Leaders of an Arkansas prison reform organization said at a conference this morning they are working with like-minded groups to oppose Gov. Sarah Sanders’ plans for a new 3,000-bed prison.
Morgan Leyenberger and Kaleem Nazeem, leaders of DecARcerate Arkansas, said the $470 million prison expansion isn’t necessary. Leyenberger, the organization’s president, said the problem isn’t about people committing crimes but about compounding policies that keep people in prison for longer.
Last year, Sanders signed her signature public safety legislation, the Protect Arkansas Act, which eliminates parole for some offenses and requires other offenders to serve at least 85% of their sentences.
“We know that those kinds of policies don’t serve anyone,” she said. “They don’t serve to make communities safer and they certainly don’t address our limited resources that taxpayers are paying for.”
Nazeem, who served 28 years in the Arkansas Department of Correction, pointed to the need for mental health programs and services for prisoners reentering the world outside of incarceration.
“I don’t think we can incarcerate ourselves out of the problems we are facing,” he said.
Sanders’ office and prison officials are in the preliminary stages of planning a new prison as Arkansas prison facilities are beyond their capacity with 2,105 state prisoners being held in county jails this week.
An array of prison reform advocates were slated to speak at DecARcerate Arkansas’s 5th annual conference today at the Ron Robinson Center. The organization held a one-day conference today with Dan Berger also scheduled to discuss his book “Stayed on Freedom” at 6 p.m. Monday at Philander Smith University.
Judah Schept, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who has studied prisons in Appalachia, told an audience of around 60 people this morning about federal officials’ plans to build a prison in eastern Kentucky. The plan was eventually scrapped amid opposition but has bubbled up again.
Schept described an area in central Appalachia that he said may have the densest concentration of federal prisons in the United States. The prisons have been framed as economic development tools that promise to supply jobs and infrastructure improvements to economically depressed areas. As the Appalachian coal industry has waned and prisons have waxed, Schept said prison jobs (around 8,000) are about double the number of coal jobs (around 4,000) in the area today.
The prisons have not fulfilled their promise of economic prosperity, though, since the counties that house some of the prisons are still among the poorest in the region, he said.
After his presentation, Schept shared his perspective on the potential Arkansas prison expansion. Schept said it isn’t enough to simply not build the prison and said the money must be invested in the resources that prevent the need for prisons in the first place.
Schept said the nearly half billion dollars that would go toward the prison should go to “things that actually provide safety to communities” such as access to housing support, healthcare and jobs.
“You have to spend money, it’s just a question of where you are spending it,” he said.
Prison building, Schept said, is a reflection of what a community wants its future to be. A state can project its future prison population and build more facilities to satisfy that or it can set a goal to reduce its prison population over that same period of time and work to fulfill that goal.
Sarah Moore, executive director of the Arkansas Justice Reform Coalition in Fayetteville, is already fighting a jail expansion in Washington County. Her organization filed a federal lawsuit to prevent county officials from using $18.8 million in federal pandemic relief funds for expanding the county jail.
Moore said she doesn’t believe the federal funds can be used for that purpose and that the federal government could eventually ask for the money back, putting the county at financial risk. She also believes it’s possible to safely release incarcerated individuals and doesn’t think there’s a need for expansion.
Moore said she also opposes the plan for the new state prison.
Moore echoed Schept’s philosophy that the money should go toward community resources that she says work. She pointed to the need for mental health treatment, beds for drug treatment facilities, education and job opportunities.
Moore said she was shocked to see plans for such an expensive prison facility instead of investments in community resources.
“Why would we invest so much in something we know does not work?” she said.
