talking about people’s lives, victims’ lives, you’re talking about how things ought to be handled within the courts. You can’t simply come up with an idea off the top of your head and say, ‘Well this is going to solve the problem.’”

The result, in the words of Colleen McCarty, who monitors legislative activity for OCJR, is that “Republicans are very split. There are some that pretty much follow the line as Oklahoma DAs; they just systematically trust law enforcement. And there are some that are concerned about their constituents not being able to reintegrate into society.”






‘You Don’t Have to Be Incarcerated That Long to Know You’re Sorry.’

SHARLA HALENCAK (AT LEFT), FORMERLY INCARCERATED WOMAN AND MEMBER OF MOTHERS OF INCARCERATED SONS AND DAUGHTERS

As this year’s legislative session grinds on—meeting only intermittently now because of the coronavirus—Steele’s coalition is facing headwinds it didn’t expect just a few months ago. “We’re seeing no movement on last year’s bills,” says McAfee, director of policy and advocacy for the ACLU of Oklahoma. She fears that legislation addressing crime and corrections will be pushed back on the agenda, as it was last year. Or what looks increasingly likely, left out entirely as the state seeks to manage budget and pandemic-related problems.

Meanwhile, she and her allies have been on defense, seeing new legislation that would undo the effect of the law that made simple possession of drugs a misdemeanor. “From the time that SQ 780 passed until today, the legislature continues to try to undermine the will of the people,” Steele said. “That’s why we’re seeking a constitutional amendment for SQ 805.”

In the last week of February, while Kris Steele met with legislators on his own, the ACLU brought together about 20 activists in a training session in the capitol, led by McAfee. They got a briefing on bills to agitate for, such as one that would grant juries the right to consider alternatives to incarceration. (Oklahoma allows juries to decide not only guilt but sentences.) They were armed with a packet of legislative information that included preprinted letters advocating the specific bills.

“We need help. Her district is full of felons. It is traumatizing our children.” —Sharla Halencak

One of the activists, Sharla Halencak, is putting her life together 15 years after being convicted of a bogus check charge. The 54-year-old resident of Tulsa lost everything, she says, and was homeless. She has kicked her addiction, but she is angry that the system is now destroying her 32-year-old son’s family. He is serving 12 years, because of sentence enhancements for priors, on charges of running a roadblock and eluding arrest. She knows his childhood was a mess because of her addiction, but she argues the penal system is only creating more victims. “You don’t have to be incarcerated that long to know you’re sorry,” Halencak says.

On this day, Halencak and another activist, Becky Feldman-Standridge from Norman, visited Republican state Sen. Rob Standridge (no relation). His assistant said he was not in his office, but she listened while Feldman-Standridge enumerated the list of criminal-justice reforms she wants her senator to support. She asked if the senator supports any of them. “Those haven’t been on his radar this session,” the assistant answered. A few seconds later, the senator strode past the activists, his phone to his ear, entered his office and closed the door.

State Sen. Allison Ikley-Freeman (D-37th District) in 2018. | AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki

Feldman-Standridge and Halencak next visited the office of Democratic state Sen. Allison Ikley-Freeman, who represents Halencak’s district. She was also not available. “I just want her to take reform as a top priority,” Halencak says. She is wearing the same “Yes on 805” shirt that Steele distributed at his rally. “We need help. Her district is full of felons. It is traumatizing our children.”

Halencak handed the assistant, Cris Davis, a pre-written letter from the ACLU. At the bottom she wrote her own story: how her son’s wife and children are struggling while he is in prison. Halencak says she has been emailing the senator at least twice a month for two years and never received a response.


Davis said she will be sure that this time the senator gets the message.

Steele in his office.

Halencak left the capitol to return home. Steele returned to TEEM after meeting for an hour and a half with 15 legislators. It was after 4 p.m. He slung his suit coat over his chair and reiterated his belief in ballot initiatives such as SQ 805. “Taking it directly to a vote of the people,” he said, “gives us the best chance” of reforming the state’s corrections system.

His phone rang. He ignored it.

“The fact is SQ 805 on the ballot creates a conversation around criminal justice reform,” he said.

The phone rang again. He answered.

“Let me go take care of this guy,” he said, “and I will be right back.”

Then Steele lurched from the room in his dress shirt and tie, dropping what he was doing to give a drug test to a felon trying to get clean.