Work-release sites under new director
Streamlined leadership cited as goal
Four work-release centers staffed with Division of Correction officers — and filled with state inmates — will be turned over to the direction of an employee at the Division of Community Correction under a new organizational chart approved Friday.
The change was narrowly approved by the state Board of Corrections, which considered the allied but differing roles of the state’s prison system and the agency that works with soon-to-be released inmates now that the agencies have been merged under a single authority as part of Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s reorganization of state government.
The work-release centers in Texarkana, Fayetteville, Benton and Mississippi County can together hold around 700 of the nearly
15,500 offenders held in state prisons. Most of those in the centers are nearing the end of their sentences and preparing to re-enter society.
Community Correction Director of Institutions Jimmy Banks will now oversee operations at the work-release centers, on top of his current job as director of Community Correction’s regional treatment centers. Those centers hold about 1,600 parole and probation violators.
The prison system’s contract with the Bowie County Correctional Center in Texarkana, Texas, to hold about 300 state inmates also was placed under Banks’ purview.
Benny Magness, chairman of the Board of Corrections, said the change was intended to streamline leadership over the work-release centers and Community Correction centers, many of which operate in close proximity to one another.
In the most extreme example, the Southwest Arkansas Community Correction Center and the Texarkana Work Release Center operate in the same building, even though they are under separate agencies.
Under the new organizational chart, Magness said employees won’t change what agency they work for, but their bosses will report to Banks.
Offenders also will continue to fall under the same jurisdictions that they now do.
“It’s a supervision thing, not a transformation thing,” Magness explained following the board’s decision. “As long as we don’t change the names as to what they are, they still remain [legal] under statute.”
The approved plan did deviate from the organizational chart proposed by Wendy Kelley, secretary of the newly formed Cabinet agency, the Department of Corrections.
Under Kelley’s original plan, Banks would oversee the operations of both the work-release centers and the regional treatment centers but as an employee of the Division of Correction. Instead, the board approved a motion by member William “Dubs” Byers to keep Banks as a member of the Division of Community Correction, where he is employed.
He will continue to report to Community Correction’s Director Kevin Murphy, who in turn reports to Kelley.
Byers said his motion was based out of concerns that Community Correction’s residential treatment centers serve a “specific purpose” that does not fully align with the Division of Correction’s mission.
Kelley, who led the state’s prison system before being appointed secretary of corrections, expressed her own concerns about the change. Because offenders sentenced to the Division of Correction have not received judicial orders to be referred to a Community Correction facility, placing the work-release centers under the authority of a Community Correction employee could create legal challenges, she said.
Still, Kelley said there were “efficiencies” to be gained in combining the two types of centers, as long as the programming is kept separate.
“I don’t think legally, there can be other changes,” Kelley said.
After the meeting, Banks reiterated to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Kelley’s belief that combining treatment and work-release centers under his purview would help create efficiencies. The amount of cost savings, he said, remains to be seen.