County Jails Over Capacity, Legislators Told

County jails are so full of state inmates that they can’t function properly, and they’re further harmed by the state’s method of reimbursing them, legislators were told Tuesday.

So could sending some of those inmates to Louisiana be a solution?

County jails commonly house state inmates because state prisons are full. However, Mark Whitmore, chief legal counsel for the Association of Arkansas Counties, and Jackson County Sheriff David Lucas, president of the Arkansas Sheriffs’ Association, told legislators that county jails are far above capacity, housing more than 2,500 state inmates when they can handle only about 1,600. Many county jails are at 130 or 140 percent of capacity.

“We can’t take 2,500 in a prolonged scenario,” Whitmore said at a joint meeting of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and the House and Senate State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committees.

The state currently owes counties $7.7 million in back pay for housing inmates, Whitmore said. Moreover, county jails are reimbursed only $28 a day per state inmate, a rate that hasn’t changed since 2001 even though average costs are now $49 a day.

Counties are not reimbursed until the inmate is released from the county jail or is moved upstream into the state system, further complicating the counties’ financial difficulties, Whitmore said. He said that when 30 sheriffs were asked in November if they would accept more money without changes to the process, all of them said no. Sheriff Lucas said that sheriffs with larger jails would accept a $40 reimbursement rate as long as the money was paid monthly and was placed in the state budget’s high priority category A.

Lucas said that 30 percent of the occupants in his jail are state inmates. At one time, his jail was running at 200 percent capacity. He finally asked a circuit judge to issue a court order that only violent offenders be held. The result is that nonviolent offenders are not paying fines because they know they won’t be locked up, which means county revenues have been reduced.

Jackson County voters have approved a tax increase that will increase bed space from 26 beds to 104, but ground has not yet been broken.

To address the state backlog, the Department of Corrections has requested funding for a $100 million prison. Legislators are debating how to respond.

LaSalle Corrections, a private prison operator based in Louisiana, could take 1,000 of those inmates within a couple of weeks at a cost of about $28 a day per inmate, excluding outside medical expenses, managing member Billy McConnell testified. He said two fully-staffed facilities close to the Arkansas-Louisiana border have bed space available.

LaSalle operates 11,500 beds across three states, including one in Texarkana, Texas, that bleeds across the border into Arkansas. McConnell said in an interview that the Arkansas Sheriffs Association has asked for cost figures for housing inmates.