University of Central Arkansas officials on Tuesday proposed a pilot program to help parolees obtain jobs by using trained career counselors who are graduate students to provide individual counseling of one hour a week until the parolees are hired.
The counseling would take place electronically through computers and the Internet using the Good Grid portal to connect offenders with services, volunteers, programs and jobs, said Femina Varghese, an associate professor of psychology at UCA.
The parolees would be at the office of Arkansas Community Correction in Little Rock, and the counselors would provide services from UCA's Psychology Clinic, she said. Community Correction is the state agency that oversees parole and probation programs.
The proposed "e-career counseling program" would cost $731,336 over a three-year period to develop, implement and analyze, Varghese told the Legislative Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force.
The state has more than 50,000 parolees and probationers, "and many of them are going to back to prison," said Brian Bolter, an associate professor of psychology at UCA.
"It is a problem that we either are going have to build a new prison or we are going to ignore, and neither of those seem like very good outcomes," he said.
The Department of Correction has 17,871 inmates under its jurisdiction, including 1,206 in county jails, department spokesman Solomon Graves said after the task force's meeting.
Varghese told the task force that UCA's proposed program would develop scientifically based intervention for Arkansas parolees that would decrease recidivism and increase hiring, public safety and cost savings.
"The career intervention will be tailored to the risk levels of the offender," she said. "The length of treatment will vary for the offender. Those at the highest risk need longer treatments that target their criminogenic needs versus those at the low risk."
Under UCA's proposal, the first year would be used to develop the program using a handful of offenders "trying to develop something that is very effective for Arkansas," and the program would be implemented during the second year "with as many parolees as we can, given the counselors we have," she said.
"In the third year, we want to analyze the results. Did it reduce recidivism? Did it increase employment? How did it influence the offenders' own attitudes?"
At the end of three years, "we plan to have a manual so that this treatment can be replicated with other parolees across the state," Varghese said.
If UCA's proposal "only reduces recidivism in just five parolees, the state would save $115,000 per year [in incarceration costs] and in 10 years that would mean $1 million," she said.
After the task force's meeting, UCA President Tom Courtway said the Legislature ultimately will decide whether to finance UCA's proposal.
"We certainly think it had enough merit to try to get it front of them," he said in an interview. "And anything that can reduce a recidivism rate of 48.8 percent to me is worth taking a serious look at."
In an interview, Dina Tyler, deputy director for Community Correction, said, "We've got to do better with parolees because the recidivism rate is too high, and we know that, and science backs us up that mental health and more programming are the two areas that we really need to concentrate on."
In June, the task force recommended that the state increase funding and manpower for parole services. A task force co-chairman, Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, R-Little Rock, said that in order to relieve prison crowding, state officials have to attack recidivism, and that Arkansas will need more caseworkers to make that happen.
The Justice Center of the Council of State Governments reported to the task force the caseload for Arkansas' parole and probation officers is averaging around 129, more than twice the load in North Carolina, which encountered prison crowding like Arkansas' six years ago and invested heavily in its parole system to curb recidivism.
Metro on 09/14/2016