Nonprofit attorney Ed Wunch suspected that Caddo County was regularly jailing people over unpaid court fines and fees, but needed to prove it.
On a Friday afternoon in March, he drove from Oklahoma City to Anadarko to scour records at the county jail. From a public access computer, he printed out more than 140 bookings tied solely to cost arrest warrants from November 2023 through March 2026.
The average time in custody was 33 hours, though a handful of people were jailed for more than 72 hours. One woman spent 95 hours in custody after being booked on a cost arrest warrant the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January 2025…