Oklahoma Once Sent Its Prisoners To Kansas

Here's a weird little piece of Oklahoma history I saw on The Pemberton Boys TikTok...

Back when Oklahoma was still figuring out how to be a state, we had a huge problem. We had a bunch of criminal prisoners, but we didn't have a state penitentiary.

Can you imagine? What would you do with a bunch of prisoners and no place to put them? This is really early on in our statehood, but we did have an arrangement with Kansas dating back to the old Oklahoma Territory days.

For the first few years, it was just business as usual. Oklahoma paid Kansas to house the prisoners, and Kansas put a lot of those prisoners to work.

Then a woman named Kate Barnard came along.

Barnard was Oklahoma's first Commissioner of Charities and Corrections, and in 1908 she started hearing some things about what was happening to Oklahoma prisoners in Kansas, so she hopped a train to find out for herself.

Barnard reportedly went in as an ordinary visitor before revealing who she was, and what she saw wasn't pretty. Oklahoma prisoners were being forced to work the local coal mines for private businesses, and Kansas was making good money for it.

Barnard documented brutal treatment, poor food, and miserable working conditions, and when she got back to Oklahoma, the whole arrangement started coming apart.

The Prisoners Come Home

Oklahoma wasn't going to keep sending prisoners to some Kansas forced-labor prison camp. We would make our prisoners work for us.

This is where the McAlester prison comes in. In order to speed up the build, the first prisoners rescued from Kansas were put to work to help complete the prison they'd eventually call home.

I thought it was interesting, how McAlester became home to Oklahoma's first state penitentiary, built by the men who eventually took up residence there. A truly ironic tale.

One of these days we'll talk about the prison rodeo.