From the Arkansas Advocate:
Forrest Abrams of Fayetteville was 18 years old when he was found dead in a Little Rock alleyway with four bullets in his back.
Darrell Dennis was convicted of the 2013 murder. A man with a lengthy criminal history, Dennis had been out on parole for five years before Abrams was killed despite being charged with 21 new crimes, including 10 felonies, since his release.
Between 2010 and 2012, admissions to state prisons fell by 19.6%. That changed after Abrams was killed.
“What happened was Darrell Dennis,” Arkansas Board of Corrections Chairman Benny Magness told the Advocate. The message, from everyone, including legislators and parole officers, was clear at the time, Magness said: “Parole had gotten too lax.”
The Dennis case prompted outrage that trained a harsh spotlight on Arkansas’ prison system. In response to the killing, the Board of Corrections voted in June 2013 to significantly restrict parole, implementing what has been described as a zero-tolerance policy for violations of parole conditions that gave Arkansas the distinction of having the strictest post-prison release policies in the nation.
“There was such a big hoopla over that, that essentially, the parole board was revoking everyone who came up and turning down people for parole, and had a huge spike in the prison population that was solely as a result of that,” said longtime Arkansas defense attorney Jeff Rosenzweig.
Even though some of the restrictive policies were scaled back in 2015 when the board implemented what Magness described as a “happy medium,” the effects of zero-tolerance continue to reverberate today.
Housing convicted offenders is an active source of consternation for legislators, counties and state corrections officials as Arkansas continues to grapple with a growing prison population, fueled by recidivism rates that consistently see around half of released inmates return to incarceration within three years. The number of incarcerated people has strained prison and jail capacity for years. Prison population growth has been cited as a chief reason for building a new, 3,000-bed prison in Franklin County — a prospect that’s sparked fierce backlash in the River Valley community while dividing the Republican supermajority in the Arkansas Legislature.
Division of Correction facilities have a bedspace capacity of 15,362 as of Dec. 9, according to department data. But the number of incarcerated people sentenced to serve time in ADC was 18,997 as of the same day, including 1,852 held in county jails while waiting for a state prison bed.
Reverberating consequences
The effect of zero-tolerance in 2013 was almost immediate. The number of parolees returning to the prison system’s custody more than tripled within a three month period. Many of those who returned ended up in county jails for lack of beds in state facilities. By November of that year, the Pulaski County Detention Center was critically overcrowded.
Admissions had increased 72% by 2015 compared to 2012. After nearly three years of large increases in admissions and parole revocations, the board adjusted its parole policy again in 2015.
“We had to change,” Magness said. “We got close to 3,000 people backed up in the county jails. You’ve got to understand that county jail backup has always been somewhere around 1,500, 1,600 people.”
Zero-tolerance marked the end of a short era of shrinking prison population, in part due to Act 570 of 2011, which had a “major impact” on the prison population, according to the governor who signed it into law, Mike Beebe.
“There’s lots of people in the law enforcement community that do not like [Act] 570, but it really did what it was designed to do,” Magness said. “It was just too lenient on probation and parole [violations]. And other than that, it did put a lot more emphasis on probation, which is not a bad thing.”
Arkansas’ prison population never managed to return to the low levels seen in the years immediately before Abrams was killed. Magness said the sky-high county jail backups dropped after the changes were implemented, but admissions to prisons didn’t follow suit.
Rosenzweig said it’s still too difficult to obtain parole. And even when someone does get out, lack of preparation for societal reintegration creates a “vicious cycle,” he said.
The state’s prison population began increasing again in 2021, even as admissions into the prison system fell to their lowest levels since the implementation of zero-tolerance in 2013. Previously, prison admissions and population rose and fell in tandem with one another. Fewer releases from prisons contributed to the decoupling.
Arkansas’ prison population grew faster than the overall population itself over the last 15 years, even as overall crime has decreased, data shows.
But violent crime is beginning to account for a larger share of crime overall as the number of property crimes has fallen off a cliff.
During the Board of Corrections’ November meeting, Wendy Ware, a consultant who does prison population projections for the corrections agency, told members the trend of harsher sentences and fewer releases would create a “stacking effect” that increases the prison population, despite dropping crime rates.
Sentence lengths have generally increased since 2020. The 2023 Protect Arkansas Act, which reduced parole eligibility and added to the list of offenses requiring 100% of a sentence to be served, is projected to continue that trend with many offenses, according to the most recent population projections.
The number of offenders sentenced to the corrections system is projected to grow by 2,902 over the next 10 years as a result of the law, according to the most recent department population projections.
The real drivers
While board policy surrounding parole might have been a chief cause of the prison population spike in the 2010s, it coincides with other issues that keep people in a cycle of leaving and later returning to prison.
Drugs, Magness told the Advocate, were and remain a huge reason why people end up in prison — either as an initial offense or as the reason someone is brought back after being paroled — even if what they’re charged with isn’t a drug crime.
“I would be tempted to say at least 50% of our population is drug-related offenses … or drug-related driven,” Magness said. “Until we change our direction on our drug offenses, we’re going to grow [the prison population] by 2% to 3% a year. It’s not going to change.”
Recidivism reports from the department show that around half of people who return to prison on new charges come back on drug charges, regardless of whether their initial offense was a violent, nonviolent or drug charge. About half the people admitted to state prisons are Arkansans who violate their parole, either on a technical violation or with a new charge.
Just putting people in prison doesn’t solve the overarching problem drug-fueled crime creates, according to Magness, who said he isn’t sure the prisons’ current addiction treatment programs are adequate. Inmates sent to the Department of Corrections’ drug treatment facilities can stay for periods as short as six months, he said. That’s lower than it used to be as the board tried to find ways to turn beds faster, he said.
“You’re not going to cure an addiction in six months,” he said, adding that he’d like to see the minimum time increased in the future. “I don’t know that that’s curing the problems of the drug-related offenses.”
Kaleem Nazeem, a co-director of DecARcerate, a nonprofit dedicated to overhauling incarceration policy in Arkansas, said there are bigger issues at play.
A former DOC inmate who was released in 2018, Nazeem said the state’s approach to parole and prison programming is fueling recidivism — and increasing the prison population — by leaving offenders unprepared to return to society, a view echoed by Rosenzweig. Eligibility limitations on programming required for release leave offenders frustrated and resistant when that is what stands between them and returning to the outside world, Nazeem said.
“Policies are ballooning the prison population,” Nazeem said, by making people spend more time in prison than is necessary. “It doesn’t take 20 years for a person to come out of his criminality.”
Magness, whose term on the board ends this month, frequently touts work training programs such as the Act 309 program during board meetings and pointed to examples of successful former participants in his interview. Act 309 of 1983, amended several times, is the law that allows the corrections department to contract with counties to house state prisoners and also provide work opportunities for them.
But Magness acknowledged more could be done.
“We need to listen to inmates that have come out of the facilities and see what we can do to change it,” he said. “I think we need to look at our programming a lot more than we probably do.”
Nazeem said programming to help inmates prepare for release needs to be available far sooner than it is, and it needs to be more comprehensive.
“I’m a prime example of that,” he said. “When I was incarcerated, every time I tried to get into an educational program other than my GED, they denied me for them due to the fact that I wasn’t 36 months from my parole eligibility date.”
Nazeem was sentenced to mandatory life without parole as a minor. He was released in 2018 after a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision found such sentences for minors were unconstitutional.
DOC spokesperson Rand Champion said eligibility for Division of Correction programming varies depending on the program and inmate. Those without high school diplomas are required to get a GED before participating in other programming, Champion said.
Nazeem said criteria for release often doesn’t match an offender’s actual needs.
“There’s no preparation for the individual to be reintroduced into society in a healthy way,” Nazeem said, nor are there many wraparound programs to help with reintroduction. He said he could easily see how those without a strong support system could end up back in prison.
“It’s like, in Arkansas, they give you $75 on a gift card; if you stay out for, I think it’s 15 days, they put $75 more on there. That’s what they did to me, you know, after serving 28 years in prison, you give me a $75 gift card and say, ‘Hey, welcome to the world.’”
