Arkansas' prison population is expected to surpass 20,000 inmates in the next decade -- thousands more than the system now can hold -- even as a turbulent period in the state's incarceration patterns appears to be ending, top prison officials were told Friday.
An annual report tracking prison population growth was presented to the Arkansas Board of Corrections. The report projected the number of prisoners to increase by 1.1 percent in each of the next 10 years, which is less than the 2.7 percent growth rate in the previous 10 years.
However, the average rate of inmate population growth in the past decade masks a period of ups and downs.
After the Legislature adopted more lenient punishments for parole violators and absconders in 2011, the number of prisoners dropped. Then, in 2013, a serial absconder killed a Fayetteville teenager in Little Rock and officials again moved to lock up more parole violators. The prison population shot upwards.
Two years ago, a projection by the same researchers said the state's prisons could swell beyond 25,000, according to past reports in this newspaper.
"My word for the day is stable," said Wendy Naro, a vice president for Denver-based JFA Institute, the firm that prepared the analysis. "All the trends we've been looking at are stable."
In each of the past three years, the Department of Correction reported a small decrease in its average number of prisoners, she said.
On Friday, the Department housed 16,261 inmates, a spokesman said. That is beyond the system's designed capacity of 15,300.
Faced with chronic overcrowding at prisons, the Department of Correction contracts with county jails to hold state inmates, while also carrying out regular early releases to free up bed space.
Earlier this year, lawmakers passed legislation to divert more low-level parole and probation violators to short-term stays at alternative correctional centers, rather than revoking them to prison. The law, Act 423, is in the process of being implemented by Arkansas Community Correction, the agency that oversees parole and probation programs.
Naro said her firm had considered that law when calculating their projections. But Benny Magness, the chairman of the Board of Corrections, said its impact is yet to be fully realized.
Magness and other board members pointed to the state's crime rate, and an uptick in violence in Little Rock in particular, as a factor in the trend toward more inmates. And they agreed when Naro said that having more people on parole and probation will inevitably lead to more violators and more lockups.
"Our crime in the state is not improving," said Bobby Glover, the vice chairman of the prison board. "That's the problem."
The report did not include data on recidivism -- the rate of people who return to crime after being released from prison -- or overall crime rates.
The overall population of Arkansas is expected to grow around 0.6 percent a year, according to Naro. Rather than outpacing it, Magness said said the state should strive to match its growth in incarceration to the overall rise in people living in Arkansas.
Attaining that goal could be done by offering more re-entry programs for inmates, hiring more probation and parole officers as well as other changes beyond the scope of the correction system, Magness said. Regardless, he suggested the state would have to spend more money.
"If you slow it to what the population growth is, that's still 1,500 beds," Magness said. "That's another prison."
Lawmakers declined to act on previous requests to provide funding for more prison beds during this year's legislative session, and they have not given any indication since that they are more open to the idea.
At the last Board of Corrections meeting, in August, state prisons director Wendy Kelley said she would like to have more single-person, maximum-security cells to handle unruly prisoners.
Asked about his preference for building another prison Friday, Magness agreed that maximum security cells would be more functional, though also more costly."
Metro on 09/23/2017