Report: Arkansas prisons farming at a loss

Fiscal ’15 hit put at $2.6M in audit

An audit report on Arkansas' prison farms was presented to lawmakers Friday and showed that the farming program had a $2.6 million loss in fiscal 2015.

But prison officials defended the program, saying that in spite of lower crop prices and poor yields, the Department of Correction actually made a profit from its farming when taking into account the savings from growing some of the food the inmates eat.

The department's Agricultural Division is self-sustaining because it sells crops and animals back to the department and on the open market, a prison spokesman said. The state audit report showed that the loss was in the farm fund, which covers farm operational expenses and receives income from what is produced. The budget of the Agricultural Division was $20.3 million in fiscal 2015.

According to the Department of Correction, inmates ate about $8.7 million worth of food grown on the farms, and the farms were reimbursed $5.8 million from the state. Also equipment transfers that have occurred over several years from the farms to other prison programs were reported in a lump sum in 2015, netting the program $1.4 million, according to the audit.

Factoring in those numbers, the Department of Correction made $1.7 million off of its prison farms, spokesman Solomon Graves said.

The audit report was requested last year by Sen. Eddie Joe Williams, R-Cabot, and was presented Friday to the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee. Williams said lawmakers would need more time to review all of the findings, and he asked the committee to vote to send the report to the Senate State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee, of which he is chairman.

In a phone call after the meeting, Williams said the report would again be taken up Thursday, when the House and Senate state agencies committees are to meet in joint session with other legislative committees on agriculture and prisons.

"I looked at other states and saw them getting out of the farming business or at least reducing it," Williams said after Friday's meeting. "I thought at least we should be looking at it."

Arkansas began its prison farm program in 1902. Since then the prison farmland has doubled to more than 20,000 acres, according to the report, and is now larger than similar programs in Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma and Mississippi. The report did not mention Texas. A spokesman for that state's Department of Criminal Justice said the Texas prison agriculture program consists of about 140,000 acres.

The Arkansas prison's cash-crop farms grow corn, wheat, rice and soybeans, and are located around the Cummins, Tucker and East Arkansas lockups in the Delta. Hay is grown at the Wrightsville and North Central prisons. The farms also raise horses and produce eggs, pork and cattle, the latter of which are sold at auction and the proceeds used to buy cheaper ground beef for prison meals.

About 350 inmates work in skilled positions in the Agricultural Division on any given day, according to the audit. Auditors were unable to determine the total number of prisoners who participated during the year because the Department of Correction was unable to report that number.

In addition to the skilled positions -- at such operations as a creamery and egg production facility -- Department of Correction Director Wendy Kelley estimated about 3,000 inmates work in the fields. Williams said he did not believe the number of inmates working in the fields was that high.

Irrigation was stretched thin on fields planted by prisoners, the audit found, which -- except for rice -- led to yields that were below estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Cummins Prison Farm, the largest in the state, planted more acres per water well than average. Prisoners there planted nearly double the average acres per well as compared with private farms.

Buddy Chadick, a member of the Arkansas Board of Corrections whose family operates a farm around the Tucker Unit, said prison farm managers work hard to train the inmates in the program. He indicated that he'd like to see more efficiency in the prison farming operation.

He said regulations allow prisoners to self-identify religions and then not work on those self-identified religious holidays, which can delay crop harvests.

Also, "some of these inmates we get don't even know what a tractor is," Chadick said. "We have a real problem with our farm labor, and we don't know what to do with it."

According to the audit report, the state lost $202,950 in July 2015 when a prisoner operating a tractor ran it into a utility pole and knocked out power to the nearby egg production facility, killing 41,000 chickens. A backup generator at the facility also failed.

The report found that the Department of Correction was unable to supply records to show that it had always gotten the highest price from the sale of its products. In one example, the department provided documentation to auditors showing that cattle sold in Oklahoma earned the highest prices, but it was unable to provide similar documents for cattle sold in Arkansas.

"There are still some unanswered questions," Williams said. "If you look at the findings, they're almost all a lack of oversight."

If the Department of Correction ended its farming operation, the report said, it could lease out the land for $1.7 million to $2.6 million a year. Prison officials disagreed with that, indicating that the state would be unable to lease the land for top dollar because of poor irrigation.

The loss of revenue from market sales and the increase in the cost to feed prisoners would cause the state to lose money if it leased out the land, Assistant Director of Administrative Services Mike Carraway said.

Also, prisons would have to find other work for inmates to do if the state stops sending them into the fields, Kelley said.

"Where we don't have farming operations, we struggle to find jobs for [the inmates]," Kelley said. "We do find jobs for all of them, but they might be polishing the bars."

Williams said he did not want to end the prison farming program, but would like to have prisoners working to grow more "labor intensive, edible crops."

A Section on 10/15/2016

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