The increasing number of parolees getting locked up in county jails across the state after a recent policy change is creating a worrisome ripple effect on the state prison system, members of the Board of Corrections warned at their meeting Friday.
“The populations are growing significantly and growing rapidly,” said Vice Chairman Mary Parker, predicting that jails in Pulaski, Sebastian and Crittenden counties are going to reach a “crisis point” soon.
Just this week, parolees were taken to El Dorado because of a lack of space.
“To put it mildly, we’ve been hit by a tsunami,” Parole Board Chairman John Felts agreed, saying that his staff of 22 - including seven commissioners, three parole revocation judges and clerical workers - have found themselves swamped by the number of hearings and resulting parole revocations.
“It’s beginning to take a toll on our people. This isn’t a sustainable situation,” Felts added.
Three new policies - created after the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette highlighted parolee absconder Darrell Dennis’ arrest in the May 10 killing of 18-year-old Forrest Abrams - are responsible for the glut.
The first policy dictates that any parolee awaiting a revocation hearing remain locked up until then.
The second policy requires that any parolee who fails to report to his parole officer two or more times be jailed and a revocation hearing sought.
The third mandates that any parolee charged with a felony - or a violent or sex-related misdemeanor - must remain in custody until a revocation hearing can be held.
Felts said the effect of the policies has ballooned the number of requests for revocation hearings.
Between June 27 and July 23, the board held 147 revocation hearings that resulted in orders to send 110 parolees back to prison and 25 cases where parolees were sent to a technical-violator center.
All last fiscal year, the board held 500 revocation hearings, ordering 365 parolees back to prison and sending 68 parolees to the technical-violator center.
Felts also said that between July 1 and July 26, 362 parolees waived their revocation hearings and were sent back to prison, compared with 296 waivers in all of last year.
As a result, prison officials are now scrambling to find space for the onslaught of inmates returning to the Arkansas Department of Correction system. Meanwhile, the rising number of parolees housed in county jails is becoming a burden for many counties, board members noted.
While jails are reimbursed for inmates whose parole has been revoked and for those who have just been convicted and sentenced, they don’t receive any money to help with the costs of housing inmates awaiting parole-revocation hearings.
“When you make an adjustment in policy in one part of the criminal justice system, that makes an impact on all of the other parts,” Parker explained after the meeting adjourned. “There are no quick fixes, and for every tweak you make to the system, there is a consequence. This tweak on DCC’s side is having a dramatic effect on ADC’s side.”
DCC is short for the Department of Community Correction. ADC represents the Arkansas Department of Correction.
The Community Correction Department supervises probationers and parolees. The Correction Department runs the prison system.
The Corrections Board oversees both agencies.
There’s been a lot of confusion over how the criminal-justice system works once someone is convicted, board Chairman Benny Magness said.
The process is this:
After a person has been convicted and sentenced to prison, he remains in a county jail until a bed opens up in the state prison system.
When a prisoner becomes eligible for parole, the Parole Board will hear from both the inmate and victim in the case. The Parole Board then has these options: It can either deny or grant parole to an inmate, or recommend that the governor consider clemency or a pardon.
Once an inmate is paroled, he then falls under the supervision of the Community Correction Department, which employs parole and probation officers across the state.
The agency fell under scrutiny after the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published articles about Dennis, a parolee who remained free despite 14 arrests and 10 felony charges. Dennis also was an absconder, which means he repeatedly failed to report to his parole officer.
In May, when Dennis was accused of killing Abrams in Little Rock, the newspaper questioned how Dennis had managed to avoid both his parole officer and a possible parole revocation.
Soon afterward, the director of the Community Correction Department, David Eberhard, abruptly retired. His departure was followed by that of Steve Arnold, the assistant director of parole and probation services. Arnold also left the agency by way of retirement.
After Eberhard retired, the Corrections Board named Sheila Sharp as interim director.
At Friday’s meeting, the board approved Sharp’s recommendation to restructure the state’s parole and probation services.
In the past, the deputy director of parole and probation managed three assistant directors, one of whom was responsible for supervising area managers in different aspects of the agency’s parole services.
With the new structure, two assistant directors and the deputy director, Dan Roberts, will manage all parole and probation services for different field agencies.
“What we had is one assistant director trying to cover the entire state for supervision - 41 offices and 13 area managers - and you can’t do it, you just can’t do it effectively,” Sharp said. “They’ll meet monthly with all the area managers, they’ll be sharing information, it’ll be a decentralized flow where they’ll talk about problems. … You won’t have one person making decisions.”
The board also approved Sharp’s proposal that parole and probation officers in the Little Rock office - the largest of the state’s 13 area offices - become specialized. In other words, the officers will be dedicated to either parole or probation supervision.
In the past, officers have handled both parole and probation cases, as have their supervisors. Sharp said it’s necessary for that to change, and that the office will get another area manager to be able to solely handle either parole or probation.
The Little Rock-area office, which handles about 7,000 of the state’s nearly 24,000 parolees, has had the highest turnover of any branch at nearly 50 percent in the last fiscal year, Sharp said.
By refocusing the resources and attention of officers and their supervisors, she said she expects more effective job performance and that the Little Rock-area office will devote more of its employees to addressing parole cases.
During the meeting, Sharp also suggested the agency change the way parole officers keep watch on their clients.
For example, when a parolee once presumed to be “low risk” is reassessed and given a “medium” or “high” risk assessment, he is then assigned a to different parole officer. Conversely, if a high risk offender is downgraded to medium or low, he also is assigned to another officer.
Sharp said she doesn’t think shuffling cases between officers serves the agency, the parolees or the public.
“The longer you have one individual working with one offender, you get to know them. You know where they live, you know where they’re working. I think it’ll be better.”
Magness and others voted unanimously in favor of a resolution stating the interim director has done a good job.
Among Sharp’s efforts was phasing out a 2007 policy that allowed parolees to finish out their parole term even if they stopped reporting.
The directive, issued in 2007 by a former head of the Parole Board, Leroy Brownlee, was brought up in a legislative committee review on July 18.
Though Brownlee had told the Democrat-Gazette that the practice of letting parole absconders run out the clock on their terms was supposed to be a “one-time thing,” somehow it became permanent policy until it was officially killed by a Parole Board vote on July 25.
At the end of Friday’s meeting, Magness reiterated his support for Sharp but said it’s still too early to move forward with getting a permanent director. Given the number of ongoing reviews, including an investigation by the Arkansas State Police, Magness said the board would have to wait to take action.
“We may run into something that we may not [have yet] found out,” Magness said. “I’m very happy with what [Sharp] is doing and what she’s done.”
Magness said the board’s own review into the Dennis case is nearly complete. But the audit the board ordered last month - one that will go over 55,000 probation and parole files - is only “40 percent” complete.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 08/03/2013