Joint Statement on the Proposed Calico Rock Prison Expansion STATEMENT ON THE PROPOSED CALICO ROCK PRISON EXPANSION

PRESS RELEASE

CONTACT: ZACHARY CROW [Email]

[Phone] CONTACT: SARAH MOORE

[Email]

[Phone]

CONTACT: BETH COGER

[Email]

[Phone]

JOINT STATEMENT ON THE PROPOSED CALICO ROCK PRISON EXPANSION

From DecARcerate, Inc. and Arkansas Justice Reform Coalition

February 11, 2022

On Thursday, Feb 10th, Governor Hutchinson announced support of an expansion of 498 beds to the Calico Rock North Central unit as a response to the backup of state-sentenced Arkansans being housed in county jails across the state. The project is slated to cost between $60 and $100 million and is made possible by the state’s billion-dollar surplus pending approval from the legislature.

The stated need for additional bed space has been attributed in part to the backlog in county jails. This proposal comes on the heels of courts reopening after COVID closure, which drove the number of people sentenced up quickly and escalated those awaiting transfer. To add to that, each outbreak of COVID at state units causes a stop to the movement of sentenced individuals out of the county jails. This knee-jerk reaction to a point-in-time concern is disproportional. Policy changes have not been attempted and could easily remedy any overcrowding concerns. This would leave these beds sitting empty in the near future.

Arkansas Board of Corrections Chairman Benny Magness said on Tuesday that a driver of the high cost was the ADC’s desire to create more “two-man” or “single man” cells rather than “barrack style” housing.

Humane treatment of individuals at our state prisons is an important human rights issue that has far-reaching effects on Arkansas families and communities. These cells would amount to solitary confinement, a practice that inflicts immense suffering. Isolation causes individuals to deteriorate mentally, physically, and socially. Solitary confinement has been recognized as a form of torture by the United Nations and can cause psychosis, anxiety, depression, and heart disease, and too often leads to self-mutilation and death by suicide and other causes.

The Department of Corrections 2021-2022 Strategic Plan lists “Decrease Restrictive Housing and Isolation Population” as a key objective. This expansion is in direct conflict with the ADC’s stated objective to reduce the use and scope of solitary confinement. The latest CLA-Liman survey, which captured data for one day in October 2019, showed that 11.0% of people incarcerated in Arkansas prisons were held in solitary confinement. The national median was 3.8%. No other participating prison system reported a figure in the double digits. This was a 23.6% increase from the previous survey in 2017 when the ADC reported that 8.9% of the Arkansas population was in solitary. These cells would continue to add to these deplorable numbers. Despite many in law enforcement across the state saying we can’t jail or arrest our way out of community concerns like homelessness, mental health needs, recovery needs, and poverty — that is exactly what happens every day in county jails across the state. Do we have an overcrowding problem? Being the fourth highest incarcerator per capita in the nation, Arkansans are not more criminal than 46 other states.

Arkansas’s punitive approach ignores data-backed solutions that have created better community safety and well-being in other areas of the country. Investments in these areas will be more cost-effective than continually building more jail and prison beds. When we no longer hold those too poor to buy their freedom, address the failure to appear in a different manner, and provide robust pretrial services, we will see empty jail beds. If simple policy changes are all that is needed to reduce the population in the jails, why don’t we do these things now? It is as though some are hopeful that their lasting legacy will be the building of more bars and cages.

State budgets are moral documents indicating what a society values. Rather than propping up systems of incarceration and state control, Arkansas can and should redirect this money toward efforts that build and foster the community. The estimated $60-$100 could provide:

• Affordable housing

• Redirect public funds to community organizations that provide social services and place social workers in our jails

• Pretrial services divisions in each county are funded sufficiently to ensure that there are sufficient case managers to properly interview defendants when they enter jail and make recommendations for the least restrictive release conditions, connect individuals to needed services, and stay in contact with them throughout their case

• Pre-K expansion

• Provide better medical care to detained individuals

• Properly fund our current Crisis Stabilization Units and expand those

• Create more community-based mental health facilities to provide for all levels of crisis care

• Provide grants to and funding for drug and alcohol addiction treatment

• Provide tuition-free community college

• Properly fund and oversee more public defenders and ensure they have reasonable caseloads that do not exceed the recommendations of the American Bar Association

• Offer job training and other educational opportunities to incarcerated individuals

• Develop statewide data-driven metrics

The state has a long history of severe staff shortages in all its facilities and local county sheriffs have had to resort to using American Rescue Plan Act dollars to hire and maintain employees. Having fewer guards means significantly more dangerous conditions for everyone. The pandemic has only exacerbated these issues.

As the state moves to authorize a $60-$100 million prison expansion, we must consider the true cost of imprisonment. This includes both the monetary costs and the indirect and often detrimental impacts of imprisonment on individuals, families, and communities. When contemplating the Governor’s proposed expansion, we must conclude that the cost, in more ways than one, outweighs any and all benefit.

Advocacy Organizations Publish Report on Solitary Confinement in Arkansas Prisons

PRESS RELEASE

Zachary Crow

DecARcerate Director

PO Box 7708

Little Rock, AR 72217

(501) 367-7890

zachary@decarceratear.org

www.decarceratear.org

FOR DELAYED-RELEASE JANUARY 8, 2021

Advocacy Organizations Publish Report on Solitary Confinement in Arkansas Prisons

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (Dec. 28, 2020)— On January 8, 2021, DecARcerate and Disability Rights Arkansas will release a new Special Report entitled “Solitary Confinement in Arkansas Prisons,”

The report investigates the experience and history of solitary confinement in Arkansas prisons pre-COVID-19 and offers evidence-based recommendations for humane, effective treatment of incarcerated people.

DecARcerate and Disability Rights Arkansas found that Arkansas has the highest rate of solitary confinement in the U.S, at nearly four times the national average. Despite the fact that ADC policy allows broad discretion in how ‘solitary’ may be used, 2,600-3,500 people are sent to solitary within Arkansas prisons each year. More than 90% of all solitary placements are for non-violent, minor offenses, and the Arkansas Department of Correction (ADC) disproportionately places Black people and Hispanic women in solitary at higher rates.

Furthermore, 73% of people in solitary have been there for at least 6 months, 42% for at least one year, and some more than 6 years. This does not include individuals on Death Row. ADC grossly underestimates the prevalence of serious mental illness (SMI), reporting that only 3% of the total ADC prison population has a serious mental illness. The U.S. Bureau of Justice reports that roughly 50% of people in state prisons report SMI symptoms, suggesting that people with SMI are not treated, are more likely to be disciplined with solitary, and are more likely to have worse mental health when they leave prison. Despite a national trend to reduce the use of solitary confinement, the report finds that the ADC has no strategic plan for reducing its use of the practice.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, prisons dramatically increased the estimated number of people held in solitary confinement each day from 60,000 to 300,000, making the issue of

solitary confinement more relevant than ever. “Solitary confinement is recognized as torture by the United Nations and reflects a larger punitive culture within Arkansas prisons. The fact that Arkansas uses solitary confinement so widely and frequently is unacceptable and deeply troubling. We must demand an end to this abusive practice," said Executive Director of DecARcerate, Zachary Crow. Tom Masseau, Executive Director of Disability Rights Arkansas, stated, "Solitary confinement is an archaic and grossly overused practice, one which is devastating in its effects on mental health. Its use should be ended immediately. It is shameful that Arkansas leads the nation in the use of solitary confinement. We call on the Arkansas Department of Corrections and policymakers to come together to enhance programs that emphasize rehabilitation in prison settings, and to ban outright the use of solitary confinement.”

About DecARcerate. DecARcerate is a nonprofit working to affirm human dignity by confronting unjust systems. They envision a world where equity, healing, and reconciliation replace systems of punishment and oppression. For more information on decARcerate, visit www.decarceratear.org.

About Disability Rights Arkansas (DRA). DRA is the independent, private, nonprofit organization designated by the Governor of Arkansas to implement the federally funded and authorized Protection and Advocacy systems throughout the state. For more information on DRA, visit disabilityrightsar.org.

Pandemic proof

Read Online at Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Last month, three independent newsgroups--The New Yorker, The Nation (in collaboration with the Arkansas Nonprofit News Network and the Arkansas Times) and KUAR reported what those of us who work in carceral justice in Arkansas had been hearing for months: Covid-19 is tearing through Arkansas' prison system.

Cummins Unit, where the virus hit in March, has received the bulk of the press. According to the Arkansas Department of Health Report from July 6, 993 residents and 67 staff tested positive for coronavirus. Yet the thing that Gov. Asa Hutchinson isn't talking about in his press conferences is just how widespread COVID-19 is throughout Arkansas' prisons. He's continued to announce the numbers but without giving a sense of exactly where they're coming from.

As of July 3, positive coronavirus cases had been officially detected in seven jails and prisons in the Arkansas Department of Corrections, with a total of 2,581 active cases, including in two juvenile detention centers and 14 deaths. There are certainly cases at the ICE detention centers in Arkansas as well.

There's no reason to think this scenario could have been any different. People in prison have always received substandard health care, and the ADC has always been unequipped to prepare for a moment like this. Reports on the neglect of Wellpath, the for-profit health-care provider that operates in our state's prisons, reveal horrifying human-rights violations inside ADC from before covid-19: nurses shredding inmates' sick calls, two-week wait times for sick inmates, a doctor who has had his medical license suspended three times for, in one case, "gross negligence and ignorant malpractice."

Like it's done for so many of our social systems, COVID is proving in prisons what we already knew: Incarceration is always a public health crisis. And since social distancing is not possible in prison, the risk for widespread transmission was basically guaranteed.

Speaking during one of Governor Hutchinson's early press conferences, ADC Secretary Wendy Kelley said--contrary to the governor--that once COVID-19 entered the Arkansas prison system "it would be disastrous." Kelley hasn't spoken at Hutchinson's press conferences since she made her statement in April, and she just announced plans to retire at the end of this month.

It's troubling that Governor Hutchinson has taken particular issue with a piece of Arkansas history touched on in some of these articles—the history of Cummins as a former plantation and the labor at Cummins arising from prison slave labor.

From the governor's statement on the issue, one would think that the history of Cummins as a former plantation had been corrected, so to speak, by the "significant reforms and the efforts in fighting COVID-19 in the prison system." However, it's really important to understand how the context of this moment is rooted in centuries of systemic racism and injustice (which the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor brought into focus).

The governor and the Department of Health's statements throughout the last few months have also been inconsistent with what decARcerate is hearing from people in prison and their family members about containment and precautions. Since early in the crisis, there's been this counter-narrative from the top down, but part of what these articles validate are the real conditions inside.

One of the most particularly disturbing reports from the KUAR series is in an interview with the Secretary of Health, Nate Smith (who speaks in the governor's press conferences), where the KUAR journalist asks him about all the contradictory reports. Smith's response is that prisoners lie. This is an attempt to discredit the prisoners trying desperately to stay alive and alert their families to the real dangers of the pandemic within prison walls.

The governor and ADC have attempted in the last month to discredit what is now three independent journalists from three independent organizations, working independently from one another, with corroborating narratives. The attempt by the state to claim all of that as not credible, as unreliable, is simply offensive.

By erasing the experiences of people in prison during the pandemic, particularly at Cummins, the governor perpetuates the oppression and cruelty of slavery.

Zachary Crow is Executive Director of decARcerate, a grass-roots coalition working to end mass incarceration in Arkansas through community education, smart legislation, advocacy and activism.