Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
NAACP backs Pulaski County sheriff on jail series’ filming
LITTLE ROCK — Members of the Little Rock NAACP branch on Friday pushed back against accusations that the Pulaski County sheriff was reckless or overstepped his authority in allowing TV producers to film a show for Netflix billed as being centered on an experiment in more humane treatment of inmates.
Claims that Sheriff Eric Higgins was careless are mistaken and misguided, said Larry Hicks, chairman of the group’s legal redress committee on Friday afternoon. In greenlighting the production of “Unlocked: A Jail Experiment,” Higgins was attempting to address and highlight the serious needs of inmates — many of whom are Black — in U.S. jails, Hicks said.
“Many people view his effort as one which is very progressive, and one worthy of being noted by the entire law enforcement community throughout this nation,” Hicks said.
Since the show was announced last month, Pulaski County Judge Barry Hyde, who is white, has sharply criticized Higgins, a fellow Democrat who is Black, over the agreement, which the county judge said was an illegal contract that Higgins exceeded his authority to sign.
But Hicks thinks that because Higgins is an elected official like Hyde and is responsible for the operation of the jail, the sheriff had no need to get Hyde’s permission, he said.
People should be applauding Higgins’ decision to try out new methods of holding inmates in the jail’s H-block, where the series was filmed, Hicks said. The plan should not be criticized “in any meaningful way,” Hicks said.
The show drew the NAACP members’ attention partly because of the disproportionate rate of non-white inmates in the jail, Hicks said. He estimated that about 60% of the inmates who participated in the series were Black.
Records released by the sheriff’s office show that of 55 inmates who participated, 39, or about 71%, were Black. Figures for the racial makeup of the jail’s total inmate population were not readily available Friday.
U.S. census data from 2020 indicates that about 39% of the county’s population is Black. Jacksonville had the highest percentage of Black residents at about 45%, while the percentage was around 41% in Little Rock and about 43% in North Little Rock.
Documents released by the sheriff’s office and the county judge’s office show that Higgins did seek Hyde’s approval on the plan to film the experiment in 2021, but the production company Lucky 8 TV Inc., did not respond to revised contract terms drawn up by county attorney Adam Fogleman. Hyde said he didn’t learn until last month that Higgins had signed an agreement with Lucky 8 in August 2022.
Hicks on Friday repeated a claim Higgins made in a March interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that Fogleman told the sheriff he had the ability to sign the contract on his own authority. The attorney then pretended not to recall the conversation, Hicks said Friday.
Higgins and the sheriff’s office have yet to provide any evidence of this conversation, and Fogleman recused himself from representing Higgins if the dispute between the sheriff and county judge results in legal action.
Hyde on Friday evening said he stood by his contention that the contract Higgins signed was illegal and that any other issues related to the production of the series were not his concern.
“I’m here to do my job, not put on a show,” Hyde said.
Through a spokesperson, Higgins on Friday declined any further interviews about the production of the show, which premiered on Wednesday. A reporter from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette had been requesting an interview with the sheriff since Tuesday afternoon.
NAACP members on Friday pointed to the show’s popularity as a metric of how people were responding to Higgins’ attempt to treat inmates more humanely by unlocking the cell doors instead of confining them to their cells for as many as 23 hours each day.
On Friday afternoon, the eight-episode series appeared at the top of the “top ten TV shows in the U.S. today” list on Netflix.
Barbara Lunon, the branch’s first vice president, was encouraged to see the inmates featured in the show gradually learning to work together and overcome generational differences, she said Friday.
Lunon hopes that the show causes people to think of the people held in jail not as caged animals but as people with families and struggles to overcome like mental illnesses, she said.
The sheriff’s office needs more funding from the Quorum Court to provide inmates with mental health care, Lunon said.
Hicks criticized Hyde and the members of the Quorum Court for what she described as a failure to provide adequate funding to the jail under Higgins. The justices of the peace are more concerned about the optics of the show than the conditions it highlights, he said.
“Take a look at what’s happening on that side of the ledger as opposed to crying and making comments about how bad Pulaski County looks, because Pulaski County doesn’t look bad,” Hicks said. “In our opinion, what this has done has given Pulaski County a national exposure to how the jail systems throughout America look.”
Last month after a Quorum Court meeting in which the members voted to compel Higgins to answer 40 questions about the production, Hyde said the show could open up the county to be “embarrassed or mocked.”
Gov. Sarah Huckabee-Sanders also weighed in on the show last month, telling the conservative outlet the Daily Wire and others that Higgins’ decision was “reckless” and that “turning our prisons into a free-for-all reality show is dangerous and insulting to our brave law enforcement officers.”
But Deborah Springer Suttlar, who is also on the Little Rock NAACP’s legal redress committee, accused Sanders and Hyde of only being interested in incarceration, not in reducing the recidivism rate or rehabilitating people who end up in the state’s jails and prisons.
Hyde has no law enforcement experience, Springer Suttlar said, and should step back and let Higgins rely on his years of experience in running the jail.
Hicks asked the Quorum Court members to “open your eyes” and focus on the problems the series exposed about jail conditions rather than sniping at Higgins with “gotcha” questions.