From the Arkansas Advocate:
Violet White’s experience in the Arkansas Department of Corrections taught her what helps — and what doesn’t help — formerly incarcerated people try to get their lives back on track.
At one point in her 17 years as an agency employee, White worked on a grant-funded program to help people acclimate to life outside prison. Having only about 30 cases meant she could spend enough time with people to get to know their wants and needs, which helps prevent them from reoffending, she said.
“You know their mom. You know their brother. You know where they live, where they work. You know all these things, and you can actually use your tools and the things that you have to try to help them do better,” said White, who left the corrections department in 2024. “But when you have 200 people, or even 150 people, which is not abnormal … you get 10 to 15 minutes with them to come in [and say], ‘Hey, how are you doing? Are you still working? Where are you living? Alright, see you in a month.’”
High caseloads are just one part of Arkansas’ uphill battle against recidivism, according to White, state officials and the findings of a legislative task force. The DOC applies the term recidivism to inmates who violate the terms of their release or are convicted of new crimes within three years of leaving prison.
It contributes to Arkansas’ rising prison population.
As of December, roughly 72,000 formerly incarcerated people were on parole, probation or another form of supervision, meaning about 71% of the 93,000 Arkansans under the Department of Corrections’ control were out of prison, spokesperson Rand Champion said.
That represents an increase in the number of incarcerated Arkansans and a decrease in the number under supervision in nearly a year and a half. The final report from the Legislative Recidivism Reduction Task Force presented to lawmakers a year ago said that 90,700 Arkansans were under correctional control as of July 2024, of whom more than 75% were out of prison. The task force was created by the Protect Arkansas Act of 2023 and disbanded after its final report.
Furthermore, almost half of closed supervision cases from 2014 to 2023 involved revoking former inmates’ parole and returning them to prison, or giving them new sentences, the report states.
A significant contributor to recidivism is “inconsistent adherence to evidence-based practices for programming provided both in house and by community partners,” according to the report. Examples of programming for current and former inmates include job training, mental health care and substance use disorder counseling.
The Department of Corrections has not consistently monitored whether its programming for current and former inmates is effective, White said.
“We really never did any research to see if [programs] worked for our population, and that’s just not good business practice,” she said.
White worked as a parole officer in Pulaski County for several years. Her final job before leaving the corrections department in 2024 was in probation management.
The department adopted the Ohio Risk Assessment System in 2011 but stopped using it in 2014, White and Champion both said. ORAS evaluates the likelihood of reoffending and what people need to help prevent it.
ORAS is widely accepted as an effective correctional tool. White said the information it yields is detailed and valuable, especially since the department’s previous assessment was “very basic,” but the department “just didn’t have the staff” for a program that “takes a good hour to an hour and 45 minutes” per inmate.
The Arkansas Board of Corrections approved a contract with the University of Cincinnati Corrections Institute to resume using ORAS in 2024. The recidivism task force report says ORAS “cannot achieve its intended impact” in Arkansas without “more officer training and resources.”
“Many officers know best practices and wish to implement them but are hindered by short office visits and lack of cognitive tools,” the report states.
Caseloads and staff turnover
The Department of Corrections has 426 supervision officers with active caseloads, Champion said on Dec. 3.
That’s a decrease of 31 officers in only a month, since a quarterly report from the department released Nov. 3 stated there were 457 filled caseworker positions.
Asked about the average number of cases each officer handles, Champion said it “varies depending on a variety of factors.”
Department officials told lawmakers in 2024 that the average caseload per officer was about 100 and that the ideal caseload would be 50-80, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported.
The demands on supervision officers have been a concern for state Sen. Clarke Tucker, D-Little Rock, who has sponsored multiple laws aimed at reducing recidivism over his years in the Legislature. He shared a similar perspective to White in an August interview, saying that officers’ caseloads “are completely untenable” and too heavy for them to “provide meaningful supervision.”
The corrections department has also seen high levels of staff turnover. White said having to rebuild from scratch inmates’ relationships with correctional officers hinders the department’s efforts to meet offenders’ needs and help them avoid reoffending.
“[For] some offenders that really want to do well, it just creates instability for them,” White said. “And [for] offenders that don’t want to do well, it creates an opportunity for them to manipulate.”
A new state employee pay plan, effective as of this summer, gave five-figure raises to the starting and average salaries for several hard-to-fill jobs, including corrections officers. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and other state officials have said they hope the pay plan will increase recruitment and retention in those positions.
Besides caseworker continuity, another major need for both inmates and people under supervision is more effective mental health care and substance use disorder treatment, White said.
The Legislative Recidivism Reduction Task Force’s 2024 report said there is a “higher probability of recidivism for people with behavioral health referrals.”
“Individuals successfully released from supervision were less likely to have received substance use or mental health referrals than those who received a revocation or a new sentence,” according to the report.
The ideal post-incarceration outcome is for people to get steady jobs, be able to support themselves, take mental health medication if necessary and remain sober from substances if necessary, White said.
Those goals become a “hard sell” for people with untreated mental and behavioral health needs and if employment is hard to come by, White said. She also said former inmates would be less likely to reoffend if they were paid living wages at their post-incarceration jobs.
“It’s really hard to convince [people] to go flip burgers for $10 an hour when they can go sling dope on a corner and make a couple thousand,” White said.
New policies
Sanders signed three new laws this year spawned from the recidivism task force’s recommendations. All three laws received bipartisan support from lawmakers and went into effect in August.
The identical Act 769 and Act 694 require a “validated risk and needs assessment,” or a standardized evaluation process that quantifies an inmate’s risk of recidivism, for each inmate brought into state custody.
It also requires assigning inmates to “a program or meaningful activity that corresponds with the inmate’s risk of recidivism in accordance with the inmate’s needs such that the higher the inmate’s risk of recidivism, the more programs or meaningful activities the inmate will be assigned.”
A study of the corrections department’s “social and organizational climate,” released in October, stated that inmates “want to use their time in prison productively to focus on personal growth” but “feel stuck and need access to positive programming and reentry programming that will enhance their chances of being approved for parole.”
White agreed, saying recent programming for inmates lacks variety and capacity.
“Prison’s the perfect opportunity for that because they’re a captive audience,” she said. “Once they hit the streets, they’ve got a lot of distractions.”
"Many officers know best practices and wish to implement them but are hindered by short office visits and lack of cognitive tools."– Legislative Recidivism Reduction Task Force final report, December 2024
Act 670, sponsored by Tucker, requires inmates’ post-release reentry plans to continue the constructive activities assigned while incarcerated, “including without limitation continued employment and continued participation in mental health treatment or substance abuse treatment, or both.” The law also requires the creation of an oversight body for evidence-based correctional practices.
The Department of Corrections “was already implementing many of those aspects and had a team in place to prioritize programming aimed at reducing recidivism” before Act 670 became law, Champion said.
“This Act codified much of the work that was already being done by existing staff since 2021,” he said, adding that the department’s existing Quality Improvement and Program Evaluation team fulfills the oversight body requirement.
Another requirement in Act 670 is for corrections officials to find ways to maximize the use of “nontraditional correctional facilities.”
The state has six residential community corrections centers, and Champion said the department has been working to “streamline intake” at those facilities.
As of last year, community corrections centers “are already implementing many evidence-based practices and seeing good results, but the potential to have a greater impact is hindered by capacity limitations,” according to the task force report.
Limited capacity for state facilities to house inmates is one reason Sanders has proposed building a new 3,000-bed prison in Franklin County. The plan has met pushback from nearby residents and state lawmakers.
In August, the Board of Corrections unanimously approved a request from Sanders to reallocate 100 beds at the Central Arkansas Community Corrections Center in Little Rock for a recidivism reduction pilot program.
The program helps inmates within six months of release find stable housing, work and opportunities for community integration and engagement, Sanders’ chief legal adviser, Cortney Kennedy, told the board. The program will also involve community and faith organizations and the private sector.
Reporter Ainsley Platt contributed to this article.
