Files: Prison system fix will require innovative thinking

Arkansas Sen. Jake Files, R-Fort Smith, said there will be disagreements on how to fix the state’s prison system, but is confident legislators will see that something must be done and will “agree on a holistic approach” that “gets control of the situation and maintains public safety.”

On Tuesday, Gov. Mike Beebe, Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Jim Hannah, state legislators and other officials gathered Jan. 4 to present findings from the “The Consensus Report of the Arkansas Working Group on Sentencing and Corrections.”

The report said Arkansas’ prison population has doubled in the past 20 years, driving corrections costs up 450%. Currently, more than 16,000 inmates occupy state prisons. Without changes, the prison population will grow by as much as 43% in the next decade and cost Arkansas taxpayers an additional $1.1 billion, the report noted.

Report authors said the policy packaged presented in the report could save the state $875 million “through averted prison construction and operating expenses” through 2020. The policies could also “improve public safety through reduced recidivism.”

Files who was one of six legislative members on the report’s working group, is confident positive changes will come from the report because those involved in the sentencing and corrections system were involved in the process.

“We cannot continue to do things as we are doing them and expect things to get better. That’s the premise we started from,” Files explained. “They (working group members) may not have agreed with all aspects of this thing, but they all agree that we have a problem.”

Files said North Little Rock Police Chief Danny Bradley, also on the working group, presented some early recommendations to members of his narcotics division. Bradley believed the officers would reject the ideas because they contained changes to drug laws. But the officers said the ideas were reasonable and workable, Files explained.

Using ideas that worked in other states and collecting real data before implementing changes are two other reasons Files believes the report will work.

“The Pew researchers, they’ve done this with other states and they knew which states had problems similar to ours. … We pulled those ideas from several states into this. So, there is a fair amount of ideas in this report that they were able to pull from empirical data from other states,” Files said.

Files added that he was impressed by how simple and innovative changes enacted by other states made big changes.

“In many of those, you would see public safety had gone up, costs were down, and the system works better because of it,” he said.

An example of innovative ideas is to collect “evidence-based practices” from courts and state agencies, review and research the data and then form solutions from the real-world information.

Legislation to implement the changes won’t necessarily be easy to draft and approve, Files admitted. He expects Gov. Beebe will “pull in a lot of legislative leaders” to plan and push a policy package. However, the package has not been drafted, and Files was unwilling to predict how Beebe will handle the issue.

Files does hope important legislation can be passed in this session so the state nay move to collect data and do other things required before significant changes are approved and adopted.