Oklahoma Diversion Fund Reaches 43 of 77 Counties, a Decade After Vote

Ten years after Oklahoma voters approved a pair of criminal justice ballot measures, 43 of the state's 77 counties are drawing money from the fund that was supposed to redirect prison savings into local diversion programs, according to the state mental health agency. The figure, current as of Oct. 20, was reported by Oklahoma Watch and anchored an Oct. 21 interim legislative study on why the program has spread so unevenly.

State Question 780 reclassified some drug and property offenses from felonies to misdemeanors. Its companion, State Question 781, was meant to send the resulting savings back to counties for programs addressing substance use, mental health, housing, employment or education. The first measure moved quickly; the second did not.

"We've not executed fully on State Question 781," said Rep. Meloyde Blancett, D-Tulsa, during the hearing. "Consequently, we're seeing a lot of revolving door offenders going through the system but not really getting fully off the path of reoffending."

Six years to write a formula

Oklahoma's prison population fell nearly 20 percent between 2016 and 2021, a drop that let the state vacate a private prison in Cushing and close a state-run facility at Fort Supply. Lawmakers made the reclassification retroactive in 2019, clearing the way for what officials describe as the largest single-day mass commutation in U.S. history.

The savings took far longer to route anywhere. It was more than six years before the Legislature settled on a funding formula for the County Community Safety Investment Fund, and the money only became available in late 2023. By then, many county officials had no idea the program existed or what kind of projects would qualify.

The Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services administers the fund and has since built model programs and simplified the application process. Applications for the next round remain open through the end of October.

What rural courts run into

Money is not the only obstacle. The smallest counties receive a minimum allocation of $62,500, and behavioral health providers are sparse enough in remote corners of the state that response times stretch even when a program is funded.

Michelle Kirby-Roper, an associate district judge in Beckham County in western Oklahoma, applied for money in 2024 and started a jail-based treatment program with group therapy and counseling. She told the interim study that the sessions help but cannot carry a patient alone. "If you have too great a period of time between when they leave jail and the time that they start treatment, you've already lost them," she said.

Her drug court program had already collapsed after State Question 780 took effect. She proposed an incentive structure the state has not adopted: enter treatment, stay clean, and the case is dismissed with all costs waived.

A working model, in the two biggest counties

Oklahoma and Tulsa counties launched misdemeanor diversion programs on roughly those terms in 2021. Meagan Taylor, chief executive of the Diversion Hub, said the Oklahoma County program has served 2,302 participants with a 73 percent graduation rate. Most of its funding does not come from the State Question 781 pot, she said, but the design could be exported to rural counties that are still deciding how to spend theirs.

"We all know that 781 is not going to be the sole answer to Oklahoma's incarceration and the behavioral health needs that we have," Taylor said. "But what we do know is that it's an opportunity for system cohesion and an actual strategy that we can use to see positive outcomes."

The gatekeeper question

One structural fix drew more agreement than any funding increase. Court officials cannot submit a State Question 781 application without approval from their county commissioners, a step Blancett said slows proposals from judges and prosecutors who already know which defendants keep cycling through their courtrooms.

"County commissioners tell us we know roads and bridges; we don't know mental health or drug court or diversion programs," Blancett said.

Brittany Hayes, senior vice president of policy at the Healthy Minds Policy Initiative, told the study that changing who signs off would not require amending the Oklahoma Constitution. Her organization helped write a guide for counties applying to the fund, and she argued that voluntary participation has run its course as a strategy. According to Healthy Minds figures cited at the hearing, 19 percent of Oklahomans experienced a substance use issue in the past year and three-quarters of them received no treatment.

"This isn't a small, isolated issue," Hayes said. "It doesn't discriminate between the population of your county or its access to services."

For counties that do participate, the money can pay for intensive outpatient capacity, recovery support or the kind of jail-to-treatment handoff Kirby-Roper described. What it cannot do on its own is create a clinic, a prescriber or a counselor in a county that has none — the gap that the interim study was convened to map, and one that a decade-old ballot measure has yet to close.