Oklahoma faces a severe and worsening mental health crisis driven by untreated mental illness and substance abuse. The state’s prisons are increasingly serving as large nursing homes and mental health institutions, with many inmates in their 70s and 80s requiring care that prisons were never designed to provide. Homelessness has become visible in cities like Oklahoma City and Tulsa, with untreated mental illness driving much of the problem.
The Donahue Behavioral Health project in Oklahoma City exemplifies the state’s struggle. Originally planned as a 330-bed, state-of-the-art facility to replace Griffin Memorial Hospital in Norman with an Urgent Recovery Center for crisis care, the project collapsed under cost overruns and delays. The initial $150 million plan ballooned by another $125 million. By May 2025, lawmakers abandoned the original vision and instead approved buying and renovating an existing building in Oklahoma City, creating 197 beds instead of 330. This decision cut adolescent care, eliminated the Urgent Recovery Center, and reduced overall capacity by more than 130 beds before the facility opened.
According to the author, too many Oklahomans end up incarcerated not because they are hardened criminals, but because they are sick. “Without upstream investment in mental health, we’re simply shifting the cost to emergency rooms, law enforcement and city streets,” the piece states. The author argues that government delays and contractor cost overruns complicate projects, with typical government work experiencing 12 to 18 months of delay before groundbreaking. The author calls for matching the scale of the problem with appropriate investment, warning that Oklahoma will continue “paying more in the long run—whether in prisons, emergency rooms or lives lost on our streets” without meaningful change.
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://www.oklahoman.com/story/opinion/columns/guest/2025/09/11/oklahoma-prison-mental-health-crisis-homeless/86039910007/