Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Prison deaths at heart of legislative hearing
Senator calls for independent audit
State Sen. Joyce Elliott repeated her calls Tuesday for an outside and independent audit of the state’s prison system, after several top officials with the Department of Correction told lawmakers what they knew — and had yet to uncover — regarding five recent deaths at a maximum-security prison.
A recent shakedown at the Varner Unit, near Grady, found “some” synthetic marijuana and cellphones, officials told the lawmakers, but the overall number of reported instances involving the volatile drug, known as K2, are down this year.
The official results of autopsies on the five inmates who died at Varner last week have yet to come in, and prison officials have not said how the drugs suspected in one or more of the deaths got into the lockup.
Prison officials pointed to the suspected involvement of K2 at recent prison incidents in Pennsylvania and Ohio to explain the scope of the problem.
But while officials who spoke to lawmakers Tuesday said prisoners’ visitors and
family members were mostly to blame for smuggling K2 and other contraband into prisons, they conceded that the Supermax lockup at Varner, where four of the five deaths occurred, prohibited contact visits for most inmates.
Nine staff members at the Corrections Department have been terminated for trafficking this year, according to the officials.
Elliott is a co-chairman of the Legislative Council’s Subcommittee on Charitable, Penal and Correctional Institutions. Because of last week’s deaths, she called the hearing Tuesday, which also included members of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees.
Speaking to reporters after the 2½-hour hearing, Elliott, D-Little Rock, said problems with the department predate the most recent deaths and include last year’s violence at several maximum-security units that left two inmates dead.
“I fully accept that K2 is a big problem,” Elliott said. “I accept that it’s hard to detect. But I don’t accept that those are excuses for us not doing better, and if we can’t figure it ourselves, get someone in here to help us figure it out.”
Department of Correction Director Wendy Kelley was unable to attend the hearing Tuesday.
Prisons spokesman Solomon Graves said after the meeting that before committing to an audit, the department “would need to discuss the scope with the governor’s office and the Board of Corrections.”
Elliott said she had met with Gov. Asa Hutchinson once before to propose an audit and hoped to do so again.
A spokesman for Hutchinson said late Tuesday that the governor is “certainly open” to such a review being conducted after the 2019 legislative session. That session is expected to include a reorganization of state agencies.
Dismissing the need for an audit, Board of Corrections Chairman Benny Magness said in a phone call Tuesday that the state’s prisons are reviewed on a regular basis by the American Correctional Association, a trade association based in Alexandria, Va. (Magness did not attend the meeting, citing previous commitments).
He questioned whom Elliott wanted to conduct the audit, saying, “It would make a difference who [the auditor] was.”
Elliott told reporters that she had not considered what group or experts she would want to review the prison system, but said she wants someone “totally objective.”
After the hearing, Graves issued a department news release highlighting a 37 percent drop in the projected number of K2 incidents this year. The department is on track to log 702 instances related to K2 this year. The state’s prison system houses around 16,000 people.
The drop in K2 was attributed in part to an information campaign about the dangers and penalties related to the illicit drug; better screening technology; and a new mail policy that gives inmates photo copies instead of their actual mail. The latter policy was put in place after letters were found laced with the drug.
Graves said the agency also will seek legislation in the coming legislative session to create a stricter penalty for the possession of illegal cannabinoids, such as K2.
The deaths of five inmates over a matter of days “was an anomaly that we will not accept becoming the norm,” Graves told lawmakers at Tuesday’s hearing.
Several Republican lawmakers asked about technologies available to intercept contraband and cellphones at the points of entry into prisons, as well as within the walls. Several officials said those technologies do exist, but prisons are hampered by the high costs or a Federal Communications Commission ban on signal-jamming equipment.
At the suggestion of state Rep. Bob Ballinger, R-Hindsville, that the prisons cease all contact visits until the flow of contraband can be brought under control, Correction Deputy Director Dale Reed responded, “I think we’d have a much bigger problem on our hands,” if inmates were denied such visitation privileges.
Meanwhile, the search for contraband at the 1,714bed Varner Unit was ongoing Tuesday, according to the department’s emergency-preparedness administrator, Randy Shores. Shores said, “Not much more than we expected” came from the first several days of the shakedown.
Graves said the search had netted half a gram of K2 and “routine nuisance contraband.”