PINE BLUFF -- It was a win-win proposition, a redemption for wayward men in a city in need of redeeming. Inmates and parolees would get training and job skills for a new start; in turn, the blight-plagued city in the Arkansas Delta would be freed of hundreds of abandoned homes, the unwanted souvenirs of decline.
Over the course of seven months, the city got its end of the bargain, as scores of eyesores were knocked down and carted away.
For the workers, who swung sledgehammers and hauled debris for months on end with the barest of training or protective gear, covering their mouths with sleeves as clouds of shimmering and potentially toxic dust swirled, it was hardly any bargain at all.
"They sold us on a dream," said Michael Mills, 31, a construction worker who had been in jail on robbery charges.
The Mulligan Road program, a nonprofit organization created and run by Arkansas corrections officials, was described by its supporters as one of the most ambitious projects of its kind in the country. Starting last fall and scheduled to run for two years, the program was to free the economically ailing Pine Bluff of 600 blighted houses while the participants, in the state with the nation's fastest-growing prison population, were to gain valuable instruction, experience and even some money.
But after rounds of cost-squeezing, what was envisioned as a bold prisoner-rehabilitation program increasingly became a municipal project on the cheap. In interviews, more than a half-dozen of the participants described being sent daily with scant protection into demolition sites presumed by the authorities to contain asbestos, which when inhaled in the slightest amounts can lead to incurable cancer. Similar operations in the private sector have led to criminal charges, environmental and workplace-safety experts said.
"Clearly a contractor couldn't expose its workers to asbestos on hundreds of demolition jobs," said David Uhlmann, a professor at Michigan Law School and former chief of the environmental-crimes section at the Justice Department. "Why should the state be allowed to expose inmates to harmful pollution?"
After a reporter's inquiries, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sent inspectors to Pine Bluff in May; within days, the agency issued a letter threatening penalties for an array of health and safety violations. The project was quietly shut down.
In a letter to the EPA, the director of Arkansas Community Correction said federal officials had "totally failed to communicate" the rules about worker protection. The letter acknowledged that information about such rules was sent to state officials, but said they were "never mentioned" in several subsequent conference calls with the EPA last summer, even as state officials "continually asked" about regulatory compliance.
"The program has been very successful on many accounts for both the city as well as the inmates involved," Kevin Murphy, chief deputy director of Arkansas Community Correction and the director of Mulligan Road, said in an email. Of descriptions given by the inmate participants, Murphy said, "Many of the statements are just not true."
In the original design, participants in the Mulligan Road program would receive training in construction and demolition work, and be provided "GED classes, substance abuse and addiction treatment, life skills training, job readiness training and computer skills training," according to a 2014 memo. They would be paid up to $1,000 for work during their six-month stretches; many would be set up with post-prison jobs and would be allowed to leave prison months early. There were plans for Mulligan Road statewide, but Pine Bluff was the test run.
The city could use it. A casualty of mechanization and other changes to U.S. agriculture, the once-thriving city, population 45,000 and dropping, is among the poorest cities in the country. It has drawn unwanted international attention for its violent-crime rate. In the latest indignity, several buildings downtown have simply collapsed, the piles of debris now blocking traffic on Main Street.
"It didn't get this way overnight," Mayor Debe Hollingsworth said. She believes that fortunes have been turning during her four-year term: Several manufacturers have announced plans to open nearby and, perhaps most important, the crime rate has declined. She attributed this to a new policing strategy, but said crime hung on tenaciously among the hundreds of abandoned houses.
"We had a budget of about $75,000 a year to take down homes," Hollingsworth said. "We would have never caught up."
In came the prisoners.
As it came together in spring 2015, the plan in Pine Bluff was to move forward with 600 demolitions. Given the funding constraints, the project would have little more than two years and $830,000 to get this done, or as much of it as possible. Even with low-cost labor, it was a very tight squeeze.
Officials with Pine Bluff and Mulligan Road approached the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality looking for ways to lower expenses, particularly the cost of required asbestos remediation.
They began looking at a 2008 state guideline that granted some leeway for isolated demolitions of abandoned buildings. At the time of its adoption, state and federal memos warned explicitly against carrying out large projects "in a piecemeal fashion" just to qualify. But this time, officials agreed that a 600-house project could fit, if the demolitions were scattered strategically around the city.
No asbestos surveys would be done and no asbestos removed; the presence of asbestos in the buildings would simply be presumed. As a "show of good faith," the city agreed to send a firetruck around to wet the debris and keep down the dust.
Last fall, about 30 inmates who had agreed to be the first participants in the program began arriving at a secured complex of brick duplexes on the edge of the city. For a few hours over two or three days, they watched safety videos while an instructor, according to those interviewed, nodded off to sleep in the back. The videos spent "just a few minutes" on demolition procedures, said one participant; other videos concerned safety measures on factory floors or in steel-working. No certification was given.
The inmates wore outfits picked from a clothing drive, and at demolition sites they were handed hard hats, gloves, safety glasses and disposable dust masks to be used and reused for days -- masks with a disclaimer on the packaging warning against use around airborne asbestos or lead particles.
Then they went to work: parolees and probationers with sledgehammers first, inmates coming in to finish tearing down the structures. On some days, dust grew so thick that it would clog up the machinery, billowing up again even after a firetruck had stopped by, sprayed down the debris and left. The men began to ask for respirators, some of them having worked in construction, but the chief on-site supervisor, a state corrections official, spoke of tight costs or reminded workers they could always just go back to jail.
"We're not paying for nothing else," is what Marcus Maxwell, a 28-year-old prisoner, remembered hearing.
Choosing to return to prison, as the inmates understood it, would be considered a violation and result in an extended sentence.
So they stayed.
After the EPA inspection, Murphy sent an email to city officials saying it would be too expensive to address the agency's listed shortcomings.
"We have shut down the project," he concluded.
By that time, the first inmates in the program were finishing up. Some original participants were back in prison, having committed some violation or another on the project. The ones who had finished received payments of varying amounts; some were set up with nearby jobs, though those who lived away from Pine Bluff had little luck. They did, however, gain something from their months there: a nagging anxiety about what might lie in store in the years ahead.
Scared is the right word, said Maxwell, now at work cutting grass.
"I think about it every day."
A Section on 08/14/2016