Group looking to reduce incarceration

FAYETTEVILLE — A group formed to find ways to get people out of the Washington County jail is focusing on ways to keep people from going back to jail.

“We don’t have people sleeping on mattresses on the floor, and we don’t want to go back to that situation,” Stan Adelman told the group Friday.

Adelman served as the county’s jail ombudsman for most of the past year and facilitated Friday’s meeting. Adelman and a staff of volunteer law students worked to identify detainees who might be released without posing a danger to the community.

He said the work of The Bail Project, which provided money for bail and then offered support for those released, was a significant part of his work.

Adelman’s contract expired at the end of June, but he said Friday he wants to see the work of finding alternatives to incarceration continue. He said the county needs to focus on the reasons why some people return to jail after being released.

“Jail populations are heavily composed of people with physical and mental health issues,” Adelman said. “Substance abuse is a common problem, as is housing. Many of them are veterans.”

Adelman said he and his staff worked with one man, in his 80s, who had serious health issues and no support network of family or friends. He said the man was connected with community organizations to provide that support.

Promoting that sort of networking is an important part of the work group’s job, Adelman said.

“The resources we need are here in the community,” he said. “We may not have as much of them as we would like, but they are here.”

Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder formed the work group last year when the daily population of the jail was routinely exceeding the design capacity. Helder proposed a $38 million jail expansion project in 2018, but the Quorum Court authorized a study by the National Center for State Courts of the county’s criminal justice system to seek alternatives to an expansion.

While the study was in progress, Helder formed his work group to look for immediate ways to manage the jail population.

Chief Deputy Jay Cantrell said the health crisis caused by the covid-19 pandemic caused the sheriff’s office, working with other law enforcement agencies and with judges and prosecutors, to implement emergency measures to cut the jail population by half, from more than 800 to 420 detainees on Friday.

Cantrell said the work group has been useful in offering alternatives.

“If nothing else, this has opened a lot of doors for us,” Cantrell said. “There’s a lot of good information.”

Monique Jones, president of the Northwest Arkansas branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, also serves as chairwoman of the sheriff’s work group. Jones said the group has offered different voices and different perspectives on the criminal justice system and that it is important that those voices continue to be heard.

“I think we’ve made the judges and others aware that there are other options than just jailing everybody,” Jones said.

Jones said she wants the group to keep working to promote diversion programs — such as drug court and the Crisis Stabilization Unit — to keep people out of jail. Another option is amnesty programs for people who have failed to appear in court through a failure of communication but aren’t a threat to the community.

“We need to continue to advocate for these programs,” Jones said. “At least we’re pushing, and I can see the wheels turning.”