Tulsa Sheriff Stanley Glanz is highly critical of a move to begin looking at proposals from private operators to run the county jail.
"Having a private operator in the jail is really a bad idea," Glanz said. "If you don't manage your jail properly, you have major problems in your community, and you can have a lot of loss of life that occurs. So, they really need to think about what they're doing."
Last week, in response to criticism over jail operations, primarily by Tulsa Mayor Dewey Bartlett, the Criminal Justice Authority voted to begin the process of seeking bids from private contractors. It's been tried and was a huge failure, according to Glanz.
"If you have for-profit people running the jail, the better their profits, the better the numbers that they have," Glanz said. "So, they're going to try and keep that population up."
The sheriff's office has been running the lockup since 2005. Before that, the private firm Corrections Corporation of America was the jail operator.