Bubbaworld

A 55-year-old inmate at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester was found dead in the bunk of his prison cell on Monday.

While prison inmate deaths do occur from time to time, what is weird about this death is that he apparently died on Friday evening and no one seems to have noticed until Monday.

And this in spite of so called “stand-up counts” conducted three times a day, at 9 a.m., 4:30 p.m. and 8 p.m., supposedly to insure that all inmates are present and supposedly alive in their cells.

To make matters even worse for prison officials it appears that the inmate’s death was due to strangulation.

The Department of Corrections’ Internal Affairs officers are leading the investigation with an assist from the state Medical Examiners Office and surprise, surprise the dead inmates cell-mate is what’s the fancy term for suspect? Oh yeah, “a person of interest”.

Oklahoma State Prison spokesman Terry Crenshaw was obviously hard pressed to explain how a dead inmate made it through at least six “stand-up counts” and could not offer anything better than “He (the dead inmate’s cellmate) may have put him on his bunk. When we discovered the body, the inmate was on his bunk.”

Owing to the fact that we are discussing Oklahoma’s “Big Mac” a scenario similar to that of the movie “Weekend at Bernie’s” is not totally out of the question.

What is obvious is that Oklahoma’s prison system has not gotten any better in spite of additional funding poured into it each year and it is not going to get better until a massive over-haul of corrections takes place.

A good place to start would be paying prison guard wages sufficient to attract individuals that can at least tell the difference between an inmate standing up and one lying down. The ability to tell the difference between living and dead inmates is an added bonus…

Reference:

OSP inmate may have been dead for days (9/28/07)