There Are Air Conditioning Heating Problems at the Osage County Jail
Video Transcribed: Osage County Jail is only receiving felony inmates. I’m Oklahoma attorney James Wirth talking about a news story reported from the Pawhuska Journal, indicating that there are some HVAC problems, some air conditioning heating problems at the Osage County Jail, and because of that, they’re having to change their policies up. Now, county jails normally are to hold people in custody while awaiting trial, so it’s pretrial detention.
These are people that have not been convicted of anything, but people that are being charged with a crime and have not bonded out or been allowed bond.
They’re normally held in the county jail, then transported to court, and then if they’re convicted, then they could be sentenced to time in the county or go to the state penitentiary depending on the circumstances.
But now they’re saying that due to this HVAC problem, they cannot house as many people. So they’re only housing felony inmates, and they’re releasing misdemeanor inmates that are waiting to get their court date.
So what that means is if somebody’s arrested on a misdemeanor, rather than going to jail, they may get an OR or a PR bond, Own Recognizance, or Personal Recognizance bond, where they promised to appear. Kind of like when you’re signing the back of your traffic, as opposed to having to actually go into custody in the jail until such time as you can bond out.
So as of right now, it sounds like Osage County Jail, they’re only taking inmates in on felony offenses for pretrial detention, no longer misdemeanors, in order to have fewer people in the jail so they can better deal with this situation where they are having problems with the heating and cooling.
If you’ve got any questions about that or any legal issue, you always want to talk to a Tulsa attorney privately about that. Confidentially about that. To get that scheduled with somebody at my office, you can go to makelaweasy.com.
