Arkansas prison decision is a metaphor for Sanders’ first two years as governor

From left, Arkansas Division of Correction Director Dexter Payne, Board of Corrections Chairman Benny Magness and Corrections Secretary Lindsay Wallace listen Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, to questions about the state’s purchase of land near Charleston, Arkansas, for a new prison. (Photo by Antoinette Grajeda/Arkansas Advocate)

In many ways, Gov. Sarah Sanders’ decision to impose a 3,000-bed prison on tiny Franklin County is a metaphor for the first two years of her administration: Top-down decision making, lack of transparency, an unwillingness to consider viewpoints other than her own and artful dodging about actual costs.

The new prison is the centerpiece of Sanders’ lock-em-up criminal justice policy, enshrined in the Protect Arkansas Act, which eliminated parole for the most serious crimes and made early release harder for the rest.  A state prison system already more than 1,300 inmates over capacity — with another 2,200 parked in county jails — is facing significant new pressures that the prison north of Charleston is designed to alleviate.

But at 3,000 beds, the new prison would be the biggest prison in the state system; the Cummins Unit in Lincoln County is currently the largest at 1,876 beds. Indeed, if the prison is built and filled, it would have more residents than now live in Charleston, population 2,600.

Sanders has touted the prison as an economic boon for the area. But the people who live around the prison site on Mill Creek Mountain have made their response clear in the yard signs that have sprouted across the countryside: “Keep the country, country.”

Site assessment documents from the Arkansas Department of Corrections show that officials began considering the property in late July and made a site visit on Aug. 2. Yet, local officials and legislators representing the area first learned of the project around Halloween, when news started to leak that the state had agreed to pay $2.95 million for the prison site, which Sanders confirmed in an interview with a local radio station.

A week later, when angry residents filled the Charleston High School gym to complain about the lack of transparency, Sanders didn’t show up herself but instead sent Joe Profiri, whom she hired as a senior adviser after he was fired as corrections secretary in January amid a political struggle between the governor and the Board of Corrections.

The message to the residents was clear: You can complain all you want, but this is a done deal. The next day, the Board of Corrections voted to buy the land; residents organized the Franklin County and River Valley Coalition and found a lawyer. And the Sanders administration has rebuffed Freedom of Information Act requests to shed light on how and why the decision was made.

The controversy over this prison raises three additional issues beyond the dismissive treatment of local residents and their concerns: How much is the prison actually going to cost? How will it be staffed? And is more incarceration and building more prisons really a wise long-term approach?

When Sanders announced the prison in March 2023, she said it would cost $470 million. But Republican state Sen. Bryan King, who represents the northern part of Franklin County, has been raising pesky questions about those estimates, based on the actual costs associated with prisons being built in other states.

He points to a prison Alabama is building for $1.25 billion with capacity of 4,000, and another Utah built for $1 billion with a capacity of 3,600 — 20% to 25% larger than the proposed Franklin County prison but costing more than twice as much.

Compliant legislators are likely to fund Sanders’ prison no matter the price tag, after already spending $2.95 million to buy the land and another $16.5 million on a consultant to help the Department of Corrections with the project. But King makes a strong case that the actual cost is likely to be significantly higher than what Sanders is now telling us.

Staffing of the new prison is another issue. Currently, the Department of Corrections has 950 vacant positions for front-line corrections officers and 120 other vacant staff positions at state prisons and community corrections units — staffing concerns that prompted the Board of Corrections last year to refuse Sanders’ request to expand capacity at existing facilities, triggering her standoff with the board.

Staffing was actually a key factor in the decision to put the new prison in Franklin County because there are currently no state prison facilities in the River Valley. The site assessment documents estimate that the prison can draw staff from a working-age population of 127,400 within a 30-mile drive of the prison, with the bulk in Fort Smith to the west.

But the assumption here seems to be that the vacancy issues besetting the rest of the system will be ameliorated in Franklin County because there will be no other prisons competing for workers, discounting other reasons people might not find working in a prison attractive. Like, say, danger and stress. And any influx of workers, if they can be found, could change the rural character of the county, as residents fear.

There is also the larger issue of the wisdom of mass incarceration as a strategy to improve public safety in Arkansas.

According to figures from the Prison Policy Project, which advocates for alternatives to incarceration, Arkansas locks up more of its people than any state except Mississippi or Louisiana, with 912 prisoners for every 100,000 people. However, Sanders’ central argument is that because all this incarceration hasn’t made us safe enough, we need to lock up even more people — circular logic that leads down a very expensive path.

The Arkansas Justice Reform Coalition and decARcerate, a nonprofit that works to end mass incarceration in Arkansas, have both been organizing opposition to the prison, joining forces with community groups in Franklin County (which gave Sanders 76% of its votes in 2022) and conservative legislators such as King and Sen. Gary Stubblefield, normally an ally of Sanders in pushing culture war legislation. Sanders’ imposition of the prison, it seems, has created some strange bedfellows.

And, ironically, the Franklin County prison itself shows the futility of the lock-em-up merry-go-round that Sanders advocates: If it were up and running today, it already would not have enough beds to erase the capacity problem in the prison system and get all of the state inmates out of county jails. Thus, by the time it’s actually built, another prison will be needed, and another, and then another …