Jail beds are full, criminal dockets are long and time between hearings keeps growing, County Judge Barry Hyde said Tuesday, addressing the movers and shakers he chose for the county's criminal-justice coordinating committee.
But with data and collaboration, they have the power to alleviate these problems, the Pulaski County administrator said.
Hyde spoke to the roughly 20 committee members who touch all corners of the central Arkansas criminal-justice system. The group's inaugural meeting was held in the Pulaski County Regional Center in Little Rock.
Among the members are judges, mental-health professionals, attorneys, business leaders and pastors. It includes Pulaski County Sheriff Doc Holladay, Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley and Little Rock Police Chief Kenton Buckner.
Each person was appointed to a three-year term, with a two-term maximum. The next meeting will be Nov. 21.
Committees akin to Pulaski County's were recommended under Act 423 of 2017. The law set in motion three 16-bed regional crisis stabilization centers that -- when operational -- will treat mentally ill Arkansans instead of sending them to lockups.
A fourth center was added in August when Gov. Asa Hutchinson said he'd seek more funding. Pulaski, Sebastian, Craighead and Washington counties will host the centers.
As a concept, criminal-justice coordinating committees are nothing new, Chastity Scifres, chief deputy attorney for Pulaski County, told the assembled officials Tuesday. They emerged in the 1970s and gained traction in the 1980s and 1990s, she said.
Regionally, such groups are established in Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Missouri, said Justin Blagg, director of Quorum Court services.
"We aren't reinventing the wheel," Blagg said. "But we are breaking new ground as far as Pulaski County and Arkansas goes."
At least one other committee was established, under Act 423, in Sebastian County. A similar group also operated in Garland County in 2010 and 2011, newspaper archives show.
The idea was -- and still is -- to connect people invested in the local criminal-justice apparatus who typically stay within the "silo" of their own departments, Scifres said.
Though Pulaski County's committee will keep tabs on the crisis stabilization center, its goals are more expansive.
With help from Hyde's office, the panel will collect data on people who filter in and out of jails and hospitals. Equipped with that information, members can brainstorm ways to divvy up available resources.
"It's hard to argue with good data," Scifres said.
From 20 percent to 30 percent of people held at the Pulaski County jail have some form of mental illness, Hyde told the committee.
Once behind bars, they're much more likely to stay there than a fellow inmate who has no affliction, he said.
The county identified about 1,500 people who were arrested three or more times between August 2016 and August 2017 Scifres said. Of those people, around 370 were diagnosed by Turnkey Medical Clinics, the jail's medical provider, with a serious mental illness.
That figure will only increase as more numbers are crunched, said Maj. Matthew Briggs, who oversees the jail. It doesn't include people who are discharged before being screened for mental problems, he said.
The jail is budgeted for 1,210 beds but the daily population frequently tops that number, Briggs said.
As it stands, Arkansas' largest mental-health facility is the Pulaski County jail, Holladay told fellow committee members.
"We have more of those individuals within our facility than they have at the State Hospital," he said.
Mentally ill people awaiting trial are often ordered to the lockup where they wait to be evaluated by doctors, he said. As time drags on, those people require extra care and can threaten violence to themselves, to other inmates or to corrections officers, Holladay said.
A lack of education, poverty, ignorance and illness can lead people to an alarming emotional state, Jegley said.
"You show me somebody who is hopeless ... that's a dangerous person. That's somebody who will pick a gun up to settle what is otherwise a minor problem," he said.
Still, some of those problems can't be addressed from the top down, Jegley said. Rather, they're "community based," he said.
During the meeting, each committee member seated in a semicircle, told the group about a pressing problem. Dr. Nick Zaller was blunt.
"We have one of the worst drug-treatment systems that I've seen," said Zaller, an associate professor in the College of Public Health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
For Buckner, he's troubled by "broken families ... specifically in the African-American community."
In Little Rock, problems like substance abuse or lack of education are compounded in concentrated areas, the police chief said. He said the department has been having some good results, of late, after increasing officers in those spots.
For Bill Simpson, chief public defender, the objective is to provide "zealous" representation for those who filter through his office, he said. About 85 percent of all Pulaski County criminal defendants use public defenders, Simpson estimated.
His lawyers are "excellent," Simpson said, but the caseloads keep expanding and seem to be getting more serious.
To alleviate that burden, "the answer, usually, is more money," he said.
Wrightsville District Judge Mark Leverett told the group he's often flummoxed by youthful shortsightedness. Most youths in his courtroom come from single-adult homes and don't think past the upcoming week, he said.
A lesson from Frederick Douglass, quoted by Leverett, could provide the answer: "It's easier to build strong children than repair broken men."
Several members, like Circuit Judge Vann Smith, said they're aware these discussions about incarceration have been hashed and rehashed, often by the people in the room.
In two decades, he'll be gone, Smith said. But without a bold initiative, "Our kids will be sitting here in this room, 20 years from now, saying, 'What are we going to do?'"
Metro on 10/18/2017