Recipe for disaster

Prison board’s critics miss the point

Sen. Ben Gilmore’s essay in the Jan. 14 edition of this newspaper misses the point in several important respects. I write this as a lawyer who has defended persons charged with crimes for 46 years, and I have dealt with the prison system continuously during that time.

Indeed, I am regularly frustrated in my dealings with the prison administration, particularly since the departure of Wendy Kelley. But the criticisms of the Corrections Board for not getting on the governor’s supposed crime-fighting team are misplaced.

First, the Board of Corrections is assigned a very specific responsibility with regard to the prison system by the laws of the state of Arkansas. It is to incarcerate prisoners safely and humanely and to provide training and services with the understanding that most of the persons in its charge are going to return to society someday. Amendment 33 confirms the placement of that responsibility on the board. The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments govern its responsibilities as well.

The board does not write the criminal laws of this state. It does not set the statutory ranges of sentences. It does not patrol the streets, make prosecutorial decisions, fund the public defender system, sit as judges and jurors—all of which impact how many persons arrive on their doorstep. With only the rarest of exceptions, these arrivals are there involuntarily and laden with the psychological and physical baggage of poverty, childhood trauma, poor education, mental illness and drug addiction.

The board does not decide how much money is appropriated for prison operations. Nor does it set pay levels that tempt correction officers into smuggling contraband as a salary supplement. Nor does the board control the demographic shifts causing the depopulation of the areas from where its workforce is drawn, with the consequent impact on numbers and quality of staffing.

And the board does not write the parole laws or appoint members of the Parole Board, now renamed (for the second time) the Post Prison Transfer Board. Certainly the Board of Corrections is not responsible for the gubernatorial appointments to that board who by rote turn down eligible inmates for parole despite excellent institutional records.

Thus, when the board says that it doesn’t have the manpower or the facilities to keep the extra inmates safe, it is fulfilling its assigned fiduciary duties.

Which brings me to the second issue—the ill-conceived and so-called “Protect Arkansas Act.”

However hard the board’s mission is now, the draconian parole provisions of the new law requiring service behind bars of 100 percent of certain sentences and 85 percent of many others will cause an immense amount of internal trouble within the prison system.

This is to be expected when one tells a prisoner that no matter how well one behaves and how much self-improvement one achieves, there is nothing that he can do to regain his freedom earlier than the prescribed sentence. This is a recipe for hopelessness and its close cousin, prison unrest.

Fortunately, the constitutional prohibitions on ex post facto laws will slightly soften these disastrous ramifications for a few years. But by the early 2030s, unless the political leadership of this state comes to its senses, the mess caused by the “Protect Arkansas Act” will be untenable, unaffordable and an affront to human dignity.