Arkansas lawmakers questioned the former head of the state’s prison system in a meeting Tuesday amid ongoing conversations about how to best accommodate the growing number of Arkansans serving time in state prisons.
Joe Profiri was fired as Secretary of the Arkansas Department of Corrections in 2024 amid tension with the state Corrections Board over expanding prison bed space while not increasing staffing at existing facilities. He was then hired as an advisor to Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, though lawmakers have tried unsuccessfully to eliminate the position.
Arkansas had sought to build a new 3,000-bed state prison in Franklin County, but those plans were tabled after public outcry and a lack of legislative support for funding the project. State officials maintain more prison capacity is needed to house a growing population of Arkansans who’ve been sentenced to prison time, but are awaiting bed space in local jails.
Profiri had previously rejected lawmakers’ invitation to speak with them – in September, members of the Joint Performance Review Committee proposed issuing him a subpoena to testify. In a joint meeting of the Senate and House Judiciary committees Tuesday, Profiri told lawmakers he’s still concerned with a lack of capacity in state prisons.
“We added 1,500 beds… to try to alleviate that, and we’re back up to almost 3,000 people backed up in county jails. So I don’t think that we can completely resolve the issue absent additional capacity in our prison system and our Community Correction Centers,” Profiri said.
The discussion focused largely on Community Corrections Centers, a system of six residential facilities across the state which serve as an alternative to traditional incarceration. Marshall Clement, director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center, said the facilities could be used to house the growing number of Arkansans sent to prison for violating the terms of their probation or parole.
“Ensuring that you have prison space to deliver justice in response to violent crime is going to be limited if the prison time served is longer, or if your recidivism rates – particularly for nonviolent and technical violations, which are large in volume – are high and consume a lot of prison capacity,” Clement said. “The more you devote to holding people in prison for recidivism events, the less space you’re going to have for holding people accountable for violent crime.”
Clement also suggested using Community Correction Centers as a space for inmates to serve the last three months of their prison sentences, and to improve employment and behavioral health services to help cut down on the state’s recidivism rate. He said Arkansas has the highest share of people in prison for probation and parole violations in the nation, second only to Utah.
Profiri said he believes the state will continue examining its programs, but emphasized the state still needs more prison bed space.
“You have more need than you have capacity, so it’s a utilization capacity issue associated with that. So emphasizing on programs, scaling those programs, scaling the re-entry centers, associated with also evaluating Community Corrections,” Profiri said. “Who are we violating? Why are we violating them? Are we creating a scenario where a violation is occurring because we’re a little more heavy-handed than we need to be?”
A 2025 state law known as the Protect Arkansas Act stiffened prison sentences for a number of felonies, and made it harder for people convicted of certain crimes to be released on parole. The number of people in Arkansas prisons is expected to jump by 5,000 over the next decade, at a cost of roughly $2 billion.
