County says parolees, tax revenue cause of jail overcrowding
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first installment of a two-part series about events leading up to the temporary closure of the Garland County Detention Center last month.
Strategies to ease overcrowding that closed the Garland County Detention Center to new male arrestees for 10 days last month were being discussed as early as last July, according to materials The Sentinel-Record obtained through an Arkansas Freedom of Information Act request.
The request sought emails and other correspondence related to the overcrowding problem from jail administrators and supervisors, Sheriff Mike McCormick and Under Sheriff Jason Lawrence going back to last July. No emails or correspondence from McCormick were included in materials the county provided, nor was any information indicating his correspondence had been reviewed for relevance to the request.
Conversations between jail staff, the county’s internal and external legal counsel and an elected official expressed concern about overcrowding violating the inmate population’s constitutional rights, as courts have ruled inmates are entitled to a minimum standard of living under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
Inmate counts swelled to over 400 in June, according to population reports the newspaper acquired through an earlier FOIA request. Maximum bed space the jail can staff is 365, according to an email Lt. Shawn Stapleton sent Chief Deputy of Corrections Steven Elrod
last month. That total doesn’t include the F unit, where about 20 women are housed as part of the Arkansas Department of Correction’s 309 work release program for state prisoners. The women work in the jail’s kitchen.
Elrod told District 6 Justice of the Peace Ray Owen Jr. in a Sept. 26 email that two female inmates had to be held in the booking area because all 68 beds in the women’s unit were occupied. He called the practice, which, according to numerous emails, has been a regular occurrence, a violation of inmate rights.
The jail has been closed to new female arrestees since February. One woman has to be released for every new one who’s booked into the facility. The policy was temporarily extended to the male population last month.
“Every day inmates are housed in booking, we violate their inmate rights,” Elrod told County Attorney John Howard in a Jan. 25 email detailing a procedure for closing the female housing unit.
The email said five women were being held in booking. In an Oct. 5 email to staff, Elrod said booking had been “paralyzed” a day earlier when 21 women were being held in the intake area.
Elrod told Owen a recent state audit recommended opening another housing unit, which Elrod said could be funded by reimbursements the county receives for holding state inmates. The roughly $500,000 in annual reimbursement payments go to the county’s general fund rather than the jail fund.
Emails noted how the Criminal Justice Efficiency and Safety Act has strained jail capacity. The 2017 law allows the state parole and probation agency to punish technical parole violations, such as failed drug screens or missed meetings with parole officers, with up to a 180 day term in a state facility. But most violators serve their sanctions in county jails.
Garland County jail officials said the number of violators serving 90 day sanctions is contributing to overcrowding, taking up as much as 20 percent of bed space. Lt. Donald Ansley told Association of Arkansas Counties Chief Legal Counsel Mark Whitmore in an email last August that the sanctions were preventing inmates held on pending charges from being released on bail.
Capt. Ron Halverson, the jail’s security director, told staff in a June 27 email that parole violators can’t be released without the approval of their parole officer, even if their stay has exceeded the 90 day sanction.
An email attorney Mike Rainwater sent Ansley last July recommended keeping the jail full with county inmates to limit space for technical violators.
“Fundamentally, you’ve got to squeeze the state out,” said Rainwater, counsel for the Association of Arkansas Counties Risk Management Fund. “It will take some time. You do that by keeping your jail full of who you want in there. Then you tell the state you have no room.”
Rainwater said the county would otherwise be forced to accept violators sanctioned under the 2017 law in an email to Ansley and former County Judge Rick Davis last August.
“This is the way Arkansas works,” he said. “The county exists for the convenience of the state, and the state can delegate its mess to the county to clean up.”
Davis agreed, responding that the 0.375 percent countywide sales tax voters passed in 2011 to operate and maintain the jail has not kept pace with revenue projections. The shortfall has kept the jail from being staffed to its full physical capacity since it opened in June 2015.
“Everything runs downhill, and the county is in the valley where everything lands,” he said in response to Rainwater’s email. “Our problem is we have a $42 million facility with bed space of 488 inmates and a sales tax for operations that allows us to only care for 350.”
Davis attributed the lack of tax revenue to the city of Hot Springs’ utility extension and connection policy that limits access to water and sewer services in unincorporated Garland County.
“In our study process before the jail’s design and planning stage, our sales tax should have grown as our inmate population grew above the 350 number,” he told Rainwater. “Our water issue has stopped growth and development in our unincorporated area for the last seven years and will take quite some time to ever catch up.”