Lawmakers look to curb rising prison population

— If the growth in Arkansas’ inmate population continues at its current pace, corrections officials say they will have to request millions of dollars to build more prison space even as they stretch their resources to operate the prisons they already have.

Faced with that prospect, prison officials, legislators and others have been talking for the past few months about how to curb the inmate population growth. Among the ideas are expanding alternatives to incarceration and re-examining sentencing laws, such as a law that requires people convicted of manufacturing methamphetamine to serve at least half of their sentences before being eligible for parole.

Sen. Bobby Glover, co-chairman of the Legislative Council’s Charitable Penal and Correctional Institutions Subcommittee, named the growth of the prison system and Medicaid costs as “the two big things that legislators are really going to have to cope with.”

“This problem is not going to go away,” Glover, D-Carlisle, said at a subcommittee hearing last week. “It’s going to continue to eat at whatever money we have.”

According a report by the Pew Center on the States, a division of the Pew Charitable Trusts, Arkansas’ prison population grew 3.1 percent last year, while the national population of state prison inmates fell by 0.3 percent, the first year-to-year drop in the nation’s prison population since 1972.

On Thursday, Arkansas’ prison population was 15,361. Growing at a rate of 33 inmates each month, prison officials expect the population to grow by about 2,200 inmates by 2015 and 4,200 inmates by 2020.

To accommodate the growth, the state Department of Correction last year requested $153 million to build two 1,000-bed prisons, but Gov. Mike Beebe did not recommend the project for funding during the legislative session.

Correction Department interim Director Ray Hobbs told lawmakers on Wednesday that the department is likely to make a similar request - for 1,800 to 2,000 new prison beds - in preparation for next year’s legislative session.

Mary Parker, vice chairman of the Board of Corrections, added that even that would just be a temporary fix.

“The flow is continuous, and we’re behind in constructing now to keep up with our growth,” Parker said at the subcommittee hearing. “So that 1,800 to 2,000 - at the time we open those, we’ll probably need 1,800 to 2,000 more unless we make drastic changes in sentencing laws.”

Prison officials acknowledge that unless the economy improves, their chances of winning funding for new prisons is slim. But without more prison space, they say, the state will face a growing backup of offenders who have been sentenced to prison but remain in county jails because of a lack of prison space. On Thursday, the backup was 1,446, down from a record of 1,820 on Aug. 28.

Some construction projects are already in the works. A 300-bed expansion of the Cummins Unit in Lincoln County is expected to be finished in September and a 782-bed addition Ouachita River Unit in Malvern is scheduled to be completed late next year.

Part of the Ouachita River Unit expansion has been completed, but the department has no money allocated to staff it. Since December, 360 beds at the unit have been sitting empty while 100 inmates sleep in the unit’s gym.

Next month, however, the department plans to open the barracks by assigning more guards for the unit while holding positions at other prisons vacant, Hobbs said.

Benny Magness, chairman of the Board of Corrections, said corrections officials are also working on programs that may help slow the inmate population growth.

For instance, he said, several counties are participating in a program in which probation or parole violators are ordered to mow grass, pick up trash or perform other chores for counties. By this summer, the Department of Community Correction also hopes to begin using a system that will use information about an offender’s criminal record, employment history and other factors to predict those who are most likely to re-offend.

Meanwhile, members of Beebe’s staff have been meeting with an informal “working group” of legislators, law enforcement officials and prison officials, and others since October to discuss ideas on how to reduce the number of inmates being sentenced to state prisons or speed the flow of those being released - without putting the public at risk.

At the request of Beebe and other top state officials, the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project has agreed to study Arkansas’ sentencing laws and correctional system and make recommendations.

Adam Gelb, the Pew Center’s project director, said the center has conducted similar studies in Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada.

“Typically, there’s a bipartisan, inter-branch working group that comes together to focus on the issue,” Gelb said. “We do a tremendous amount of data analysis to identify what will happen with the prison population if nothing changes, to identify the drivers of prison growth and then work with the group to identify and build consensus around policy options that will protect public safety and hold offenders accountable while figuring out how to control and contain corrections costs.”

In Texas, a Pew Center study helped persuade lawmakers in 2007 to spend $241 million on treatment and diversion programs, Gelb said.The same year, Kansas passed laws allowing inmates to reduce their sentences by 60 days by completing treatment programs in prison, reduced minimum sentences for certain nonviolent offenders and allocated $4 million to provide grants to counties that reduce the probation revocations.

Both states have since seen growth of their inmate populations flatten out, Gelb said. In Texas, the population fell by 0.7 percent last year. Kansas’ population increased 1.2 percent.

Across the country, the prison population dropped in 26 states last year, led by Rhode Island, which had a 9.2 percent drop. Meanwhile, Arkansas’ 3.1 percent growth was the eighth-highest in the country, behind Indiana (5.3 percent), West Virginia (5.1 percent), Vermont (5 percent), Pennsylvania (4.3 percent), Alaska (3.8 percent), Louisiana (3.6 percent) and Alabama(3.5 percent).

Sen. Jim Luker, D-Wynne, said members of Arkansas’ working group hope to use the Pew Center study to develop a set of recommendations by January, in time for next year’s legislative session.

Among the ideas the group will likely examine, Luker said, are increasing the number of drug courts in the state and expanding the kind of intensive supervision that the drug court program offers to those who commit nonviolent offenses such as theft.

He said the group will also look at providing funding for halfway houses and revisiting sentences for those convicted of manufacturing methamphetamine. In 2005 and 2009, the legislature passed laws allowing the offenders to become eligible for parole after serving at least 50 percent of their sentences, instead of 70 percent. With credit for good behavior, inmates convicted of many other offenses can be paroled after serving as little as a sixth of their sentence.

As for the prospect of building another prison, Luker said, “That’s going to be a hard sell to me.

“My focus and my emphasis is going to be on some of these alternatives,” Luker said.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/19/2010

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