CJAC Releases 2024-2025 Annual Report
- anglinpr
- Jul 18
- 2 min read
CJAC completed its seventh full fiscal year on June 30, 2025, further advancing the mission to make Oklahoma County’s justice system fairer and more effective. The year was marked by major leadership transitions, including new executive leadership and a turnover in the council chairs. Thanks to several long-held partnerships, bold progress in diversion programs has helped create paths to stability for folks without financial resources and those struggling with substance use disorders. These strong partnerships and the new phase of folks at the helm of the council is evidence of the stability CJAC has created in the over seven years of collaboration. Many years into this ongoing effort to improve the justice system, CJAC remains committed to bold, data-driven solutions, knowing that progress requires vigilance, innovation, and a shared determination to build on a strong foundation.
Here few of CJAC's most impactful updates:
Leadership: Bringing Melissa Walton on as executive director this spring marked a major transition, as only the second person to hold the role. Much of her experience comes from direct services and diversion programming. Walton outlined a forward-thinking agenda, with a renewed emphasis on research to deepen CJAC’s understanding of the human impact of justice system policies.
Datahub: CJAC commissioned a study to evaluate the county’s current capacity for collecting, integrating, and analyzing data across the criminal justice system, to begin relying on a ‘common case identifiers’. Based on a recommendation from the Vera Institute, the long-term goal is to build traceability into the system, so that all agencies contribute data into an integrated tool.
Updated Dashboard: Oklahoma Policy Institute has helped rebuild CJAC’s previous detention center dashboard to work more efficiently and include much more data. Previously, the dashboard was manually updated on a weekly basis, but thanks to partnerships with Jail Tracker, the updates are now automated to update on a daily basis. New types of data now include bond amounts, charges and even social issues like whether someone is unhoused. OK Policy is seeking feedback from the public on the various ways this new data tool can help, and what types of data it should include.
Jail Population: The yearly average population of the detention center grew slightly to 1,501. With last year reflecting a record low, this increase brings the number of detainees to just under the 2023 population average of 1,534. We see a consistently high number of sentenced individuals in the detention center, rather than seeing those people efficiently moved into the custody of the Department of Corrections (DOC), with an average of 280 people per month.
Download the report here and subscribe to our newsletter for further updates.
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