Arkansas DOC Adds Beds, Re-Entry Programs to Ease Overcrowding

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The Arkansas Department of Correction has started on Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s $33 million plan to address prison overcrowding in the state. While the plan does not involve building a new prison, it does involve adding prison beds, hiring new parole and probation officers, and investing in re-entry and alternative sentencing programs.

On April 18, the department began transferring 54 female inmates who are eligible for a work-release program into the new Pine Bluff Re-Entry Center. The work-release program is for inmates who are within 30 months of parole, and only those with non-violent convictions and a clean disciplinary record are eligible. These transfers will allow the department to begin moving women from county jails into the prison beds left vacant by inmates accepted into the Pine Bluff Re-Entry Center.

The former Pine Bluff Diagnostic Unit, which closed in 2012, is also being renovated to help with re-entry services. When completed, the re-entry facility will help inmates eligible for re-entry to learn job skills, sign up for health care and meet with their families to re-establish relationships. It will open in July as the Ester Unit to serve as a re-entry unit for inmates who are within 18 months of their parole date. The Ester Unit will have 184 beds, and an additional 172 beds will open on Jan. 1, 2016, reported Arkansas News.

Earlier this spring, the department also secured an agreement with Pulaski County to renew its contract, which leases a 240-bed county work center to the department to ease the overflow of inmates in county jails. The yearlong lease was originally secured last July and requires half the inmates in the work center to be from the Pulaski County jail. Since then, the jail has been close to its 1,210-inmate capacity instead of well over, reported ArkansasOnline.

Another way that Arkansas is reducing overcrowding is by housing overflow inmates in Texas correctional facilities. In March, Arkansas and Bowie County in Texas signed a contract that allows Arkansas to place up to 288 male inmates in Bowie County Correction Center in Texarkana, Texas, located across the state line from Texarkana, Ark.

“Bowie County is a short-term fix. It was a Band-Aid,” Cathy Frye, spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Correction told Arkansas News. “But the bed expansions, plus the renewed efforts to keep people from coming back to us, that’s where you’ll see a long-term difference.”

The state also may try housing inmates under Act 1206 of 2015, which was sponsored by Sen. David Sanders, R-Little Rock. It allows the governor to approve contracts with counties to house state prisoners in regional correctional facilities that the counties would build and operate, according to Arkansas News. If the state were to offer counties a commitment to place a certain number of inmates in their facility, and pay for them, it might benefit both parties.

In addition to adding new prison beds and investing in re-entry programs, Gov. Hutchinson also named 16 members to the Legislative Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force in late April. The task force was established by the Criminal Justice Reform Act of 2015 with a goal of implementing “wide-ranging reforms to the criminal justice system in order to address prison overcrowding, promote seamless re-entry into society, reduce medical costs incurred by the state and local governments, aid law enforcement agencies in fighting crime and keeping the peace, and to enhance public safety.”

This new approach toward fixing overcrowding in Arkansas prisons is very different from the $100 million, 1,000-bed prison that state prison officials had planned to ask for last year. State legislators and Gov. Hutchinson, who took office in January, did not get behind the idea.